Monday 6 July 2015

Diablo III Patch 2.3.0 Lands in PTR to the Chagrin of Mice Everywhere



Yes indeedy, there is a lot of clicking to be done in Diablo III in general, but the recently released patch 2.3.0 will make sure that gamers' mice are kept red-hot the majority of the time. The patch comes complete with tons of new and intriguing content, new features, and countless new tweaks, covering just about everything from skill allocation to damage increases for various skills , to new difficulty levels and to new collision models for pets. Obviously, the changes and tweaks are way too numerous to comfortably list and discuss all of them here, but there are a few features that stand out and that just have to be appraised one way or another. It also has to be noted though that getting into the PTR is not a small feat these days at all, as some players complain of queue times as long as 23 hours (for t10) - something that obviously kills playability completely.

There are a few ways to circumvent to queue issues though. First off: casual players should not even attempt to queue for t10. There's just no added benefit for them there in terms of legendaries, as the drop rate there is about the same as it is on t6. Bounties might make an exception for those exceptionally well geared, but as a general idea, they too are more efficient on t6.

Those who want to do greater rifts should just queue up for lower difficulty games, like expert, where the queue times are way lower (we're talking about 10-15 minutes), so that's another great way to speed things up. Yet another option is to join several public communities and request them on spots that may become available.

Once in the game, players will obviously want to avoid going AFK, so to do that, they can just bind a skill to a key and then place some sort of weight on that key to keep re-using that skill after cool-down. It's a bit rudimentary but it works.

One of the newly added zones is the Ruins of Sescheron one, situated in the upper right corner, in a previously blocked-off zone. Ruins of Sescheron is a rather linear area. It comes complete with some new mob-types and some traps which do actually cause some damage. There are two levels to this area, at the end of which the Kanai's Cube is unlocked, which gives players the possibility to fully customize their items among other things. As soon as the cube is acquired, several recipes become available, like Convert Set Item, Upgrade Rare Item, Reforge legendary Item, etc.

Another interesting feature (to say the least) in patch 2.3.0 is the Bandit shrine. Some call it ridiculous, others call it entertaining: the bottom line about it is that once a player hits it, it essentially spawns a goblin rift. If someone does indeed want to kill all the goblins, he/she should make sure the difficulty level is adjusted accordingly. The loot is obviously sweet in this one: there will be a few legendary items, as well as tons of gold and tons of clicking to do.


Philip Thalberg works for esportslistings, the premier destination for eSports odds and everything regarding eSports betting.