I’m liking the new content so far. I think they struck a good balance with the effort needed to extract items. It adds new incentives for bounties while not creating too large a barrier for extracting. The new area is a nice change of pace as well. It also feels like they’ve beefed up some of the bounties and made mini-quests more common.
As far as I can tell, Demon Hunters can’t use The Furnace affix, which people were worried about, since DHs can’t equip two-handed maces. I looked through the weapon affix list twice with my DH and didn’t see The Furnace.
I also noticed that there are a million-billion new crafted items. When they said that new plans would drop with every bounty cache, I didn’t think they meant twenty at a time.
The recipes are all level 60 ones that you can’t ordinarily find at level 70. I guess they just decided that you ought to have all of them anyway, just for completeness.
It sounds like crafting materials don’t vary with difficulty: I’ve been running Normal, and still getting 2-3 per cache.
I’m a little disappointed that you take the Cube with you back to town, since it leaves very little reason to ever re-visit Sescheron, unless there are bounties that can show up there. It’s a cool zone; it’d be a shame to only ever go there once.
And for which items to extract the affixes from, I think it’ll depend on the build. There are a lot of items which would work well with particular sets, except that they take the same slot as a set item. For instance, Depth Diggers with the Raiment of a Thousand Storms set. You can address this with a Ring of Royal Grandeur, but that takes away a lot of flexibility.
It’ll also vary a lot on a case-by-case basis. If you already have an ancient Furnace with great other stats, then it probably makes more sense to cube some other item to add on top of it. On the other hand, if you have some boring weapon that just has high numbers, and a really low-number Furnace, then you cube the Furnace.
On T8 you get 8 crafting materials total, 4 from cache and 4 from bonus cache. That’s a lot more than 2-3.
Also last night when I was doing bounties I did get one in Sescheron - had to free some barbies and then listen to them blather about how they only got captured because they had been fighting some cannibals and were still tired/injured/hangover whatever.
I got the cube and did a full game of bounties at T6 and now have 6 of each of the area mats, but I still can’t extract those special mods, and it doesn’t tell me what else I need (Yes, I have 5+ death’s breaths).
The patch notes have a link that says “more about Kenai’s cube”, but it should really say “less about…”, and Diablo III Official Game Site doesn’t have 2.3
I said 2-3 per cache, not per set of bounties. 2-3 is not much different from 4. I guess it might scale a little with difficulty, but it doesn’t seem like it’s worth running at any difficulty that slows you down at all (at least, if that’s all you’re after).
And I got that event when I went through Sescheron, too, though it wasn’t a bounty. The reward is that one of them escorts you through the rest of the area, until and unless you reach the immortal throne. Which feels like it should also have some event associated with it, but didn’t the time I went through.
EDIT: Put your legendary item and a stack of each required material into the Cube, and then press “transmute”. It’ll make change on the materials. Yeah, it took me a few tries to figure out too.
So you don’t need to manually destack them? Was a bit worried it’ll eat all my materials if I just throw the whole stack in there, but guess that would be way too last millennium as far as game design goes.
For the bounties, I’ve been doing them on T8 since that doesn’t slow me down much and the 1% chance of dying keeps me awake, but I’m sure that is very much a YMMV thing depending on your gear and how much on autopilot you want to be on.
Thanks. So it works more like the D2 cube than D3 blacksmith and jeweler. BTW, even though it’s kind of annoying to have to have the stuff on you instead of in your stash, you can just right-click the whole stack over and it will just use what you need. You don’t have to split your stacks or worry about melting them all. [and on preview, you SAID that and AEM referenced it. No, you don’t have to manually unstack them, although I did the first few times.]
T7 gets you 4+4 shards, which I’m told is the max. IDK what benefit there is to go higher. If Normal gives 2-3, then there doesn’t seem to be any point at all to going higher than you’re perfectly comfortable with (craft materials-wise).
The only real benefits are higher legendary drop rate and more xp, but I also enjoy it more when the demons actually fight back a bit. Doing split bounties on T7 is very fast and efficient though when you just want some mats.
I don’t know, but I’ll hazard a guess that it’s probably either shift+click, alt+click or one of those modifiers and right click. Those are the standard key binds for stack splitting in games.
On my barb I added the mods from the Furnace (50% dmg to elites), Icewalkers (immune to freeze and immobilize), and one of the immunity amulets, so now he’s mostly immune to 3 different elements.
But I’ll be starting a new Witch Doctor tomorrow, so I pulled the gear from old ones and put them all together in an attempt to make my WD, (who was about 95% Pet Doctor and ~50% Harvester) into both. Alas, I still cannot get the full set bonus from Zuni and Jade Harvester at the same time. I could (and probably should) go full Harvester with a bunch of pet support, but I’m too lazy to play that way.
I’ll be on tonight, but I’m going to concentrate on doing non-seasonal bounties so I can beef up my main characters, clear out my stash, and make room for those end-season items that are at risk of expiring.
Thanks to everyone who pointed out that there’s no need to de-stack the crafting materials. That sped up the Cube process a bit.
I am strongly considering putting some non-zero amount of effort into a season character this time around. Seems pretty likely that I’ll be on at 8 tonight either way. Not sure yet if I want to do another monk (there’s a season-only legendary that enables a new build) or a barb (lowest playtime of all of my levelled characters, and I enjoy what I’ve played of it, which seems like a good combo to put more time into).
Just fought an elite champion named “Clawgane [The Mountain]”. IDK if he’s new, or if I just missed him because I didn’t do Act5 bounties before 2.3
(If you don’t get it, you should watch Game of Thrones)
Oft, once the new season starts, off-season stuff doesn’t matter. Your seasonal characters will have a new stash and the old stuff won’t matter.
[ETA: Oh, like all of those “messages” that I haven’t gotten around to yet? Yeah, I better take care of those, but it won’t take long.]
On the one hand, I got level 70 on the first night of a season, which I think is some sort of awesome life achievement. Or should be. At least 30 RL points.
On the other hand, by the time I hit 70, there was already a solo barbarian who had done a level 21 rift. I am so inadequate.
Yeah, Clawgane’s been around for a while. The new references this season seem to be mostly intra-Blizzard stuff: In Heroes of the Storm, the crusader hero is named Johanna, and the barbarian hero is Sonya, and they’ve got some items in D3 now named after those two.
Hit level 55 and getting a bit sick and tired of leveling already but at least I have 6 of each Act-specific material now so I can cube stuff once Death’s Breaths start dropping. Enjoying playing a DH once again, was feeling very indecisive about what class to play for this season but this feels the right choice.
