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[Niveras]

This works for all of their games, though. They've directly stated WoW to be non-canon (I didn't like WC3 either), and the changes for SC2 were pretty glaring.

Couple pages back, but do you have a source on this? It seems preposterous that they'd say that, when WoW is by far the most popular part of the entire franchise. Whether it's officially canon or not, the stories present in the game are what people are going to know. It'd be like calling the Star Trek TV-series non-canon.

That said, I guess I can understand it slightly. They can't go and say that some million random heroes defeated the Lich King, or the Old Gods, or Deathwing, or generally saved the world a hundred times over. Its difficult to get a consistent story with memorable protaganists when you have millions of actors and need the content to reset itself every week. Instead all the heroes and villains come out of the books, and if you're lucky you'll get to see them or participate in game to some degree. I know, for example, that the Twilight Dragonflight was only resolved in literature, despite being a minor plot element of the Burning Crusade. I'm sure there are more examples. Its true even of the events in the game: while they had a part, the players aren't the reason the Lich King was defeated, that was Tirion alone.

/tangent

[Darkmere]

Couple pages back, but do you have a source on this? It seems preposterous that they'd say that, when WoW is by far the most popular part of the entire franchise. Whether it's officially canon or not, the stories present in the game are what people are going to know. It'd be like calling the Star Trek TV-series non-canon.

Oddly enough, that happened to the star trek animated series... Roddenberry himself wanted it disallowed... until he changed his mind and didn't care.

This is one of Metzen's takes on it. As I read it, he's saying they can just pick and choose what they want to to keep and make things fit nicely together. I don't think WoW is canonical any more than the old games were... Deathwing was originally a captured drake until they had to invent the dragonsoul, Dranei were all corrupted until a big group suddenly weren't. The big stuff will probably stick if they do WC4, but everything else is subject to whatever changes Metzen wants.

[V-Norrec]

Mmkay, who is excited for monster power levels and all that sick extra loot?  Also they mentioned something about a new event or feature or something that isn't officially released yet.  As you can tell, I'm a little bit pumped, just a little.

[Meta]

I am not. No new content (apart from the bothersome event giving a ring), only new difficulty 'modes'. Itemization is still a mess.

Frankly, this update gives me no reason to start playing again, as the new event and modes are inaccessible to me due to bad gear.

[PrimusRibbus]

Whoa, how did I post here? :\ What an embarrassing necro.

[Dutchling]

* Dutchling judges PrimusRibbus

[LASD]

Well, I'll try to make the necro worth something.

I bought Reaper of Souls a few weeks ago, booted Diablo 3 again and found a way better game than I remembered. The progression is very fast, difficulty is tunable, so no more grinding through trivial difficulties before getting to the main game. Useful items drop all the time, with a nice number of legendaries sprinkled in that nudge the player towards interesting character builds. There's a lot of new things to go for and Adventure mode is a diverse way of going around killing monsters.

And by progression is fast I mean that my first character in the old D3 took 60 hours to get to level 60. The new one I rolled for RoS took 14 hours to get to level 70 and it was suitably challenging all the way through. Also, after beating Act V with any character, there's no reason to go through the main storyline again to hear what must have angered the goat men or whatnot.

This time I also got geared for the late game for the first time, which was surprisingly not-painful.

Oh yeah, there's also a ladder/season thing now, that doesn't really matter, but it gives a fresh start and there's double the achievements to earn, which is sort of fun.

The base game was also updated with more fun drops, adjustable difficulty and way faster leveling.

So, mostly what I want to say is that I'm pretty impressed of the way Blizzard has reacted to the feedback they received about the numerous flaws of the original Diablo 3 and how much change they were willing to go through to fix them.

[nenjin]

They did, finally. Better late than never I suppose.

Setting the improvements aside though, I only played hardcore again for about a month before I got bored. It was just "Rifts, rifts and mo rifts." And now they've doubled down on that with SUPER RIFTS, which are Rifts only quicker, and the whole point is to beat a boss so you can get a chance at upgrading a gem 1 step out of 25.

I shouldn't complain since better is generally better....but I still find POE more fun to play at higher levels (setting aside desyncs.) Perhaps because the loot schema is just more appealing to me there. In Diablo 3, after a certain point, you're completely geared out with legendaries and the game becomes about amassing enough resource to make minor tweaks to that gear, to min/max. Or to continue to hunt for the newest set of legendaries which, honestly, the powers on them are so broken that the difference between a guy with "Just legendaries" and a guy with all the right legendaries is night and day. It's all about hunting down the super whacky and broken legendaries for your class so your abilities become ridiculously OP....which I guess is the point of most Diablo clones. Somehow though, the grind to get there is really unappealing to me. Something about spending 150 blood shards at a time and having my eyes glaze over the dozens and dozens of yellows until I finally roll a legendary, only to discover that it's complete shit.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just impossible to please when it comes to D3 anymore. They did everything they could to make the game not fucking retarded, and I still can't work up the motivation to play.

[Neonivek]

I bought Reaper of Souls a few weeks ago, booted Diablo 3 again and found a way better game than I remembered. The progression is very fast, difficulty is tunable, so no more grinding through trivial difficulties before getting to the main game. Useful items drop all the time, with a nice number of legendaries sprinkled in that nudge the player towards interesting character builds. There's a lot of new things to go for and Adventure mode is a diverse way of going around killing monsters.

That is to be expected because the auction house closed down.

To support an auction house a game needs to make it worthwhile, which it can only do by giving in game gold a link to time.

Without the auction house the game no longer needs to be meaninglessly padded out in order to benefit the auction house... it is about the hour to hour gameplay more then it is about the endless grind.

[Darkmere]

Well, this necro will all end in tears.

But yeah, I've gotten back into it lately as well. I like that it's much easier to get any given class to Torment-6 viability so I can at least take the endgame builds for a spin with something like a sane mount of played time.

It blows my mind when I find people who have 3X more played time on a single character than I have on my entire account. I'm all in favor of mindless stabby killing, but wow.

[Rez]

That's gear grinding games in general.