Just trying the PTR it's very clear the game is balanced around torment, bounties and rifts all of which are expansion only which imo is just wrong. I'm not saying the game should have all the features, but the fact is that just farming monsters has intentionally been made a bad method of farming because bounties/rifts are supposed to be better and if just farming monsters gave good loot then in order for bounties/rifts to be better the amount of loot they would need to give would be to much. Master is basically doable as a fresh ding meaning theres no progression, nothing to strive for and hilariously theres not even a loot gain from doing master instead of normal because increased difficulty allows for monsters 61+ to spawn and increased bounty loot both of which are RoS only.
All in all I feel like Torment, Bounties and Adventure mode need to be enabled in vanilla in order for it to feel like a playable game instead of a demo for RoS. This still allows for RoS to have lv 70/Crusader/Rifts/New ubers which is more than enough to sell an expansion.
Id like it to be noted that I will actually be buying the expansion, so this isn't me saying "ugh, gief free stuff" or trying to selfishly get what I want. This is simply my opinion on what needs to be done in order to keep vanilla playable and fun for those who wont be getting the expansion as they still paid for the original game and deserve a real gaming experience from it and not a demo.
RoS gets; Bounties / rifts / adventure mode / blood shards / level 70 / crusader / act 5 / any new uberness / new torment specific legendaries and sets.
Vanilla; Loot 2.0 / Paragon 2.0 / class skill balances as well as changed skills and runes to level 60 / New difficulties except torment, and clans (I might be forgetting something).
To me, that feels pretty good for a free patch. Oh, and elohel to everyone saying RoS isn't worth the money because there aren't any features =P
You seem to have missed my point, while yes for a patch it's very good you need to remember that D3V is losing stuff as well. Namely the AH and MP5+ and now while I agree the AH wasn't good, the looting was based around it and has been replaced with bounties/rifts yet as these are missing your left with no good way of obtaining loot and as MP5+ (torment) difficulty is now locked theres no hard difficulty. As I said in my OP, simply killing monsters gives next to no actual loot and this is because if it did then the additional loot gained from bounties would cause you to gain loot faster than Blizzard would want. Yet without bounties it causes the drops to feel underwhelming, which puts us right back in the issue we have right now where you farm for days on end and obtain 0 upgrades yet now you don't even have the AH to make up for it.
As you pointed out RoS has a huge amount of features, if they just dropped Bounties, Torment and Adventure mode into vanilla the expansion would still have more than enough to sell itself and vanilla would still feel playable and fun. Adventure mode is just a free roam version of the game which is totally patch-worth as you can barely consider it content, we lose a feature (AH) so gaining one (Bounties) is fair and we already have MP 5+ so to make Master the max difficulty for vanilla is to actually remove something that already exists on live and put it into the expansion which is wrong.
To give a simple example, imagine if you were playing d2 in hell mode.. an actual challenge (laughs). But then you got it taken away and could only play in nightmare :(. However, you could access hell mode again if you paid money! I think blizz will come around in the end and cater to those that never want to upgrade or don't want to upgrade "just yet".
For the purpose of testing I actually played my lv 55 character and gave him no extra gear so his gear level was fresh-ding, at first it was great as all the rares were pretty good upgrades and I even equipped a couple legendaries, yet these were obtained from guaranteed boss drops and were nothing special. Sadly after a couple of hours of farming I was able to breeze through Master, the rate in which I had legendaries drop was abysmal (around 1 every 2 hours) even the few I found were just junk and the rares were all the same, so common that you would have a full set of decent rares within an hour and even if one dropped that was an upgrade it was so small you wouldn't even notice.
I felt like I was back in live but with a lower drop rate of legendaries (I assume due to MF changes), just salvaging rares, no AH to maybe help me get some upgrades and ridiculously easy content. No hope of finding an upgrade anytime soon and just eventually getting bored, I felt even more lost than I do in live now as I felt like without the AH and with these drop rates I would never obtain a decent set and even if I did to get there would have been a long, slow boring grind which is not what I want to think when playing Diablo.
No offense to anyone here, but I relish the closure of the AH. when I hit 60 on my WD (recently), I was geared fairly well shortly after due to the AH. Then I stopped and wondered, what was the reason to play if not the gear chase...paragon levels? bah. I'm a longtime classic D2 player, I WANT the gear chase.
