Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls & patch 2.1

Hey everyone, today I decided to talk about a game that has made a huge comeback in my library of games that I play, Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. Reaper of Souls (RoS) is the expansion for the Diablo 3 (D3) franchise that came out on March 25th 2014 for PC and Mac. There was also a release of RoS for Xbox and PS4 that more recently came out on August 19th 2014. RoS was hugely anticipated due to the fact that it was bringing some very big changes to D3. I myself at the time of the PC release was very excited for these new changes and couldn't wait to try it out.

RoS had some very major changes slated for it's release, most notably the closure of the D3 auction house (AH). Blizzard decided to close both the gold and real money AH's because they felt that it was ruining the way the game was played. Blizzard felt that farming gold to buy an item on the AH was not what they were going for with D3 gameplay. Blizzard thought that the most rewarding and funnest way to get items should be by finding them yourself by killing monsters. To accommodate this change of removing the AH Blizzard made legendary items drop way more frequently and were subject to smart stat rolls. Smart stat rolls would ensure that if you got a legendary drop on your wizard that the vast majority of the time it would roll Int and not something useless like Str or Dex making it much easier and faster to find upgrades. Since they buffed drop rates and gave the items smart stats rolls, when legendary items were identified they became account bound. Items however can still be shared with friends, as long as you were playing in a game together when the item dropped it is tradeable for up to 2 hours afterwards. At first it felt a little bit like it would take forever to gear up since I wouldn't be able to buy missing pieces on the AH. I quickly realized though that this was a myth and that items dropped frequently enough to make it possible to gear fairly quickly. Since I have been playing I've geared up both my Wizard and Witch Doctor with enough gear to play the hardest difficulty Torment VI with several different build specializations.

Along with the removal of the AH they also decided to implement a new character to the game, the Crusader! The Crusader is a champion that uses their great faith and determination in the law to lay waste to the evils that seek to destroy the world. Crusaders have a slew of Holy abilities (along with many others) to help them dispatch the forces of evil. Crusaders are very durable with their plate armor and shields. Crusaders have some specific items such as Crusader shields and large 2h Flails that are used only by their class. The Crusader also has the unique ability to Equip a 2h weapon in 1 hand along with a shield. This combination allows them to be a hard hitting and still keep their high survivability.

In RoS they also did a major overhaul of the Paragon leveling system. In the new Paragon system they first removed the level cap which was really cool because this gives continued incentive to play because no matter what you can always continue making your character better via higher paragon levels. In addition to removing the level cap they also made it so paragon levels were shared on all your characters. This was an excellent change because you now don't feel like if you don't play your highest paragon level character that you are underpowered. This shared paragon levels made it much less detrimental to swap to another character to play because they were still getting the paragon bonuses. Paragon levels now rather than gaining a flat amount of predetermined stats you get points to spend in 4 different tabs with 4 different options in each tab. This allows you to  customize how you spend your paragon points per character and per build. You can also reset these points as many times and whenever you want to try a different customizations for your characters.

Another new addition that came with RoS was the addition of Act V to further add to the plot of D3. With Act V there was also a raise in the level cap from 60 to 70. All the current classes  in original D3 got a serious make over for all of their abilities to rebalance their power and to make them funner to play. At level 69 all the original classes also got brand new abilities to add to their arsenal. I will give just for a brief summary of the plot so as not to spoil anything for those who have not played the game yet. After you defeat the reincarnation of Diablo in the high Heavens the black soulstone falls down and is recovered by Tyrael. Tyrael, now human, decides to take it upon himself to hide the black soulstone because contained within is still all 7 of the prime evils. Malthael, formerly the angel of wisdom but now the angel of death, ambushes them and steals the black soulstone. Malthael feels that he must use the black soulstone's powers to once and for all destroy the demonic horde and end the eternal conflict between angels and demons. In his madness though this includes killing all humans because they are composed of both demon and angel within their souls.It then falls on the Nephalem to once again stop this evil act from reaching completion.

