Alright! Finally patch 2.0.1 has hit the live servers making Reaper of Souls seem that much closer. This patch is much more than a pre-expansion patch it really changes a bunch of fundamental things in Diablo 3. Loot 2.0, Paragon 2.0, Difficulty changes, Clans and Communities are what’s in store. Click through to read the entire post for the details!
Loot 2.0
Loot 2.0 has been hyped a lot and for good reason. It really does a great job in the way loot drops. Now, don’t get me wrong….if you are currently best in slot from items you bought off the auction house then you probably will still have some issues finding upgrades. If you are like the rest of us then finding upgrades and not just useless items becomes easier.
Blizzard has tightened up the stat rolls on items to help make more items potentially better. Legendaries are actually feeling “legendary” with unique attributes that make them useful and sometimes build changing. Smart drops is on the list as well to help make item drops more relevant to your class. I don’t know about you but I got tired of finding tons of crappy quivers on my Barb. They are also focusing on drop quality which means you will find less items but of better quality. I feel like that works out well when I was testing on the PTR.
One of the downsides is making the legendaries Bind on Account. Diablo is fundamentally a trading game and with this change it does take that out somewhat, but does keep you playing the game longer to get the best legendaries. There is a 2 hour time limit you can trade legendaries to other people in your game before it becomes BoA so trading with friends is still somewhat there I guess.
Paragon 2.0
Paragon levels are still in the game but massively changed. Instead of having a separate Paragon level for each character it is account wide now. So you can gain Paragon on any character you want. They also removed the level 100 cap and currently there is no cap in place, you can continue farming Paragon levels until the end of time if you want to.
Also each Paragon level gives you an attribute point to put in a category. With this change I feel like they really do some good with this since it lets you level Paragon as high as you want as well as being able to customize the way your character plays by having attributes. There’s a bit more on the subject which you can find on Blizzard’s blog post here.
Difficulty Changes
Blizzard threw out the old difficulty system, no more Nightmare, Hell, or Inferno modes. Now, monsters will scale in difficulty with your character’s level. You can choose from a new different difficulty settings: Normal, Hard, Expert, Master, and Torment (1-6).
Normal, Hard, and Expert are available from the beginning. Master is unlocked when you beat Act IV and Torment is unlocked once you hit level 60. The Torment 1-6 is kinda like the Monster Power system where you can adjust the difficulty higher to be even harder.
One cool thing is you can lower your difficulty settings while in-game. You can only lower difficulty in a game and not raise the difficulty. Also, this is disabled in Hardcore.
Clans and Communities
Finally, some social aspect to Diablo 3. 🙂 I don’t know why they didn’t do this sooner, but oh well, it’s here now. You can be part of a clan and have access to specific clan chat and different clan notifications. You can only be in one clan at a time and a clan cannot have more than 120 people in it at a time.
The communities are basically custom chat communities that don’t have a member limit. You can find more out about this at this Blizzard blog post.
That’s the major changes that have hit in Patch 2.0.1. There are a few more in store when the expansion, Reaper of Souls, launches next month. I’m totally stoked for it and can’t wait.