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Ultimate Evil Edition Pre-Order

You can now pre-order your Ultimate Evil Edition, which launches August 19th!

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Prepare your living rooms. The end is near. . . . Diablo® III: Reaper of Souls™ - Ultimate Evil Edition™ launches August 19, 2014 on PS3™, PS4™, Xbox 360®, and Xbox One®. Join the crusade against death today by pre-purchasing the game digitally on the PlayStation®Store!
Note: Ultimate Evil Edition is not available for digital pre-purchase on the Xbox 360 or Xbox One, but you can prepurchase a physical copy at select retail locations today. Visit www.diablo3.com/console for details.  

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Secure your digital copy today and you'll also receive the following in-game items:

• The Infernal Pauldrons, a unique shoulder wearable at level 1, these devilishly handsome shoulder plates provide bonuses to Vitality, Life per Second, and Cooldown Reduction, and are primed and ready for transmogrification
• Arma Mortis and Arma Haereticorum, two exclusive collections of helm and weapon transmogrification recipes to distinguish your hero among the champions of Sanctuary
• Liber Canis Morui, an ancient scroll that will summon a loyal Spectral Hound minion to keep your adventurers company
• Three additional character slots to accommodate your new nephalem

Players who take the fight for Sanctuary to their big screen TV on the PS3 or PS4 will also enjoy exclusive content based on two popular PlayStation games!

• The Last of Us™ Nephalem Rift, a new randomized dungeon level teeming with ravenous creatures modeled after the infamous Stalker, Clicker, and Bloated infected and infused with an ominous yellow spore effect
• The Guise of the Colossi, a unique transmogrification plan that unlocks six armor appearances inspired by Shadow of the Colossus™

The fate of Sanctuary rests in your hands, nephalem. Ultimate Evil will be out before summer's end, so lock in your preorders, grab your favorite demon-slaying friends, and get ready for one hell of a party.

Clarification on Greater Rift Rewards

Nevalistis explained with a little more detail what will be the changes to the Legendary Gems mentioned yesterday.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

so these gems are nerfed?

yeah what does this exactly mean?

Will legendary gems' secondary ability be unlocked at level 50 still?

Good questions! The quick answer is no, the secondary ability no longer unlocks at level 50 - it now unlocks at 200. The reward scaling and rank power of Legendary gems has been completely revamped, and we're still working on additional tuning. You’ll see our first iteration in the next PTR patch. It roughly works out to the same amount of power gained over time, but you'll have fewer "no rank up" droughts. Hope that makes sense.

I'd also like to clarify something that I misunderstood when originally relaying this information. Legendary Gems no longer have a chance to rank up multiple times in one attempt. Instead, when you choose to use Urshi to upgrade your Legendary Gems, if you've completed a high enough Greater Rift, she will offer you additional attempts at upgrading your Legendary Gems with a higher success rate at higher Greater Rift tiers. You can gain up to a maximum of 4 upgrade attempts at a time.

This is a bit hard to illustrate, so here's an example (though bear in mind the numbers are completely pulled out of thin air and not accurate; they're just here for the sake of explanation):

Say you complete a level 15 Greater Rift and you decide you want to opt to upgrade your gem. You have a reasonable chance for your gem to upgrade, but you'll only be able to attempt it once. Instead, you decide to try to push a little further to Rank 20, where you know you'll get two attempts at a slightly better chance. You can then choose to spend these two attempts on two different gems, or use them both on one to try to get two ranks. 

In short, while you could try to upgrade your gems with Level 1 Greater Rifts, the chance will be very low and you'll only have one attempt. Higher level Rifts offer not only more attempts, but a higher success rate for upgrades. While there will likely be an "efficient" place for you to upgrade your gems based on your current gear, there's still room to push yourself further for greater reward.

I also want to thank everyone who's continued to provide valuable and constructive feedback in response to these updates. I'm passing it all on, and it's greatly appreciated!

2-Handed Buff and Bows/X-Bows

Ranged weapons will not be receiving the same Damage buff of melee weapons in patch 2.1, because the developers consider them to be already competitive with 1-Handed Crossbows.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

What about the 2H Bows and Xbows you forgot about the DH again we don't need buf on the weapons just gonna plat sentries we have the M6... what if someone don't have the set of don't want to use it?!?

Currently the changes to increase baseline 2-handed weapon damage will only be for melee, since 2-handed ranged weapons are already performing the way we want them to.

You hit the nail on the head here. Currently, 2-Handed Crossbows/Bows are very competitive with 1-Handed Crossbows because Demon Hunters can use a quiver with any bow type and as a result, 2-Handed Crossbows/Bows do not require a rebalance.

Jeweler Achievements

Some old Jewelers achievements are particularly difficult to get unless you forcefully keep yourself between levels 57 and 60, and should be converted to Feats of Strenght in a future patch.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Achievements Perfect as tears & Like stars in the sky in Jeweler's branch require you to "Craft a maximum level gems", but listed are radiant stars. Which are hardly maximum not to mention they can't be achieved. For that, one needs 3000x Flawless Squares which drop only to lvl 57-60 characters. After hitting lvl 61 it switches right to Marquis. 

So in order to get this achievement one has to delete and recreate like couple hundred characters?

Currently, the plan is to convert the achievements Perfect As Tears and Like Stars in the Sky into Feats of Strength in our upcoming patch 2.1.0 content update. I can't make any promises as to when that may arrive on live servers, but feel free to pop on over to the Diablo III PTR and check out what we have so far!