I am one of those players that stopped playing D3 shortly after launch and have recently started playing again because of RoS. I played at Blizzcon and liked what I saw. The gear chase is one of the reasons to keep playing. You might recall in D2, the legendary/set piece drop rate was very low. And it was that much more precious when you got one. I sort of think we have it too good on live. We can literally look up the gear we want and buy it for whatever price is deemed.
The longtime D3 players are (possibly) going to see less benefit of RoS then those new players, return players. Maybe, that is part of the point. Fresh meat...I mean...fresh blood.
Edit: sorry to sidetrack the tread. I think Vanilla D3 will get some nice features with 2.0 launch. And very likely will have a nice carrot to buy RoS.
No offense to anyone here, but I relish the closure of the AH. when I hit 60 on my WD (recently), I was geared fairly well shortly after due to the AH. Then I stopped and wondered, what was the reason to play if not the gear chase...paragon levels? bah. I'm a longtime classic D2 player, I WANT the gear chase.
I am one of those players that stopped playing D3 shortly after launch and have recently started playing again because of RoS. I played at Blizzcon and liked what I saw. The gear chase is one of the reasons to keep playing. You might recall in D2, the legendary/set piece drop rate was very low. And it was that much more precious when you got one. I sort of think we have it too good on live. We can literally look up the gear we want and buy it for whatever price is deemed.
The longtime D3 players are (possibly) going to see less benefit of RoS then those new players, return players. Maybe, that is part of the point. Fresh meat...I mean...fresh blood.
Edit: sorry to sidetrack the tread. I think Vanilla D3 will get some nice features with 2.0 launch. And very likely will have a nice carrot to buy RoS.
I did say in OP that i'm not against the removal of the AH but the AH was there to make up for the fact that farming in-game gave an extremely low amount of drops so atleast with the AH you had a chance to obtain the gear you needed. Bounties solve this issue because they yield a very good reward meaning you'll still have a good chance of obtaining the gear needed within an acceptable time frame, yet the actual drop rates from simply farming monsters is lower than it currently is on live. This means that yes loot 2.0 allows for you to quickly (perhaps to quickly) reach the mid-level of gear yet to go above this would require an extreme amount of farming and patients because without those additional features or the ability to trade the drop rates are so abysmal that it's near impossible to find the gear you want.
While yes Diablo 2 had very low drop rates, there were many more factors to consider in that game. There was a real gearing curve, although it would be very rare to find a top-end item you would constantly find upgrades if you played because there was just so much loot leading up to it also not all top-end was bis the gear you could obtain fairly quickly was very good and at times the best item for that slot. On top of that there was trading and possibly the biggest of it all was the fact there was duping, the drop rates were huge because as soon as the right person found an item it became mass-produced and it's value decreased, had that game not had duping I expect this same complaint would have happened there to because to build items such as Last Wish would have been a near-impossible task.
RoS gets; Bounties / rifts / adventure mode / blood shards / level 70 / crusader / act 5 / any new uberness / new torment specific legendaries and sets.
Vanilla; Loot 2.0 / Paragon 2.0 / class skill balances as well as changed skills and runes to level 60 / New difficulties except torment, and clans (I might be forgetting something).
To me, that feels pretty good for a free patch. Oh, and elohel to everyone saying RoS isn't worth the money because there aren't any features =P
I don't get why an open world and a more difficult game would be considered "expansion content". Agree with everything else.
Because they are a company that needs to make money to continue making games? You have to save the best for the expansion, it's just logical.
For the purpose of testing I actually played my lv 55 character and gave him no extra gear so his gear level was fresh-ding, at first it was great as all the rares were pretty good upgrades and I even equipped a couple legendaries, yet these were obtained from guaranteed boss drops and were nothing special. Sadly after a couple of hours of farming I was able to breeze through Master, the rate in which I had legendaries drop was abysmal (around 1 every 2 hours) even the few I found were just junk and the rares were all the same, so common that you would have a full set of decent rares within an hour and even if one dropped that was an upgrade it was so small you wouldn't even notice.
