Since the 2.2 PTR went live and also had the same 2000% legendary buff, I wanted to see what kind of drops I would get. From the previous PTR, my character had ancient items in only a few slots so there was still room for improvements. I didn’t re-copy my characters from live since the only thing that really changed were the legendary gems (I stopped leveling them at rank 21).
I put in the equivalent of what would equate to 150 hours of live game play on my main softcore character; out of around 500 or so legendary/set drops, none of them were upgrades. I did get around 75 ancients but they were mostly just the same junk legendary items (stuff like Executioner, Scrimshaw, etc). This is all at T6 rifts. I only did GRifts up to 30 to level up a defensive gem.
Basically, not very good luck with drop quality and RNG. I did get some items for my other non-wizard classes that sort of were upgrades. I also spent blood shards mainly on my demon hunter.
I started the PTR with around 260 forgotten souls. Even after burning through around a hundred of them re-rolling those other class items, I now have around 698 of them. In total between the 2.1.2 and 2.2 PTR, the above represents around 350 hours of drops on live (this doesn’t take into account that with the 2.1.2 PTR, there were also double goblins and double blood shards).
My luck was much better on the hardcore server playing only on T3. During the previous PTR, I managed to gear up my wizard (I stopped playing all of my hardcore characters on live once I leveled them to 70 after RoS launched) which at the start, could only do Expert safely to manage to easily do up to T3 (lack of more elemental and elite damage plus not using a full set is what is holding this character back at the moment).
With this PTR, my luck with drops continued including getting an ancient Serpent’s Sparker (a huge 20% damage upgrade over my Thunderfury). There is a PTR issue though where all my hardcore gold was missing (which makes it hard to re-roll items or make enough gems).
On the hardcore side, the items I have represents around 175 hours of drops (subject of course to luck with RNG) in total.
In a nutshell, what the game is telling me is to stop playing my main softcore wizard. In more actuality, this is sort of reminscent when I stopped playing around 1.0.4 and began putting more time into hardcore (which I also stopped until resuming around 1.0.7).
I’m probably going to shift to playing demon hunter for a bit (getting better items on softcore) and seeing how far I can get my season 2 hardcore one.
One final quick thought about the cosmetics UI. I can also see this coming to the PS4 and XB1 UEE version of the game as DLC. The assets will all be there (it’s why some console players have managed to use editing software to unlock the bone wings and pennant).
It’s also my opinion that it will only be a matter of time that they will implement these microtransactions into the North American and European regions. It doesn’t make any sense to create such assets and limit their revenue potential when they already have data from WoW that shows how players spend money on such items. Of course, most of that revenue will go towards funding cosmetics (graphics design), backend operations, customer support, and not actual game play design.
