http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/19802338/patch-230-ptr-preview-6-23-2015
I’m reserving judgement until the patch actually goes live. We’ve been led down this road before with things sounding really good at the outset, only to get watered down during testing. Kanai’s Cube (what seems to be newly created lore since they are saying the Horadric Cube originated from it) fits that description where the idea (the break down a legendary item and equip their special effects as passive skills part) sounds awesome, but the final implementation with the transmutation part is likely going to be a lot less tepid. The Horadric Cube was a fun element in D2 since you could put different things into them (like potions and runes), and transmute them to something else. What I’m saying is if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
The additional power creep from that is an inevitable outcome though since given the powerful combinations than can be achieved (like specific effects from certain weapons, the RoRG’s ability to reduce the required amount of set items by 1 for the set bonuses, Cindercoat’s resource reduction for fire damage, etc). What they are going to be initially testing on the PTR is 1 weapon, 1 armor, and 1 jewelry from which you can utilize 3 effects from. Like I cannot see the effect from Ancestor’s Grace (a hardcore only amulet which restores you to 100% life upon fatal damage but destroys the amulet in the process; I have this but don’t bother equipping it) being part of this deal without putting a cooldown timer on it like other cheat death passives. And there are going to be a ton of unintended interaction issues (many which likely will not be caught during the PTR). What I mean is that certain effects on weapons are powerful on their own. Being able to equip one while using another weapon with another strong effect is going to lead to the usual balance issues. I already have my popcorn ready for Season 4.
One thing I do not like is the addition of Torment VII-X. Their preview writeup is already an admission of the lousy implementation with Greater Rifts where the power creep trivialized the games original base difficulties to this degree where they threw in the towel and added 4 more additional difficulties. Furthermore, the fact that players were speed farming Greater Rifts (especially due to the multiplicative XP in them) what was supposed to be a mode that wasn’t meant to be farmed, is indicative of this design teams cluelessness. Adding extra base difficulties doesn’t solve anything. All it does is scale monster health pools and damage higher again in order to keep up with Greater Rift (an infinitely scaling one) progression.
This amount of base difficulties (Normal-Torment X) is going to border on the ridiculous though with Torment be like the old Monster Power system where it was Inferno MP10 or bust; it’s going to be no different with the new meta being Torment X or GTFO (at least when it comes to the stuff outside of Greater Rifts). Rescaling the current difficulties would have made more sense but whatever. They got themselves into this trap since they don’t want returning players (who were able to manage the original difficulties to feel weaker). So long as there is at least a period of not just having to only do Greater Rifts, it is better than nothing though. But 6 months (or even less) from once this patch actually goes live, there will be players who will again be at that level where T10 will be trivialized, and be asking for more base difficulties over T10.
This does represent a fairly sizable “content” upgrade with the ulterior motive being to get a large number of players to log back in again (since I believe this patch is going to be a key lead in to the announcement of the next expansion). In the past, I would’ve been at least excited but it’s hard to believe any hype from this team anymore. Furthermore, it’s mostly just adding more lipstick on top of the ugly demon since NONE of this deals with the underlying core design issues. Most all of this content still plays out in the area of bounties and rifts since the rewards are tuned towards these areas (leaving the rest of adventure mode’s open world as well as the campaign left to rot). And anything to do with skills and items are being added on top of an already broken itemization system.