I felt like I was back in live but with a lower drop rate of legendaries (I assume due to MF changes), just salvaging rares, no AH to maybe help me get some upgrades and ridiculously easy content. No hope of finding an upgrade anytime soon and just eventually getting bored, I felt even more lost than I do in live now as I felt like without the AH and with these drop rates I would never obtain a decent set and even if I did to get there would have been a long, slow boring grind which is not what I want to think when playing Diablo.
How am I the only person that caught this dude saying 1-2 legendary an hour was bad? Apparently someone never played pre MP vanilla Diablo....
1-2 an hour wouldn't be bad if there wasn't so many legendaries that were complete junk, even as a fresh ding over the course of 10 hours I only found 1 legendary I equipped and even that was mediocre. I played D3 since release, legendary drop rate didn't matter at the start because rares were all vastly superior and it was a completely different game. Are you trying to tell me your happy with spending weeks farming hours every day in order to obtain 1 good item?
I dont know. I mean, I've clocked some serious hours so far on this PTR and I have a couple things worth mentioning. Let me get the fact out of the way that the perspective I have is completely parallel to the fact that I fully intend to purchase the Reaper of Souls expansion pack. I do not see the logical point in removing the content of basically MP1+. I haven't seen any hard numbers, but from what I have seen with my own two eyes: Master (60) is Monster level 61 (says so in the tool tip when changing preferences) Anyone who has geared using traditional means (Ahem... Auction house.. And theres nothing wrong with that! use what you got!) you're going to blow through this content.
People keep saying things like " Well its designed around finding your own gear..." Well, no... I'm afraid that has no logical consistency.. They are relying on the fact that people are moving on to Reaper of Souls. In a round about way, they are making the game mind-numbingly easy to the point it almost pigeon-holes you into buying the expansion right off the bat. Why would you patch content into the existing Vanilla structure to negate all of the progress you've made (if you can call eliminating any challenge of the game negating the progress) It just doesn't make sense to me... What is expected if we don't immediately switch to Reaper of Souls? Sell all our current gear to a vendor and start over? I understand that this PTR is a port of RoS so there are some unknown factors that we cant account for, like, the fact a weapon can't be found with Crit Damage or Life Steal. We are assuming this is because its a RoS port. Because I can flat out tell you right now if thats what loot 2.0.1 is, Any great gear with Crit damage, sockets, lifesteal, it's still the best gear in the game. This whole expert/masters/etc thing. We are assuming this is only a RoS feature. I haven't seen any literature indicating any further changes to Monster Power. It would be incredibly asinine to go backward (removing the mob density that was added) and over-simplifying the elements of PvE when the game up until this point was entirely centered around having insanely efficient gear readily accessible at the click of a button. I think once some more answers rise to the surface we can lay some of these fears to rest, but I can only say, I hope some of these changes are ONLY for RoS and stay OUT of Vanilla.
I'm planning on buying the expansion but I agree with the OP.
I think it's important to note that vanilla D3 will also be getting the cursed chests. So that is at least one new feature for regular D3.
That being said, messing around on the PTR it is pretty easy to gear out and trivialize the hardest difficulty for the PTR even without the AH. That combined with reduction in monsters and experience gain kind of make the PTR experience less fun that live for me. On live I could crush through some monsters and at least see my experience bar moving (I know that's bugged right now, I mean to say the experience gain sucks on PTR). I think the changes to game play and pacing are great. But the game feels less fun to play on the PTR than live. I really think that at least adventure mode, hopefully with bounties should come to VD3 too. Its a pretty small feature that at least adds more replay value.
On live your objective when you start a game is get 5 stacks then kill some monsters for xp and loot. On PTR your objective is what exactly? Just kill stuff? Maybe find a chest? Maybe go kill 1 boss? I do not think it is unreasonable to what at least some piece of new content for VD3 considering the last content patch was so long ago and there were some features promised to D3 players that just never got added to the game.
The "companies exist to make money" argument is tired, and, honestly, pretty lame. There's no good reason for them to nerf difficulty across the board and then introduce the 'old' difficulty as expansion content. None whatsoever.As for open world, it's something the community has been asking for almost since launch, and it's also a dick move to make it expansion content.None of these things are new content, there's no reason for them to be RoS exclusive.
