The above is my original wizard which came into the expansion with mostly all legacy 1.0.x items. The Mempo, Tal Rasha amulet, and the Triumvirate are still legacy 1.0.x level 60 items. The only two loot 2.0 items I had from the pre-expansion were Gladiator Gauntlets and an Eternal Union ring. As of this posting, I have relatively crap level 70 items at the moment. My level 68 Fire Walkers are the only worthy legendary item equipped so far. Unbuffed Toughness is pretty bad which is why I have to use Energy Armor for Torment.
I replaced my Vile Wards pretty quickly. The Lacuni Prowlers I replaced once the Hammer Jammers dropped (basically the movement speed on it made it a no brainer). I then re-rolled the life regen on the rare bracers to 6% critical hit chance (doesn’t show up on the web profile though). I also replaced the Zunimassa chest once these Fire Walkers obsoleted my Zuni boots (the 130+ set bonus was quickly negated by the stat increase from the boots and rare chest). I actually gave up my Witching Hour for this rare belt (gave up 16% sheet damage, but made up for it with the extra eHP and the 11% Electrocute damage increase – which I can attempt to enchant to get it up to 15%).
March 31st update: I replaced the Mempo with a rare level 70 helmet and re-rolled it’s +armor to crit chance; it represented an eHP and 9k damage upgrade.
But I’m still lacking a lot of +% to cold damage/increases arcane orb damage modifiers (as I intend on using Frozen Orb) at the moment which would boost my effective damage significantly. Still I’m just 50k 40k sheet damage from where I want to be with the mostly level 70 rares that I have (and they aren’t necessarily maxed on their rolls).
The slots that will be the most difficult to replace are the off hand, amulet, and ring. But I’ll have to get level 68+ items in all slots before I can start getting the kind of upgrades that will begin getting me over 1+ million sheet damage (which is where I want to get to as a base for turning T1 into Normal; basically one shotting everything).
The following for comparison is the new wizard I created when patch 2.0 launched. It was thus only geared with loot 2.0 items.
I previously had a level 70 chest but went back to my level 60 Tal Rasha. The only level 70 worthy legendary items equipped is the Gesture of Orpheus wand and the Blackthorne belt.
Both characters have around 6 hours of actual game time on them at level 70. As mentioned in my previous post, it took around 28 hours of game play at level cap during PTR/beta, to get the majority of slots filled with legendary/set items (this was the amount of time I also had on MahoTsukai during the pre-expansion where I had 4 pieces of the Tal Rasha set equipped).
Both characters are about where I expected them to be at this juncture. At the 10-15 hour mark (of actual game play), I expect to have more of the level 70 rares, replaced with legendary items.
But this is why legacy 1.0 items were not made to be enchantable. The stuff it still workable even at Torment difficulty. They shouldn’t even scale in this manner considering the amount of main stat inflation with loot 2.0 items. It’s a design failure (even though the excuse they gave was balancing out the power curve with itemization). Look at the difference in Intelligence for example. The toughness of both characters is nearly identical. Gear based healing is way in favor of the loot 2.0 geared character ( I use my Paragon points to give 5k life regen for Murasaki – but I definitely need more from gear).
The quality level of loot 2.0 legendary drops though, hasn’t made replacing some of these legacy items very compelling. Wizard legendary/set sources in loot 2.0 are just underwhelming for example (most of the rare ones are just slightly better; the worst part is my legacy Triumvirate wasn’t even best in slot during vanilla). The only compelling wand (at least to me) is this Gesture of Orpheus (since it has that cool down reduction properly for Slow Time). The new Chantodo’s and Slorak’s (which I already have equipped on my mule wizard) aren’t really that compelling for me. Stuff like the Starfire and Fragment of Destiny are like meh. Serpent’s Sparker which I don’t have, is probably not going to make hydra’s significantly better. It also doesn’t help that these class specific items, rarely drop even while leveling. And when they do drop at max level, it turns out they really aren’t that great. Thus we’re back to the whole issue of the game feeling unrewarding after awhile.
While I could use other weapon types, I personally prefer wands for the extra maximum arcane power roll (for obvious reasons of having a larger resource pool to work in conjunction with resource reduction). Thus I don’t know how long it will take to replace the rare wand on my main (I didn’t bother trying to re-roll a socket yet on the Orpheus I have equipped on my new wizard, as I’d like to see what kind of drops I get by using the rare one).
I don’t expect something like a level 70 Thunderfury to drop for me for quite awhile as I tend to fall on the bad side of luck/RNG. It took around the 800 total game play mark for even a bad Mempo to drop for me in vanilla, and I only got a Witching Hour (one that only rolled vitality and not main stat) during the pre-expansion while playing my hardcore witch doctor. My quality level RNG hasn’t changed much in Reaper of Souls either and I’ve set my expectations so low that I don’t expect these kind of end game items to drop early on for me.
The above also cements my “why rush?” line of thinking with the expansion. I already realized during beta the amount of artificially induced systems built into the game, as a means to increase the longevity. Most of these systems are generally unrewarding (like legendary crafting). The best thing to do is just play the game; eventually, ones inventory will fill up with crafting materials and ingredients. Eventually, certain legendary/set items that are good enough (not necessarily the best rolls) will drop. Mostly crap will drop though (which will eventually yield more than enough Forgotten Souls). It’s all random luck as to what exactly will drop over the course of every 100 hours of actual game play though.