Besides Act V and the new crusader class, Blizzard added Adventure mode to the game. In adventure mode they have 2 main goals that can be accomplished, bounties and Nephalem Rifts. Bounties are similar to quests in any typical RPG game. You go to any of the 5 acts and Tyrael has 5 bounties for you to complete. They are typically to go clear a certain area of monsters, kill specific champions or rares, cleanse cursed shrines or chests, and always to kill one of the several bosses of the act you are in. Each of these bounties yields a large amount of bonus experience, gold, and sometimes rift stone fragments as a reward. Once you are done with all 5 bounties in the act you talk to Tyrael and he rewards you with a Horadric Cache. Within these Horadric Caches you receive several rift stone fragments, crafting materials, a few bloodstones and a rare chance for specific legendaries which only drop from within caches. Once you collect 5 rift fragments you can open yourself a Nephalem Rift. Nephalem Rifts are hard dungeons that are randomly generated and randomly populated with different monsters and elites that can come from any act of the game. At the end of the rift once you have cleared enough of it to fill the rift meter to 100% one of many different possible Rift Guardian will appear. The Rift Gaurdian is a boss of sorts for this randomly generated dungeon and will drop several items with a greater chance for them being lengendary items and a large amount of bloodstones. More bloodstones are rewarded for the higher the difficulty setting you are playing on.

Along with all this exciting new game play they added in 2 new vendors to the game. There is the Mystic and the bloodstone vendor. The bloodstones I had mentioned in the previous paragraph that are obtainable from bounties and Rift Gaurdians are used to "gamble" at Kadala the bloodstone vendor. Kadala has all the armor slots to choose from and several different weapon and off hand categories. Say you have lots of good legendary items but you still need a good set of legendary gloves, with Kadala you can spend all your bloodstones on gloves trying to get a legendary. This can greatly speed up gearing out your characters because you can focus on the pieces you are still missing. Just remember that you cap out at 500 bloodstones, so make sure to spend them before then. The Mystic is an indispensable new tool that everyone utilizes to perfect their new gear. What the mystic allows for is to take any item and for a certain cost you can pick one single stat on it to reroll to another. Say for instance you get bonus armor and on that particular item you would rather get crit %. You can then pay the cost and reroll that stat for a 2 chances to potentially get what you want. This however can be a double edged sword if you are unlucky as each time you have to reroll the price goes up to continue rerolling. This can sometimes make you run out of gold and crafting mats very quickly so be careful. Also a good thing to know about rerolling is that when you get the 2 options from the reroll instead of picking one of those 2 you may instead select to keep what the items current stat is. This is good because let's say in the earlier example you finally rerolled your crit % on bracers but it rolled to the lowest possible value of 4.5%, you could then continue to roll trying to get the maximum of 6% but if neither of your options that you rerolled were crit % you could continue to select the 4.5% to keep what crit you currently have. Sadly I didn't know this little tidbit when I first started playing RoS and wasted a lot of gold and materials until I figured out otherwise.

That pretty much concludes all the new additions that have been implemented to D3 in the RoS expansion. I now wanted to take a look at some up coming changes that have been in the works for Blizzards first major content update for RoS patch 2.1. Patch 2.1 looks to be very exciting since they will be adding several very big additions to RoS's available content. It has been in the works for a few months now and I am still eagerly anticipating it's arrival, but I think it should be coming out very shortly. I think they waited as long as they did to perfect some of this new content and at the same time to wait for the release of the console additions so that they could release the patch for both PC and console versions at the same time.