The only valid argument would be that the difficulty is nerfed for vanilla. Everything else IS new content, you can't argue against that because.. well it's new.
And tired of an argument or not, it still stands; They can't make money if they make Vanilla just as attractive as the expansion, and if you want them to continue making anything, they need to make money. If any argument is bad, it's the 'well we've been asking for X for a long time, so it should be free!'. THAT, makes zero sense.
As far as I understand, master difficulty (available on new vanilla and PTR) is supposed to be MP10 - so there is no loss of difficulty. Akso, the bounties/rifts are not the new gearing system, playing is: I started a new barb on the PTR, found two legionaries before end of a1.
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The difficulty is not nerfed for Vanilla. The only reason it is this way is because the ptr is on the ros beta server with the difficulty scaled to RoS (but unfortunately we're stuck on 60). When the real vanilla game comes it, it'll be adjusted accordingly.
If they keep D3V like this, with Master being the hardest difficulty, then the game is absolutely dead.
Must buy ROS.
Edit: @RasAlgethi24: I hope you are right...
The difficulty is not nerfed for Vanilla. The only reason it is this way is because the ptr is on the ros beta server with the difficulty scaled to RoS (but unfortunately we're stuck on 60). When the real vanilla game comes it, it'll be adjusted accordingly.
Except that's not even close to being true. What you see is more or less when you'll get in post-RoS Vanilla.
Quote from Jamoose
If they keep D3V like this, with Master being the hardest difficulty, then the game is absolutely dead. Must buy ROS.
Of course it is. They want to make you upgrade as much as they can without saying you HAVE to upgrade to play the game. Did you expect anything different? d2 vanilla was DEAD after LoD was released. Same thing applies here.
Quote from Reeko89»
I would appreciate adventure mode even without bounties and rifts. Campaign mode is crappy to farm...
I would agree with this. I think Adventure Mode should ship with 2.0...with bounties. Rifts should be RoS content.
@Venaliter: I did not expect anything different. But D2 vanilla was not dead after lod came out. It's not the same because here they are stripping down features (MP, density...) and in d2 they only added features in the expansion. I hope that RasAlgethi24 is right in that the difficuly will be adjusted to better suite vanilla players. I will be buying ROS on release so i don't really care but still, if they don't fix then it's a sleazy move by them.
The point is to make you buy Reaper of Souls, of course. Blizzard wants you to spend more money on the game. It honestly is as simple as that.
You aren't going to get all of the awesome features for free. If you want level 70, the Crusader class, Act V which also gives you the Mystic, Rifts, Adventure Mode, etc, then you are going to have to buy Reaper of Souls. I highly doubt any of that will change. Loot 2.0 Paragon 2.0 and Cursed Chests/Class changes are all you're going to get with D3V.
Am I the only one who doesn't see sense in making vanilla unplayable to force people into buying the expansion? I mean it's fairly simply to assume there are 2 groups of people atm, one that will be buying the expansion and the other that's on the fence and still undecided. This means that those on the fence will likely try vanilla to help them decide so if that is a load of stripped down crap then why on earth would that make them want to spend more money? If vanilla was enjoyable (adventure mode, bounties, torment) it's much more likely to convince those on the fence to get it than if it were utter crap.
Yingtao u don't seem to have read my post at all, I never said 1-2 good legendaries dropped per hour, I infact said that in all 10 hours of play I received only 1 fairly mediocre legendary and not a single one I would consider good. Right now on PTR it feels like after the first few hours of getting those GG rare rolls, you're on this endless search for a decent legendary while just getting frustrated that every time one drops it's useless I would of been very happy if 1 - 2 good legendaries dropped every hour and I felt like every day I gained something from my play. Gearing shouldn't take a long time because it takes weeks to get 1 piece as you only need 12, it should take a long time because you want 10 different sets for each class for 50 different builds which makes 600 gear pieces your in search of. This is what made D2 so long, I could gear a single character fairly quickly but to do all the builds I desired that is what took a long time.
