First of all, the cinematic was top notched as usual and that did not disappoint.
For itemization though, I was hoping they would make the hard choice at redoing the core systems in the expansion (as opposed to this ongoing bandaid approach). But as the recent interviews suggested, they were cautious and wanted to take a safer approach because they didn’t want to break peoples current gear (kind of irrelevant though once expansion hits since higher level items will be dropping anyway so if anything, its meant to not break peoples gear for those who choose not to get the expansion).
So it wasn’t surprising when the confirmation came that Loot 2.0 would be a common foundation for classic and the expansion. Non-smart drop items will still be subjected to the same RNG issues. I currently don’t see the items being a huge game changer once the expansion has a couple of hundreds of play hours (see following).
The sneak peek at just a few Loot 2.0 items makes it hard to judge that part effectively though; for example, I currently don’t see the huge build game changers in the two legendary items shown (they may talk more details at Blizzcon so I’m pretty much neutral at this point). Stuff that I would’ve liked to see (simple example) would be something like finding an item with “Changes Mammoth Hydra into the ability to cast Firewall that does x-amount of damage over time”, pairing it with another found item that “increases elemental damage by n%”, using those with another item that “increases elemental damage by n-seconds”, and trying to find that very rare legendary item which provides the ability to cast hydra and have whatever modifier effects follow you around. Thus I’m not just focusing on the damage numbers and certain key affixes on them.
With that said, as far as the expansion related material goes, it’s fresh added content which won’t be fresh as time goes on (that is not meant as a negative; it is what it is). I don’t expect the in-game dialog to be any better than D3C or HoTS (it is what it is). I just hope for the ability to be able to turn all of that stuff (NPC dialogues, cutscenes, cinematics) off once the campaign has been completed with that character. It would be nice to have an open waypoint system to go along with that ability, but that drum has been banged long enough where the drum and stick are both broken.
The key are some of the end game content mentioned (time limited loot runs and Nephalem Trials) which increases the games replay-ability. Out of everything, these two things piqued my interest the most. The details are in the execution though and since the real in-depth details regarding these two modes are still lacking, I cannot say that I’m disappointed (but I’m also not excited either like compared to the time leading up to the actual launch of D3).
Myself, I’ve been off the must purchase expansion bandwagon since around 1.0.4. I’ve accept the fact this team won’t do any major system changes for D3 (that will be for D4 if that is ever greenlighted). Thus the fact that these two new end game modes have pinged my interest level, should be somewhat promising as that means I’m still a potential customer.