Without further ado the first notable change slated for patch 2.1 that I will talk about is Seasons. Think of Seasons as a competition system that takes place over a set amount of time. In each Season as the come you will have to start a new character for that Season. In this competition your success will be tracked via leaderboards. I'm assuming there will be leaderboards for highest overall paragon, highest paragon for the class you are playing, and several other things. In seasons there will also be challenges that are tracked called conquests. Conquests are very difficult achievements that only be able to be accomplished by first 1000 players able to finish them. I'm again assuming these will be tracked via leaderboards for who completes them the quickest and also who completes the most of the available conquests. Also in seasons there will be some exclusive legendaries that will drop during the season that only players involved with that season will be able to get. If power leveling and gearing to compete against other players in an attempt to achieve high rankings on leaderboards sounds like fun Seasons will definitely be the thing for you. Oh and if by chance you don't feel like doing Seasons don't worry those exclusive items will roll over into the normal item pool once the Season is over and a new one begins.

With how they added Nephalem Rifts in RoS they are going to take it one step further by adding Greater Nephalem Rifts in patch 2.1. Greater Nephalem Rifts will be another thing that will be tracked on leaderboards in both Seasons and regular gameplay. What a Greater Nephalem Rift will be is a continuation of a normal Nephalem rift that will chain into higher difficulty for each subsequent one completed. Once you complete a regular Nephalem rift the Rift Gaurdian will drop a greater rift fragment which will allow you to open a Greater Nephalem Rift. The Greater Nephalem Rift will be slightly harder than the regular rift you just finished as well as timed. In order for you to get the fragment to open level 2 of your Greater Nephalem Rift you will need to defeat the current one and do it within the time limit. It will scale like this for as high of a level of Greater Nephalem Rift as you can continue to defeat. The higher the level you get continues to be harder but at the same time will also yield greater and more bountiful rewards. Also the higher and faster you get there the more fame you can possibly achieve by gaining high rankings on the leaderboards for Greater Nephalem Rifts.

Along with these two new game modes (well Greater Rifts being more an addition to an existing game mode) there will be many new items in patch  2.1 along with some upgrades to existing ones to make them more interesting and viable to use. Some of these redo's are on several of the existing class specific sets that were underpowered compared to the others that no one used, as well as multiple legendary items that players never used because they weren't viable. If you currently have a full set for a class that you play that you don't use because it is underpowered hold on to it because the changes for set items will be retro active! Legendary items that are receiving buffs however you will have to go out and find new ones because they won't be retro actively upgraded. Along with this slew of new items and buffed old ones they plan to introduce Legendary Gems. All I know so far about legendary gems is that they will only be able to be socketed into rings and amulets. Along with that these gems will only be dropped in Greater Nephalem Rifts and will be able to be leveled up to greatly improve their power. There will be a set amount of different types of Legendary gems of which you will only be able to have one of each account wide. This means if you have Legendary gem "X" on your wizard it will not drop again for any of your other characters. You can transfer it to other characters but in total you will only be able to have 1 Legendary Gem "X" on your whole account, so make sure to equip them wisely to your characters. And the last new item I would like to mention that could be a very serious upgrade would be the new Hellfire Amulet. Currently there is a Hellfire Ring in game (which sounded like it would get a revamp). The special ability of the Hellfire amulet that will make it worth while is that it can grant you an additional passive ability so that your character at level 70 could potentially have access to 5 passives. I look forward to getting one of these because this could greatly boost your character's overall power.

That is my summation of all that is new in the D3 expansion of RoS and the upcoming patch of 2.1. I personally feel that with the release of RoS that Blizzard did an amazing job of breathing new life into what I felt to be a dying franchise. The original D3 was a very monotonous endless grind that yielded very little results due to horrible drop rates of items. This resulted in the game becoming about grinding for ok items to sell (or if you were super lucky getting one god like item to sell for absurd amounts) so that you could find and buy the gear you needed via the auction house. There was no fun in identifying items because 99.99% of the time they were useless and you never had that excitement of finding a drop on your own that would be an upgrade for your character. Also the way abilities were in original D3 for the big majority of classes there was only one viable build to play the game at high end. RoS brought back the excitement of getting those new drops to upgrade your character as well as making multiple builds for each class viable for doing high end difficulty. This made it possible to be able to play the way you want and customize your character in a variety of ways to play however funnest for you. Not to mention that fact that Blizzard, to accomplish a lot of these changes, took out the the real money AH which was a big income for them. To me this speaks very highly of Blizzard's dedication to make a high quality game that they are willing to remove an asset of the game that makes them additional revenue. I also like the fact that they are continuing to add new and exciting content for patch 2.1, which just further shows their dedication to continue making D3 even better.  So if any of you out there are thinking about either picking up the D3 franchise to give it a second try or want to become a new player  I would highly recommend D3: RoS as I feel it is a fun experience and a must play in my book!