Tbh, this "Blizzard are trying to make money" argument isn't good. If RoS was 1000x better then u know what, that wouldn't be an issue, my issue is the fact this patch as many people have said is stripping down the current vanilla it's removing features (higher MPs, AH, Paragon MF) which means less difficulty, less gear while giving nothing in return to make up for it. That's not ok, it's not ok to take things from vanilla that make it playable and then make you need the expansion to solve the issues created by what they've taken. It's a terrible business practice because while they are indeed there to make money but we are also there customers so there should be some level of respect, in the long run companies abusing there customers to suck them dry of every last penny are the ones getting the backlash now (Look at EA, Ubisoft) it's not a good route.
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Just trying the PTR it's very clear the game is balanced around torment, bounties and rifts all of which are expansion only which imo is just wrong. I'm not saying the game should have all the features, but the fact is that just farming monsters has intentionally been made a bad method of farming because bounties/rifts are supposed to be better and if just farming monsters gave good loot then in order for bounties/rifts to be better the amount of loot they would need to give would be to much. Master is basically doable as a fresh ding meaning theres no progression, nothing to strive for and hilariously theres not even a loot gain from doing master instead of normal because increased difficulty allows for monsters 61+ to spawn and increased bounty loot both of which are RoS only.
All in all I feel like Torment, Bounties and Adventure mode need to be enabled in vanilla in order for it to feel like a playable game instead of a demo for RoS. This still allows for RoS to have lv 70/Crusader/Rifts/New ubers which is more than enough to sell an expansion.
Id like it to be noted that I will actually be buying the expansion, so this isn't me saying "ugh, gief free stuff" or trying to selfishly get what I want. This is simply my opinion on what needs to be done in order to keep vanilla playable and fun for those who wont be getting the expansion as they still paid for the original game and deserve a real gaming experience from it and not a demo.
RoS gets; Bounties / rifts / adventure mode / blood shards / level 70 / crusader / act 5 / any new uberness / new torment specific legendaries and sets.
Vanilla; Loot 2.0 / Paragon 2.0 / class skill balances as well as changed skills and runes to level 60 / New difficulties except torment, and clans (I might be forgetting something).
To me, that feels pretty good for a free patch. Oh, and elohel to everyone saying RoS isn't worth the money because there aren't any features =P
You seem to have missed my point, while yes for a patch it's very good you need to remember that D3V is losing stuff as well. Namely the AH and MP5+ and now while I agree the AH wasn't good, the looting was based around it and has been replaced with bounties/rifts yet as these are missing your left with no good way of obtaining loot and as MP5+ (torment) difficulty is now locked theres no hard difficulty. As I said in my OP, simply killing monsters gives next to no actual loot and this is because if it did then the additional loot gained from bounties would cause you to gain loot faster than Blizzard would want. Yet without bounties it causes the drops to feel underwhelming, which puts us right back in the issue we have right now where you farm for days on end and obtain 0 upgrades yet now you don't even have the AH to make up for it.
As you pointed out RoS has a huge amount of features, if they just dropped Bounties, Torment and Adventure mode into vanilla the expansion would still have more than enough to sell itself and vanilla would still feel playable and fun. Adventure mode is just a free roam version of the game which is totally patch-worth as you can barely consider it content, we lose a feature (AH) so gaining one (Bounties) is fair and we already have MP 5+ so to make Master the max difficulty for vanilla is to actually remove something that already exists on live and put it into the expansion which is wrong.
OP has good points.
To give a simple example, imagine if you were playing d2 in hell mode.. an actual challenge (laughs). But then you got it taken away and could only play in nightmare :(. However, you could access hell mode again if you paid money! I think blizz will come around in the end and cater to those that never want to upgrade or don't want to upgrade "just yet".
For the purpose of testing I actually played my lv 55 character and gave him no extra gear so his gear level was fresh-ding, at first it was great as all the rares were pretty good upgrades and I even equipped a couple legendaries, yet these were obtained from guaranteed boss drops and were nothing special. Sadly after a couple of hours of farming I was able to breeze through Master, the rate in which I had legendaries drop was abysmal (around 1 every 2 hours) even the few I found were just junk and the rares were all the same, so common that you would have a full set of decent rares within an hour and even if one dropped that was an upgrade it was so small you wouldn't even notice.
