Reaper of Souls Highlights: New Visual Sets and Monster Affixes, DiabloFans Site Update Going Live Wednesday, PTR Might Be Comin

DiabloFans Site Update Going Live Wednesday 12/4/2013

The time has come and it looks like we will be pushing our beta site live. If you have yet to check out the beta, now is the time! Feel free to post random posts and give it a try and leave any feedback!








Reaper of Souls Highlights: New Visual Sets and Monster Affixes

The next part of our improvised RoS Guide consists of a showcase of the new visual sets for all the classes that are accessible thanks to the transmogrification feature the Mystic offers. Keep in mind some of the sets you'll see are placeholders and won't look the same way once the expansion is live. The second part of today's post is a presentation of the 5 new monster affixes.



Previous Highlights:

New Class Skills and Visuals

Full List of Crusader Skills and Runes

Enchanting, Transmogrification, Crusader Thorns Build

All Class Changes

Difficulties, Paragon 2.0

Adventure Mode, Bounties, Nephalem Rifts, Blood Shards and Gambling






New Visual Sets




Class
Ascended Set
Rakkisgard Set




Monk




Demon Hunter




Witch Doctor




Wizard




Barbarian




Crusader


Also, here is the majority of the Crusader's sets. Some of them don't have all of the pieces and parts of the sets are 'improvised' by us:








New Monster Affixes

There are 5 new monster affixes. Some of them are kinda terrifying, while others are just annoying. We've gathered all of them and made some videos, so that you won't have to take our word for it.
  • Wormhole
The wormhole affix is among the most creative ones - the mob spawns two portals (wormholes) on the ground. If you step on one of them, you get teleported out of the other. Usually it's not fatal, just annoying, mainly for classes like the Wizard for example.
  • Poison Enchanted
The poison enchanted monsters do pretty much the same of what the monsters with the "Plagued" affix do: they spread poison on the ground. While the old one spawn poisonous pools though, the new affix lets mobs spread poison in long straight lines on the ground. There are usually a big number of lines crossing each other, so the ground becomes covered with a sort of a poisonous net.
  • Orbiter
The monsters with an "Orbiter" affix spawn one big lightning orb and many smaller orbs which orbit around the big orb (yes, the word "orb" has a lot to do with it). While you can avoid the orbs hitting you, at some point it's pretty hard to do so due to the enormous number of smaller orbs floating around. It's not very lethal as well.

Here is a short video, showing all of the three affixes, mentioned above, in action. The wormhole's effect is demonstrated around the 6th second, the orbits are spawned around the 3rd second and the poison enchantment is visible from the 12th second on.





  • Thunderstorm
The thunderstorm affix is among the very dangerous ones, especially to "glass cannon" classes like the Witch Doctor in this case. It ignores the "tanking" creatures/allies, because it strikes all opponents, which can cost your character's life depending on the difficulty and/or remaining health. You can see several thunderstorm strikes (the blue lightning) in the following video (it's very easy to spot on the 17th second):





  • Frozen Pulse
Same as the Poison Enchanted affix, the Frozen Pulse already has a "relative" among the old affixes - "Frozen". While the Frozen affix spawns several "ice bombs", frozen pulse spawns several "ice beacons" that pulse for about 10 seconds, but only damaging characters in its range. Here is a video representation of this affix. Its effect is easier to see near the end of the video - after the 40th second:





PTR Might Be Coming "Soon"
What Grimiku is talking about here is the pre-expansion patch and not the expansion itself.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

According to Devs and their description, a WD is more of a ranged attacker, and should not be limited to a cloud of bats 8 yrds wide for example to clear the highest content in the game.
I'd say that Reaper of Souls will help build diversity for Witch Doctors on every difficulty level. For example, getting close to your enemies to hit them with Cloud of Bats is a lot riskier when you subtract Life Steal from the equation, and will likely influence the player's decision to use that spell. Also, when you consider some of the updates made in Reaper of Souls (like the loss of Life Steal, damage buffs to other skills, and new Legendary affixes), then it starts to look like Witch Doctors will have a greater variety of viable skill choices.

We plan to launch our patch 2.0.1 Public Test Region soon, and it will include class changes and balancing. Keep an eye out for the PTR to test the class changes out for yourself, and you can read a little more about it in this blog if you're interested. We'll be keeping a close eye on things as Reaper of Souls progresses, so be sure to leave us your feedback.

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