by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 10 years ago     show comments

Following up on the changes in this week’s patch, game designer Travis Day took to the forums to discuss some more ideas they have in mind for future hotfixes for Reaper of Souls.

It’s very clear that the dev team wants slaying monsters to be the most rewarding experience, but they don’t feel it’s quite there yet. They started with the 25% buff to legendary drop chances while in Rifts and now they plan on buffing it further to a 100% bonus. That’s right One Zero Zero, 100 frickin’ percent! With every thing from chests to elites having double the chance to drop legendaries while in Rifts I’m left wondering only one thing, why would anyone play anything other than Rifts? Not that that’s a problem right now, but it might be something to consider down the road. Oh wait, we’ll have Tiered Rifts in the future, I do hope you enjoy running Rifts!

Some of the other changes that will be coming are further nerfs corrections of exploitative gameplay like treasure chest farming or targeted Unique Monster farming. The nerfing of Unique monster’s drop chances hearkens back to the Pindle-runs of Diablo II, they were quick, efficient and incredibly boring. Kadala is receiving another buff to her legendary gambling chances to keep pace with the increased drop chances in Rifts. While I doubt they are going to complete double her chances at giving out legendaries, the devs want to make sure that Blood Shards still feel rewarding to use when compared to running Rifts or Bounties.

You can check out Travis’ full comments on the changes below.

A series of hotfixes will be deployed today making more adjustments to overall reward structures within the game. I wanted to take a minute to explain the reasons for the changes that we are making. A driving goal of our design has been to make killing monsters feel rewarding, we want you all to find tons of cool items that you are excited about but more importantly we want you to have fun while doing it.

Rifts have always been intended to be the most efficient play method in the game, currently they aren’t for a number of reasons. Part of this has to do with the high level of efficiency in farming that players find doing things like farming Manglemaw, Razorclaw and any other number of unique monsters. Another contributing element is that farming chests without having to actually fight monsters is far more effective than actually fighting the monsters. It is very important to us that chests are exciting to find and feel rewarding but presently they are far too common and reliable to farm in certain areas of the game.

Finally Kadala, she has always been intended to give players some degree of control over their item upgrades. While we don’t want players to simply pick and choose from a list of items at an excessively high cost, we do want you to have an answer to the question “How do I upgrade my boots?”. Kadala is meant to be that answer, she is meant to give you some direct control over the types of items you find. Since we are increasing the overall reward structure of the game she is also going to be increasing but by a larger amount than the rest of the changes since she didn’t feel rewarding enough to us.

Without further delay here is a list of the changes that will be coming in the hotfix.

The Bad!
Unique monsters now drop less items.
*Uniques were dropping far more loot than their difficulty would warrant.

Chest spawns have been thinned out across all acts of the game.
*Ideally chests become less common and something that players can’t flip games to farm. It is our goal to make them feel exciting and rewarding when you find them.

The Good!
The bonus legendary drop rate for rifts is being increased from 25% to 100%!
*This means that while in a rift your chance to find a legendary item from monsters, chests, elites, and everything else is double what it is outside of rifts. No this does not mean opening bounty bags in rifts is the new hotness. ;P

Kadala’s legendary drop rate has been significantly increased.
*Blood Shards are meant to be a compelling element of rift rewards and something players are excited to get.

Loot is an incredibly important aspect of Diablo games and we will continue to keep a very close eye on it. If more problems arise we will continue striving to address them. It isn’t our goal to take loot away from people, we just want to make sure they are having as much fun as possible while finding it and these changes all support that goal.

Good hunting and link the loot!

Travis Day