DiabloFans

]Hello folks,

So first I want to touch on the Serpent's Sparker really quick. The item that people saw screen shots of at Gamescon was not a final version of the item, that item was changed to be "Allows you to have 1 additional Hydra active".

One of the most important things about expansion legendary effects is that, as much as possible, they are designed to change how players interact with the game. That could mean they make a skill you don't currently use something you want to use, you interact with the environment in a different way, you interact with monsters in a different way etc. An example of this is one of the legendaries we added recently gives players a speed boost every time they destroy something (barrels, barriers, etc) suddenly you find yourself wanting to break random crates you may have ignored previously.

Jawbreaker was another example people saw at Gamescon, it makes your Dashing Strike free when you hit a target more than 25 yards away. When people get their hands on the new and improved version of Dashing Strike I suspect they will appreciate how awesome that effect is

There will also be some items that exist just because they are cool. For example The Cow King's Halberd is one that I made just because I wanted to make something that captured a really cool element from D2. It deal's lightning damage (and yes elemental damage types have effects associated with them now) because it's a nod to the Cow King himself and also has a chance to summon a herd of murderous cows to fight with you. That effect isn't really changing any gameplay... but cmon it's just awesome!

There is still a tremendous amount of work from now til the expansion releases and we are still coming up with and implementing awesome ideas on a daily basis. Given the philosophy point I listed above I would love to hear what kind of cool things you guys would like to see. Things that change your gameplay, big or small, and class agnostic things are the best. For example "Knockback skills now deal more damage and knock targets back further". That is an effect that opens up build possibilities for more than one class and gets people thinking about how a single item can change the way you interact with the game or what skills you want to use.

I see this question popping up in several places, including my email inbox from coworkers so I thought I'd chime in.

When the Paragon 2.0 system is released our current plan is to take all the experience players have currently accumulated and sum that into a single value, well two values really, HC and non HC. If you have 5 paragon level 100 characters on your account in soft core that we will add that total experience earned into a single value and your soft core paragon level will be equal to whatever that amount of experience translates to into levels.

The current plan is to do the same thing with all of your hc characters. We are still discussing what we do with dead vs active characters but I'm leaning towards including experience of dead hc heroes as well.

The purpose of the paragon 2.0 system is the reward players who want to invest lots of time as opposed to specific characters. Under that philosophy I don't see any reason to deny hc players experience they previously earned. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hey folks,

I'm here to answer some questions about Paragon 2.0.

Paragon levels are account bound, they are also segregated between HC and non HC characters. This means you will have a paragon level associated with HC characters that can not be increased by playing non HC characters. We didn't want players to feel like the "right way" to level their HC paragon was outside of HC.

The intent of account wide paragon is to reward the player, not the specific character. Paragon experience and levels are fun to earn, but they currently have the draw back of making people feel tied to a specific character. We want to let players play the game however they want when possible and this was one case where we felt the right thing to do was let you play any character you want and have them all work towards the same rewards.

In the case of spending paragon points, if you are paragon level 50, you will have 50 points to spend in the assorted categories. Each character that has access to this pool of points will get to allocate them for that character. So your barbs 50 points can be allocated differently than your wizards 50 points.

Lastly yes paragon levels do not have a cap. The amount of experience required to gain a paragon level increases every time you earn a new one so progress becomes slower the higher you are, but if you theoretically played all day every day for the next 10 years you would still be earning paragon experience.

Hope this helps clear up the air about the new system. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

That is currently the plan. Paragon experience will be account but will also be broken out by game play mode. Players who play in Hardcore will have a separate hardcore paragon level from their non hardcore characters.

When a season ends all of the paragon experience you have earned will be rolled into the appropriate pool of paragon experience for the account and you will be able to start at 0 again in the new season.

This is all still a work in progress and subject to change but that is what we are currently intending.

Just to make this official:

Blizzard employees are currently testing various aspects of Reapers of Souls, and some of those elements appeared on a PTR as part of that. This was intended (in order to make those elements available for testing, they also became datamine-able).

Information taken from the PTR is not final, though, and we encourage everyone to keep that in mind when reviewing datamined content--and also to be mindful to avoid potential spoilers! While we're not going to be commenting specifically on any discussions regarding datamined info (as it is often not reflective of the final product), we'll definitely be updating the community and sharing more delicious details as development of ROS progresses and features start getting locked down.

Where is the PTR ?
We're currently only conducting internal testing right now with employees, but we're using PTR functionality to help facilitate it. By making the game build available for testing, this also made it available for datamining.

While we certainly want to give players the opportunity to test out these changes before they go live and provide feedback, we don't have any details to share right now regarding a public PTR (yes, that's redundant, I know :P) or Reaper of Souls beta.

Sounds like someone made an "oops"
Nah. That's just how uploading game builds to CDNs roll.