Thankfully, this was a change for the better.

Monsters now scale to your level - a change that I initially was hesitant to embrace in light of the damage that scaling can cause to the sense of progression vital to so many RPGs. The new difficulty system rips out the nostalgic but sadly unbalanced Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno progression and replaces it with a new setup which offers a much more balanced and intuitive difficulty curve. Along with the abolishment of the contentious auction houses, running around finding goodies is better than ever, even without the expansion. You’ll still find stuff for other classes and builds, but the days of procuring only a single near-useless legendary after hours and hours of play are essentially over. Special abilities are more frequently tailored to your specific class and skillset, and the vaunted legendary items now inspire the kind of awe their name implies. The loot system has been entirely revamped, featuring a generally lower number of drops with a generally higher amount of interest. Part of this is a great new variety in skills, but some credit also must go to how items are distributed post-patch. I tend to favor wizarding around the land, and the patch has allowed me to try out all kinds of new and, more importantly, viable builds than the original ever did.

This patch is available to anyone with a copy of the game, and it forms the foundation of what has refreshed the game so well.įor starters, each class has had their skillsets vastly modified, providing a greater deal of variety and a much more interesting degree of synergy in your choices. Even I said, in no uncertain terms, to fellow RPGFan editor/ Diablo aficionado Rob Steinman, “I don’t think Reaper of Souls and Loot 2.0 can fix the problems in this game.”įirst of all, my return to Sanctuary began a few weeks ago with the release of a major patch that revamped the difficulty, loot, paragon leveling, and skill systems in Diablo III. Much drama has unfolded in the wake of vanilla Diablo‘s unpopular mechanics, and for a while, it seemed like a legend had fallen. In hindsight, I was right to voice those concerns, as problems with the way items were awarded, the auction house, and the wildly oscillating level of difficulty killed replayability after reaching the maximum level. When I reviewed the original Diablo III, I gave it a glowing appraisal that spoke of niggling concerns that the game’s systems would not hold up to extended play in the way its legendary predecessor’s did.

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