Diablo 3 was pretty okay, but I didn’t play it much before the expansion came out. Now it’s all I play, more or less. In simple terms, the expansion added Loot 2.0, new difficulty levels, act 5, the crusader class and adventure mode. These things work together in unison to make a damn good game that I’ll play a bunch.
Let’s get the easy things out of the way, the crusader class is cool, but it’s not a total game changer, it’s quite hard to create ‘new’ abilities that won’t look like others but with different graphics and damage values, but I really like shield-using classes. Zeal isn’t as good as it was in Diablo 2, but they can’t all be winners! Act 5 is also pretty interesting, with varied maps including tons of side events, a freakingly awesome fight on a battering ram slamming into huge doors and a boss fight against a typical boss with patterns and huge blasts of energy, then you get loot. They still leave the story open enough as to have the room for another expansion, but that’s fine with me!
After you beat the game (both in normal and hardcore mode for their respective unlocks) you get access to adventure mode where you complete bounties to get blood shards and chests with a bunch of random items in them. They’re a great way to just kill things and level up to 70 and then get a bunch of paragon levels - I love the way they revamped those, although I would’ve loved to see magic find as one of the stats you can get. The blood shards are used to gamble and I wish they were used to buy very strong items instead, like marvel heroes, instead of buying random stuff for 5-20 blood shards, make me get 2000 of them for a very good thing.
Loot 2.0 is the new way items are doled out, you basically get good items for your character with stats that more-or-less fit with the class you’re playing. You also get legendaries more frequently and they have better special abilities. Set items with incredible bonuses also await people playing at level 70. Loot 2.0 is a two-edged sword, that being said. On one hand, when you find awesome gear, you might go “heck yeah! Loot 2.0!!!” but at the same time, if you’ve been playing for a while without finding any upgrades and finally a legendary item that drops is pretty bad, you’ll curse the same system. It’s a weird problem to solve that is the distribution of items in such a game.
Also, I’m not a big fan of the way stats are diluted, but not all the way. Each item raises your damage, toughness and healing, and these values are the only things compared to tell you if an item is better than another. I kinda miss the good old days of eyeballing two items and trying to find which one fits more my playstyle, but now items are just stats, I suppose. Why not go all the way and show little arrows on the item pictures? Green and red arrows to tell without even looking at the stats if an item is better or worse! It’s also a bit difficult to do the same things with skills, but trial and error will help players find out what does the more damage overall.
The new difficulty system is also interesting, but a bit flawed. You choose a difficulty, from normal to torment (and then torment has 6 sub-levels built in) and then you fight things. It’s easy to level up characters really fast by giving them a piece of equipment with a really high level gem in it and then blasting through the lower levels at torment difficulty - everything scales with your level, but you’re clearly stronger than the average mob at that point. At torment difficulty, level 70 enemies wield rarer things than usual, but the difficulty scales quite a bit. It’s fun to get progressively stronger, try out new builds and slowly rise to be able to go to the next difficulty, but if things get overwhelming, you can always bring the difficulty down.
You can’t raise the difficulty, though. There’s a button for that in the UI, but I’ve never seen it enabled, it’s always been greyed out, telling me that I can’t raise the difficulty at this time. At what time can I do that, then? I wish it’d say.
And finally there’s the mystic follower that enchants your items. The process of enchanting is basically to re-roll one stat on one of your items. Don’t like that +25% lightning damage on your shield when all you do is throw fireballs? Re-roll it! You’ll never be able to change any other stats, it’s quite expensive, and you might have to do it multiple times before you get something you like, but you’ll get from lightning to fire eventually.
To conclude, D3:RoS isn’t perfect. Gems still take forever to craft, crafting, enchanting and gambling are unreliable ways to get good items most of the time, some enemy types are still the bane of me and most quest rewards feel underwhelming, but at least this time, the difficulty is more or less where you want it to be, you have better items, and you can still get paragon levels to increase your stats, for more or less forever.
Which I might do! Who knows.