I felt like I was back in live but with a lower drop rate of legendaries (I assume due to MF changes), just salvaging rares, no AH to maybe help me get some upgrades and ridiculously easy content. No hope of finding an upgrade anytime soon and just eventually getting bored, I felt even more lost than I do in live now as I felt like without the AH and with these drop rates I would never obtain a decent set and even if I did to get there would have been a long, slow boring grind which is not what I want to think when playing Diablo.
No offense to anyone here, but I relish the closure of the AH. when I hit 60 on my WD (recently), I was geared fairly well shortly after due to the AH. Then I stopped and wondered, what was the reason to play if not the gear chase...paragon levels? bah. I'm a longtime classic D2 player, I WANT the gear chase.
I am one of those players that stopped playing D3 shortly after launch and have recently started playing again because of RoS. I played at Blizzcon and liked what I saw. The gear chase is one of the reasons to keep playing. You might recall in D2, the legendary/set piece drop rate was very low. And it was that much more precious when you got one. I sort of think we have it too good on live. We can literally look up the gear we want and buy it for whatever price is deemed.
The longtime D3 players are (possibly) going to see less benefit of RoS then those new players, return players. Maybe, that is part of the point. Fresh meat...I mean...fresh blood.
Edit: sorry to sidetrack the tread. I think Vanilla D3 will get some nice features with 2.0 launch. And very likely will have a nice carrot to buy RoS.While yes Diablo 2 had very low drop rates, there were many more factors to consider in that game. There was a real gearing curve, although it would be very rare to find a top-end item you would constantly find upgrades if you played because there was just so much loot leading up to it also not all top-end was bis the gear you could obtain fairly quickly was very good and at times the best item for that slot. On top of that there was trading and possibly the biggest of it all was the fact there was duping, the drop rates were huge because as soon as the right person found an item it became mass-produced and it's value decreased, had that game not had duping I expect this same complaint would have happened there to because to build items such as Last Wish would have been a near-impossible task.
Because they are a company that needs to make money to continue making games? You have to save the best for the expansion, it's just logical.
1-2 an hour wouldn't be bad if there wasn't so many legendaries that were complete junk, even as a fresh ding over the course of 10 hours I only found 1 legendary I equipped and even that was mediocre. I played D3 since release, legendary drop rate didn't matter at the start because rares were all vastly superior and it was a completely different game. Are you trying to tell me your happy with spending weeks farming hours every day in order to obtain 1 good item?
I dont know. I mean, I've clocked some serious hours so far on this PTR and I have a couple things worth mentioning. Let me get the fact out of the way that the perspective I have is completely parallel to the fact that I fully intend to purchase the Reaper of Souls expansion pack. I do not see the logical point in removing the content of basically MP1+. I haven't seen any hard numbers, but from what I have seen with my own two eyes: Master (60) is Monster level 61 (says so in the tool tip when changing preferences) Anyone who has geared using traditional means (Ahem... Auction house.. And theres nothing wrong with that! use what you got!) you're going to blow through this content.
People keep saying things like " Well its designed around finding your own gear..." Well, no... I'm afraid that has no logical consistency.. They are relying on the fact that people are moving on to Reaper of Souls. In a round about way, they are making the game mind-numbingly easy to the point it almost pigeon-holes you into buying the expansion right off the bat. Why would you patch content into the existing Vanilla structure to negate all of the progress you've made (if you can call eliminating any challenge of the game negating the progress) It just doesn't make sense to me... What is expected if we don't immediately switch to Reaper of Souls? Sell all our current gear to a vendor and start over? I understand that this PTR is a port of RoS so there are some unknown factors that we cant account for, like, the fact a weapon can't be found with Crit Damage or Life Steal. We are assuming this is because its a RoS port. Because I can flat out tell you right now if thats what loot 2.0.1 is, Any great gear with Crit damage, sockets, lifesteal, it's still the best gear in the game. This whole expert/masters/etc thing. We are assuming this is only a RoS feature. I haven't seen any literature indicating any further changes to Monster Power. It would be incredibly asinine to go backward (removing the mob density that was added) and over-simplifying the elements of PvE when the game up until this point was entirely centered around having insanely efficient gear readily accessible at the click of a button. I think once some more answers rise to the surface we can lay some of these fears to rest, but I can only say, I hope some of these changes are ONLY for RoS and stay OUT of Vanilla.
