Blizzcon 2014 - Diablo 3 nyheter

Ancient Items

These are an upgraded quality of legendary items, including Set Items. About 1/10th of the time a leg drops it’ll be an Ancient Item, with greatly boosted primary and secondary affixes. Not all stats are boosted: +% skill damage is still just 10-15%, and +elemental damage (such as on Cindercoat) is unchanged. But all attributes, resistances (100-130 res all), armor, etc are much higher numbers. You can see them in these screens, with the existing version of the item on the left, and the Ancient Item version on the right.

Ancient Items can appear from any source, including Kadala gambling, monster/chest drops, Horadric Caches, and even crafting. The idea is that even characters who have perfect gear (now) should have upgrades to seek. And characters without perfect gear will find occasional Ancient Items and get a nice boost from the bigger numbers.

Blizzcon 2014 Diablo 3 Demo 1st Impressions:

The new wizard set has the chance to shift the cookie cutter builds drastically. I say that because the only playable demo was a Greater Rift 15, comparable to about T2. The new set looks as follows:

Fierce Set

2 pc – Casting Arcane Orb, Energy Twister, Magic Missile, and Shock Pulse reduce the cooldown of Slow Time by 1 second
4 pc – Enemies affected by your slow time take 1250% weapon damage every second
6 pc – Enemies affected by your slow time take 500% more damage from your Arcane Orb, Energy Twister, Magic Missile and Shock Pulse.
There is also a pretty new interesting helm.
Crown of the Primus – Slow Time Gains every rune.

On the playable demo, they have you also using a Gesture of Orpheus which reduces the cooldown of Slow Time outright. Pretty intense gear set to play with, and Frozen orb has never felt better because of it. More details soon.

I played the Wizard a couple of times as well and thought it was really fun. Very fast moving and fun to stack up Slow Times and then bomb in the Frozen Orbs with big damage increase. N3rdwords plays nothing but Wiz, and he’s really psyched to get this set on the live realm and have something as good or better than Firebird’s.

More updates to come; we’ve both played through the demo a dozen or more times with the quick updates going up on Twitter. Quick highlights:

New Demon Hunter Set

New six-piece set for the Demon Hunter enables Multishot as a big time skill. The 2 piece bonus grants +2 discipline with every Hatred generator. The 4 piece bonus adds a defensive boost, with -20% damage when enemies are within 40 yards. And the six piece full set bonus turns on a huge damage buff. The DH gains 10% damage for every point of Discipline to the damage of your Multishot and all Hatred Generator skills.

The DH in the demo has 65 Discipline, so the damage buff to everything when full discipline was 650%. Welcome to the days of stacking +discipline gear.

New Barbarian Set

The new Barbarian set enables a Rend + Whirlwind build. The two piece bonus is 300% damage to Rend. The four piece bonus is 300% duration to Rend. The six piece bonus is 300% damage to Whirlwind against enemies tagged with Rend.

The Barb also had a legendary helm (or belt?) that granted double Rend stack potential, so you could get up to 2 Rend stacks on each target.

It was hard to really see how this set worked in the demo since it’s only Greater Rift 15, so everything dies too quickly to estimate how the Rend stacks are adding up and boosting Whirlwind.

New Treasure Goblins

There are three new Treasure Goblins, colored purple, green, and silver. All are found in the demo in a Greater Rift, but that’s just a special thing for the demo here. Normally they will be like other goblins, and not fond in Grifts.

The purple one is called the Blood Thief and he drops Blood Shards (one stack) when running, and when he dies he drops one or two stacks of about 20-25 shards… but once in a while pops larger, with 10-12 stacks, good for about 280 total Blood Shards.

The green one is called Odious Collector, and he drops materials. He drops huge stacks; I killed several and the usual take was around 8 white, 35 blue, and 150 yellow materials.

The silver (chrome?) goblin is found on level 3 of the demo Rift, and he drops crazy amounts of gems. All are Marquise or Imperial in the demo here, and I got around 35-40 marquise and 2-3 Imperial each time I found this guy. Anyone low on gems would want to let him run a bit, since he drops a Marquise every few steps.