The Lord of Patches

An absolutely monster Diablo III patch dropped yesterday, and by "yesterday" I mean "all of yesterday" - look, Blizzard, given the crap you got for D3's release, wouldn't you try to make this patch go a little smoother? 

Anyway, so much is different. Me being me, I'll start with what I hate.


The entire difficulty system is thrown out the window. The upshot to this is that my Barbarian is suddenly viable again (could not get very far at all into Act II on Inferno because of all the monstrous death).  Seems like for both you and the monsters, damage has been scaled back and protection has been scaled up. The downshot to this is that now I can't revisit earlier levels with my paragon item find buff and get good gear for my lower-level characters, nor can I do a naked run for kicks and giggles.  The other downshot is that they threw out all the old achievements.  What's my incentive for playing the game on "Master" difficulty if you're not going to give me a banner sigil for it?  (And what happened to the "Naked Lust" achievement?)

By the way, don't go poking around the achievements, at all, if you don't want to be spoiled regarding Act V. The spoilers are not limited to the "Campaign" tab.

Okay, that's really my only complaint.  Loot 2.0 is such a massive improvement.  (Although, once again, I found an Infinity +1 bow with my Barbarian and had to pass it over to my Demon Hunter, who got instagibbed because her armor is terrible, but there you go.)  Prior to this patch, I think I was replacing one piece of my Barbarian's armor every week or so.  In the three hours I've played since the patch, I've replaced every piece at least once; that's how useful the new gear is.  (And now I'm kicking myself for blowing 1,500,000 gold on the utterly useless Archon Armor of Strength... I was warned, I'm just an idiot). 

But yeah, the improvement to the Loot system isn't limited just to the fact that now stuff drops for other characters as often as stuff used to drop for your character, that is to say, rarely.  Another huge improvement is the fact that you don't really need to worry about rolling stupidly low stat boosters when you're level 60.  Pre-patch, I was farming weapons that did 200-300 damage, which were utterly useless because I had a Legendary polearm that did something in the 700 range. Since the patch, I don't believe my Barbarian has found a weapon that did less than 700 damage. It's amazing.