Yesterday, Patch 1.0.5 dropped in Diablo 3, bringing a huge number of changes that I just had to check out.
Since I AM the inveterate D3 auction house player, I absolutely had to get in game and check out the changes to the auction house. You can now sort, for instance, by the prime attribute for items in which you’re interested — in my wizard’s case, Intelligence. You can also find items similar in nature to an item you select (although in my experience, not all that similar), and the search attributes are now sorted alphabetically instead of grouped by crits, resists, stats and so on.
I was kinda used to the old way, but…
Also introduced was a monster power setting, supposedly attached to the quest selection screen, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s only for max level characters. It’s not like it’s really needed before that. Anyway, you can make encounters easier, while still gearing up, or harder, for increased experience and loot rewards. Given a hundred or so Paragon levels to earn after your characters turns 60, faster xp and better loot might be worth the difficulty.
But the note that really intrigued me was the guarantee of better loot from bosses, the first time you killed them on a specific difficulty. COOL! And it was retroactive; you could go back to previous bosses and it would be marked as your first time! COOLER!
Combined with the changes to Wizard powers, I set up a new build and went back to some of our previous fights to see how went the loot.
Diablo him/herself, Normal mode — just blues.
Azmodan, Normal mode — more blues. Yawn.
The Butcher, Nightmare mode — two yellows! They were crappy, but hey, yellows!
We’re about to meet Zoltan Khuul in the static group, so we’ll see what he drops. We’ll probably finish Act II Nightmare and get a start in Act III Sunday, so that’s two more bosses to try.
If we can only start finding more loot appropriate to our levels and not have to farm the AH so much, I’ll be happy. And surprised, because Blizz really wants people in that AH.
In other news, Spode pushed through the Zoltan Khuul and Belial fights on Act II Inferno with his 60+ barbarian, so grats to him, he’d been working on that awhile.