Hearthstone - New Blizzard Game

Hearthstone is the one of the newest games being developed by Blizzard. Currently it is still in beta testing, so if you want to play it you need to have a battle.net account and apply to be accepted to the beta test. It seems like it is fairly easy to get into the beta if you are interested. When I applied for beta access to Hearthstone it only took about 2 weeks for me to receive a reply that I was accepted. Hearthstone is a fairly easy game to setup and install since you just download the game right off the battle.net site. It is a small game in size at just under 2gb, but large in gameplay.

Hearthstone is a game based off of their TCG (trading card game) that is set in the universe of their very popular World of Warcraft. The premise is very simple with two people (or 1 person against a computer opponent) that face off against each other with two decks to deal damage to the opponent and reduce their health to 0. Each player selects the type of deck they play based upon 1 of  9 different hero classes. The 9 different classes are druid, hunter, mage, paladin, priest, rogue, shaman, warlock, and warrior. Each hero has a different set of abilities and spells that are available for use in their decks as well as a unique ability that each hero can use at any time. Each player starts with 30 health,1 mana, and 30 cards in their deck.

On the first turn depending on whether you go first or second you draw 3 or 4 cards (second turn gets 4) and draw one additional card each turn until the end of the game. You also start off with 1 mana and earn 1 additional mana each subsequent turn up to a maximum of 10. Your mana is used to "pay" the cost of the cards in your hand so that they can be put in play, the more powerful the card the more mana it will cost. As an example say on turn 5 (you will have 5 mana) you could play 1 card with a cost of 5 mana or 2 cards one 2 mana and one 3 mana. Spending your mana like this will deplete your mana to 0 till the end of the turn. At the beginning of turn 6 you will gain 1 additional total mana and it will refill. There are two basic types of cards that use up your mana, minions and spells. Minions come into play and remain in play until the end of the game or they are killed. Minions have a printed value of attack and life and typically can attack once per turn. Minions are good to have because they can attack the enemy hero multiple times as long as they are alive or they can also become the first line of defense to stop incoming physical damage to your hero. Spells can do a large variety of thing such as buff heroes and minions, debuff heroes and minons, deal damage or heal heroes and minions. Damage dealing spells are useful because they can bypass minions that protect your hero and attack them directly.

Depending on what you want to do with your deck and what hero you play you can build decks in numerous ways. There are hundreds of cards to choose from (you don't start off with this many but will accrue more as you play) which make the number of combinations almost endless for deck construction. Just as a few examples you can make decks focused on buffing minions, offensive spells, healing decks, minion swarming, aggro decks (defensive), or control decks (debuffs and counters) and many more. You start off with 9 preset decks for each hero type and as you play and level up the different heroes you get 20 bonus starting cards for each class. After you collect enough cards you can go into your card collection and build your own custom decks for each class. As you play against other people and gain more levels and experience you will occasionally be rewarded with coins that you can use to purchase "packs" of 5 cards to further expand your collection. Along with leveling up you will get quests to accomplish and each quest you complete will reward you with more coins that you can also use to purchase additional packs of cards. If you are impatient you always have the option to spend real money to get packs of cards faster. There is also a disenchanting system to turn extra cards that you don't use into arcane dust. This arcane dust can then be saved up and used to craft specific cards to help progress your growing card collection.