I think it's important to note that vanilla D3 will also be getting the cursed chests. So that is at least one new feature for regular D3.
That being said, messing around on the PTR it is pretty easy to gear out and trivialize the hardest difficulty for the PTR even without the AH. That combined with reduction in monsters and experience gain kind of make the PTR experience less fun that live for me. On live I could crush through some monsters and at least see my experience bar moving (I know that's bugged right now, I mean to say the experience gain sucks on PTR). I think the changes to game play and pacing are great. But the game feels less fun to play on the PTR than live. I really think that at least adventure mode, hopefully with bounties should come to VD3 too. Its a pretty small feature that at least adds more replay value.
On live your objective when you start a game is get 5 stacks then kill some monsters for xp and loot. On PTR your objective is what exactly? Just kill stuff? Maybe find a chest? Maybe go kill 1 boss? I do not think it is unreasonable to what at least some piece of new content for VD3 considering the last content patch was so long ago and there were some features promised to D3 players that just never got added to the game.
The difficulty is not nerfed for Vanilla. The only reason it is this way is because the ptr is on the ros beta server with the difficulty scaled to RoS (but unfortunately we're stuck on 60). When the real vanilla game comes it, it'll be adjusted accordingly.
Of course it is. They want to make you upgrade as much as they can without saying you HAVE to upgrade to play the game. Did you expect anything different? d2 vanilla was DEAD after LoD was released. Same thing applies here.
I would agree with this. I think Adventure Mode should ship with 2.0...with bounties. Rifts should be RoS content.
@Venaliter: I did not expect anything different. But D2 vanilla was not dead after lod came out. It's not the same because here they are stripping down features (MP, density...) and in d2 they only added features in the expansion. I hope that RasAlgethi24 is right in that the difficuly will be adjusted to better suite vanilla players. I will be buying ROS on release so i don't really care but still, if they don't fix then it's a sleazy move by them.
The point is to make you buy Reaper of Souls, of course. Blizzard wants you to spend more money on the game. It honestly is as simple as that.
You aren't going to get all of the awesome features for free. If you want level 70, the Crusader class, Act V which also gives you the Mystic, Rifts, Adventure Mode, etc, then you are going to have to buy Reaper of Souls. I highly doubt any of that will change. Loot 2.0 Paragon 2.0 and Cursed Chests/Class changes are all you're going to get with D3V.
Am I the only one who doesn't see sense in making vanilla unplayable to force people into buying the expansion? I mean it's fairly simply to assume there are 2 groups of people atm, one that will be buying the expansion and the other that's on the fence and still undecided. This means that those on the fence will likely try vanilla to help them decide so if that is a load of stripped down crap then why on earth would that make them want to spend more money? If vanilla was enjoyable (adventure mode, bounties, torment) it's much more likely to convince those on the fence to get it than if it were utter crap.
Yingtao u don't seem to have read my post at all, I never said 1-2 good legendaries dropped per hour, I infact said that in all 10 hours of play I received only 1 fairly mediocre legendary and not a single one I would consider good. Right now on PTR it feels like after the first few hours of getting those GG rare rolls, you're on this endless search for a decent legendary while just getting frustrated that every time one drops it's useless I would of been very happy if 1 - 2 good legendaries dropped every hour and I felt like every day I gained something from my play. Gearing shouldn't take a long time because it takes weeks to get 1 piece as you only need 12, it should take a long time because you want 10 different sets for each class for 50 different builds which makes 600 gear pieces your in search of. This is what made D2 so long, I could gear a single character fairly quickly but to do all the builds I desired that is what took a long time.
Tbh, this "Blizzard are trying to make money" argument isn't good. If RoS was 1000x better then u know what, that wouldn't be an issue, my issue is the fact this patch as many people have said is stripping down the current vanilla it's removing features (higher MPs, AH, Paragon MF) which means less difficulty, less gear while giving nothing in return to make up for it. That's not ok, it's not ok to take things from vanilla that make it playable and then make you need the expansion to solve the issues created by what they've taken. It's a terrible business practice because while they are indeed there to make money but we are also there customers so there should be some level of respect, in the long run companies abusing there customers to suck them dry of every last penny are the ones getting the backlash now (Look at EA, Ubisoft) it's not a good route.