» Thu Aug 23, 2012 9:53 am Patch 1.04:
I played it for about 4 hours, doing both Act1/Inferno and some Act2 areas. On that very limited reference, feels like blue/yellows drop a bit more noticeably from non-Elites - especially the blues - but not much more noticeably from Elites. I did, however, have one Legendary drop in Act2 (BulKathos wedding band, svcks). Still get plenty of ilvl58 and below items in Inferno. Still get a lot of low dps items. Do seem to generate more items with high stats (100+ stat), but that doesn't make most of the items themselves any better (because of low dps or the stats don't apply to you, eg. high STR on a quiver). Still don't see any reason to want anything but main stat+VIT.
Difficulty wise, with the Monk, I'd say it feels a tad less difficult overall but it's still a major kiting game for melee against tougher enemies.
Not sure I like the boosted spell effect graphics, it's too visually distracting. The slightly lighter color blue text for certain items is actually more annoying for me re: quickly differentiating between blue magic items and trash I may not be interested in (gems/tomes)...I'd have preferred they made those a different color altogether, like a pale purple or something.
Bottom line: slightly easier difficulty and a lot of pleasant non-combat game interface changes, but items still largely svck and it won't make a huge difference in how many "good" items you'll see. A little, but not some awesome difference. I think I gained 1.6 Paragon levels in that 4 hours. The first one came quickly (1.5 hrs), the 2nd one is slower, so I imagine average players who don't play 10 hrs a day will get annoyed just trying to reach lvl 50-Paragon.
