Reaper of Souls Expansion Highlights: Adventure Mode, Bounties, Nephalem Rifts, Blood Shards and Gambling, Blue Posts

Reaper of Souls Expansion Highlights: Adventure Mode, Bounties, Nephalem Rifts, Blood Shards and Gambling
Starting today we will be highlighting different parts of the Reaper of Souls expansion. We're starting out with Adventure Mode and it's main features - Bounties and Nephalem Rifts. Read on and expect a lot more in the coming day!



Adventure Mode
Adventure Mode is an alternative to the Campaign Mode that we've had in live Diablo 3. Instead of completing the story of the game the purpose of this mode is to let you play Diablo 3 immediately the way you want it. You can enter the game, complete a few objectives, get some nice rewards and log out in a matter of minutes. It's incredibly fun and will what people will be spending most of their time in come Reaper of Souls.



You choose Adventure Mode before you enter the game as the rules are very different from Campaign. There are no checkpoints, no progression into the Acts, no quests. Instead you get to do one of 2 new things added to the game: Bounties and Nephalem Rifts. They are short and sweet and give a nice amount of rewards upon completion.

In Adventure Mode the entire world of Sanctuary is unlocked. You can teleport to anywhere that has a waypoint. And from anywhere! That's right, you can open your map at any item, just select a waypoint in another Act and off you go.

An additional thing that Blizzard thought some gamers might like is Gambling! Added with its own currency, Gambling works exactly like it does in Diablo II. Read below for all the details.



Bounties
Bounties are half of Adventure Mode right now. They are essentially very short quests, that fall into several types: Kill Boss, Kill Unique, Clear Dungeon, Complete Mini Quest. They show up on the new World Map and can be teleported to instantly. Bounties are meant to be completed pretty quickly - in a matter of minutes.

Overview
  • Short quests that take very little time
  • Traveling across the whole world of Sanctuary keeps things fresh
  • Wide variety of Bounties

Rewards
  • For completing a single bounty you receive a Horadric Cache.
    • Horadric Caches contain crafting reagents, Magic and Rare gear, gems, Blood Shards (See Mechanics) and a chance for a Legendary item
  • For completing all Bounties in an Act you receive a Greater Horadric Cache.
    • Greater Horadric Caches contain everything that normal Horadric Caches include, plus a greater chance of a Legendary item. They also drop roughly twice as much stuff as the lesser Caches





Nephalem Rifts
Nephalem Rifts are the other half of Adventure Mode. They are completely random instance that go several levels deep and offer some interesting combinations of monsters and bosses. To open e Nephalem portal you first need to obtain a Nephalem Key. These are dropped randomly across the world, by all monsters and also from Horadric Caches. Currently the reward for completing a Rift is only the loot that drops from last boss, but there are some veeery interesting events that might happen in these random instances, like we showed you yesterday.

Overview
  • Completely random instances, that feature themes from all across Sanctuary
  • All enemies in the game, apart from bosses, can be considered as a type of monster for that level of a Rift. For example on a level you could have a combination of Goatmen, Dune Trashers, Succubi, Armaddons and, you know, Treasure Goblins.
  • As it currently works the theme of the entire Nephalem Rift is generated upon opening its portal. As you go deeper levels don't change theme. It's the same all the way down
  • Nephalem Shrines are special shrines that only appear in Nephalem Rifts. They are way overpowered! Here are some of them:
    • Shielding shrine, that makes you invulnarable to damage for 30 seconds
    • Shrine that increases all your damage by 400%
    • Speed shrine that gives you the maximum run speed
    • Lightning shrine that makes your character shoot lightning to all enemies and breakables he passes by and one-shots almost everything



Blood Shards and Gambling
Blood Shards are new currency that sits next to your gold in your inventory. You get a few of them by completing Bounties and also randomly through the Horadric Caches given as rewards from Bounties. There are currently two things you can buy with them: Greater Horadric Caches (for 100 Shards) or random items, a.k.a. Gambling.

One of the new vendors offers Mysterious gear. It has random quality and random stats. Each piece of gear costs exactly 5 Blood Shards. The items currently offered are: 1H Weapon, 2H Weapon, Source, Mojo, Helm, Gloves, Boots, Chest Armor, Belt, Shoulders, Pants, Bracers, Shield, Amulet, Ring. Legendaries and Set items have been recorded to drop from multiple streamers, but Magic and Rare gear will be the majority of what you can get. Just like it worked in Diablo II!





Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Crushing Blow
One of the things the developers have expressed that they'd like to see is that Crushing Blow is competitive with stats like Increased Attack Speed, Critical Hit Chance, or Critical Hit Damage. However, if it clearly trumps all of those stats in every situation then it might need to re-evaluated. Keeping in mind that higher difficulties will have greater monster health pools, do you think the current version of Crushing Blow will compete with IAS, CHC, and CHD? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Nephalem Rifts
Nephalem Rifts are completely randomized as far as featuring different content from Acts I-V—random interior and exterior areas, random layouts, random lighting and weather, random monsters, and a random boss encounter at the end. Each Nephalem Rift dungeon has a random number of levels, up to ten.

Kill guardian minions then kill Guardian?
Currently, all Nephalem Rifts require the player to kill a number of monsters to get the Rift Guardian to spawn, who is a random boss. Sometimes this happens before you've reached the final level, but not always.

am i the only one that really really likes rifts? i would prefer them over bounties, if the bounties didnt give so much stuff
We're currently working on tuning the rewards for Nephalem Rifts. We know there isn't a balance in the rewards at the moment, but our goal is to bring them in line so players feel like there are reasons to do whatever they find fun. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Bounties in Coop
There are some great questions in this thread about joining Adventure Mode games that are already in progress, and how much participation is required for Bounty rewards. I didn't know the answer to all of these questions at first, so I did some testing in the Reaper of Souls Friends and Family Beta, and got some input from the developers.

Here's what I found out. Bounties (and their set progress) are synchronized for everyone in the party. So you're group will have the same objectives, and the same progress made towards those objectives. Completing a Bounty set by dropping into a game that's mid-session is currently possible, and the rewards for doing so will need a tuning pass at some point. It's definitely a work in progress, but that's how it's currently operating. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

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