This game to me was a very easy game to pick up and learn. I also liked it because there are so many variations of decks you can construct and that you could encounter playing other people. It can suck you in for hours or you can hop on and and play one game in 15 minutes for a quick bit of casual entertainment. And even though this game is a very quick to pick up the learning curve is almost infinite with how many hundreds of cards there are and the endless possibilities of constructing decks. Even after very many games you can run into someone with a deck style you have never seen before and learn something new. Having this much of a learning curve really helps with keeping the game interesting even well into the "end game". For additional detailed information about Hearthstone please check out this page  http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/9882328198.

Overall I found the game to be great fun and think it will have a bright future once it is released. I am not 100% sure but I do believe once it is released it will be free to play. I think that Blizzard will be looking to make money off of the micro transactions from the purchases of additional card packs in game. I also think that Hearthstone would be an excellent candidate for a smartphone or tablet port on the Google Play or iTunes market places. With the ease of use and the mouse only nature of the game play, which will be very easy to use on a touch screen, I think they are setting it up to be an easy crossover into the mobile gaming market.

As a side note to Hearthstone it seems that Blizzard is going to a battle.net launcher system. If you have played any of the newer games from blizzard like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, or WoW you will be familiar with how each of them has it's own laucher that takes care of making sure the game is up to date and launching the game. The new battle.net laucher is an all in one laucher that takes care of all the games that blizzard produces in one consolidated program. If you are familiar with how Steam works it is very similar with the exception that battle.net will only support Blizzard games. Who knows though maybe in the future Blizzard will expand to offer games from 3rd parties as well through their battle.net system to become more like Steam as an online distributor of games.

Walking Dead Season 4

Who else is excited for the multitude of new episodes for the TV season for all their favorite shows? I am in particular excited about the return of The Walking Dead with their 4th season this year! This year we will be getting even more love than last year since the new season will be a whopping 16 episodes rather than what it previously had been last season with 13 episodes. This year Season 4 kicked off on October 13th, the season premiere had an amazing 16.1 million viewers. With 16.1 million viewers the new episode broke the previous record held by the season 3 finale of 12.4 million viewers. With these outstanding numbers The Walking Dead has secured a solid spot as the most viewed show in basic cable history. Just yesterday October 27th we just had episode 3 air (going to watch it as soon as I finish this post! lol). This year we will get 8 episodes up to December 1st and then it will take a dreaded 2 month break and return to airing the final 8 episodes of the season in February 2014!

In this highly anticipated new season, we see Rick and the group of survivors fostering a thriving community in the safe haven of the prison. Sadly, in this brutal world, happiness is short-lived with the danger from walkers and other outside threats along with numerous dangers brewing inside their own fences. With the joining together of prison dwellers and Woodburyans not everyone is going to get along. In fact, there's going to be some major head butting, and some new alliances that form from the merging of the two factions. The group's home and new way of life will be thoroughly tested, and their struggle to survive has never been so perilous.

With this new season there will be several additions to the cast this year. The lovely Christian Serratos from the Twilight series will be introduced playing the new character of Rosita Espinosa. Rosita Espinosa is a tough girl in her mid 20's. Rosita is a character that originated in the comic series, where she and two friends, Abraham and Eugene, meet up with Rick and his crew at Hershel's farm. Rosita, who is likely to be introduced later in the season, will also probably be introduced at the same time as Abraham and Eugene. Also there is Larry Gilliard Jr. who will be playing the character of Bob Stookey. Bob Stookey is another character who originates from the comic book series, Bob is a new group member who was a former army medic. With the show they changed his character from a mid 50's  Caucasian to a African American in his mid to late 30's. And lastly Alanna Masterson will be introduced as a new survivor who will show up sometime around midseason. Little is known about the character officially, though it's said she'll be a recurring character this season.

This season looks to be very promising and just as good if not better than the last 3. Perhaps the best tease on what to expect in Season 4 came courtesy of Gimple at Comic-Con, when he told the fans, "It's going to get insane very quickly." So I hope you all enjoy the upcoming madness as much as I will.