ePPIC sLOW

Toto just pinged Paragon level 40 ... epic slow i know, but if putting food on the table is a priority, D3 must be put on the back burner until there are weekends. But coincidentally i FINALLY got a set of keys, and am working on my second set of three for my Infernal Machines...that's a good thing actually. 278 hrs played as Toto and not ONE machine completed.

So what has happened this week? 

We got some great updates from Blizzard, as well as some less than official information regarding D3:ROS...

1st - The Auction House

Yip, it created allot of excitement when it was first announced that D3 would have a real money auction house, and many a forum troll shot Blizzard/Activision down for including the feature, but from the 18th March 2014 we will no longer be able to buy and sell... with both Gold and $.

17 September:

When we initially designed and implemented the auction houses, the driving goal was to provide a convenient and secure system for trades. But as we’ve mentioned on different occasions, it became increasingly clear that despite the benefits of the AH system and the fact that many players around the world use it, it ultimately undermines Diablo’s core game play: kill monsters to get cool loot. With that in mind, we want to let everyone know that we’ve decided to remove the gold and real-money auction house system from Diablo III.
We feel that this move along with the Loot 2.0 system being developed concurrently with Reaper of Souls™ will result in a much more rewarding game experience for our players.
We’re working out the details of how the auction house system will be shut down, but we wanted to share the news as soon as we made the decision in order to give everyone as much advance notice as possible. Please note that the shutdown will occur on March 18, 2014. We will keep everyone informed as we work through this process.
Josh Mosqueira and I wanted to provide everyone with a little more information behind this decision, so please have a look at the video, and stay tuned to this site for further updates in the months ahead.

and....

I believe Josh noted this in the video, but making the call to remove the gold and real-money auction house wasn’t easy–and it certainly wasn’t done in a vacuum. On the one hand, we invested a lot of time and resources into the development of the auction house system, and (for all intents and purposes) the auction houses achieved the goals we originally set for them when they were implemented. We also knew that many players appreciated if not outright enjoyed using the feature, be it because they worked long days and didn’t always have time to farm, because they liked having a convenient way to sell off unneeded goods, or because they had fun “playing” the AH economy. These were all things we considered and debated heavily. (Keep in mind that we actually evaluated different options that would allow us to preserve the auction houses and just diminish their temptation. This was initially one of the big goals of Loot 2.0.)
On the other hand, it’s become increasingly clear that despite the benefits the auction houses provide, they ultimately undermine Diablo’s core gameplay and warp our ability to deliver a great in-game experience. A big part of Diablo is the thrill of battling demons and finding epic loot. While buying epic loot in the auction houses might be more convenient, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as heroic as plowing through a pack of fearsome-looking monsters and having them drop that one awesome item that seems like it was made for your character.
Removing the auction houses is only one part of the equation, though. The other is Loot 2.0, which is aimed at making playing the game the best and most satisfying way to get items. This system focuses on better loot drops, targeted loot drops, and giving players additional ways to customize their items. We feel that these improvements, along with the removal of the auction houses, will improve the overall gameplay experience for all of our players and help address the initial loot concerns voiced by our community.
Now, we still have a lot of technical and mechanical details to work out, but we’ll be sharing all that info once it’s available.
TL;DR: The decision to remove the gold and real-money auction house wasn’t about validating “self-found” or invalidating those who enjoyed using the auction house. That’s a very binary way of looking at things, and I would sincerely encourage players to avoid falling into the whole “we win/you lose” trap. Locking this up.

Good for the game, bad for those of us that needed a quick way to craft gems. can you imagine what schlep we will need to go through now for a Marquise Gem... I wager that there will be a new rush, not paragon 1000, but Marquise Diamond.

Currently you need:

2 Page of Jewelcrafting
2 Tome of Jewelcrafting
65 Tome of Secrets
93312 Chipped Gems

FOR ONE RADIANT STAR!!!!

2nd - ROS leak

Ok I am not going to go to deep into this one, as there is a PLETHORA of plethoric awesomeness leaked on Diablo Fans... IT IS HUGE, so much information that i am sure Blizzard did not whant to have in the open, in fact due to the leak they had to do some PR work, and we found out that we will in fact be seeing Ladders being introduced in ROS.

I confirm that Blizzard employees are testing various elements Reaper of Souls, and some of these items are available on the test server. I remind you that the data is a test server and they are by no means final. Also warn against spoilers contained in these articles. Information on the progress of the development of the addition we will publish on our official website.

I bet you start ladder with paragon 0 and your ladder exp is added to your non-ladder exp in the event of a reset. That’s my hope at least.
Travis Day: That is currently the plan. Paragon experience will be account but will also be broken out by game play mode. Players who play in Hardcore will have a separate hardcore paragon level from their non hardcore characters.
When a season ends all of the paragon experience you have earned will be rolled into the appropriate pool of paragon experience for the account and you will be able to start at 0 again in the new season.
This is all still a work in progress and subject to change but that is what we are currently intending.

3rd - Virtual Tickets 

Well, i was browsing the Blizzcon site and saw that there was a new page available --- virtual tickets was on sale!!! i immediately proceeded to purchase my virtual tickets for this year's Blizzcon. I only got confirmation after i tried for 5 times to complete the purchase. but in the end i finally got them!

subsequently i received my bonus items on the 18th -

New Banner, sigil and detail....


So for next week, please drop me a mail and tell me what you are doing to increase your paragon leveling time... as with all these amazing developments happening, i am not so sure anymore that we really need to push for paragons prior to ROS going live....

Loot 2.0 & Mystic Adjustments... with crafting resurgence?

Just thought i would drop in this quote from a blue post.
As you can see it is quite lengthy, but boy am  i now more excited than ever!!

I am still not sure how the crafting is going to work, last weekend i bought a ton of recipes from the Auction house in preparation for patch 1.09 and ROS, as we are supposed to get 'targeted' drops. And as crafting is a mechanical drop system i surmise that our crafted items should also be 'targeted'... and as legendary items will now match your character level at the time of drop, should we be expecting awesome crafted items? Finally?

I REALLY hope so, and trust we could see a resurgence in recipes...

Would love to see some really strong items come out of the crafting, and the mystic's enchanting.

what would you like to re-roll / craft - or - even transmorgify?

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

This is spot on.

We are still iterating heavily on the system, so the exact details may vary from what we talk about today, so let's talk about our values. By focusing on our design values, even if the exact implementation changes, you''ll be able to see our intent and what's important to us. Here are some of our design values for enchanting:

Value: It's important for the actual hunt for the loot to still matter
How enchanting supports this: As currently designed, you are only allowed to reroll ONE property on an item. In this way, each item can only be changed so much from it's original state. This allows enchanting to feel meaningful, while still allowing lots of room for players to resume hunting for an even better "base item" to enchant into an even better item.

Value: We want this to be a meaningful end-game sink
How enchanting supports this:
1. As previously mentioned, all items that are enchanted will be bound to account
2. Even though you are allowed to reroll only ONE property, you can reroll that property over and over. For example, suppose an item has 200 str, 200 vit, 80 res all, +1200 Life on Kill and +400 Life on Hit. You might choose to reroll the +1200 Life on Kill and get +87 Hitpoints per second. You can then reroll the +87 Hitpoints per second and get +4 gold pickup radius. You can reroll the "mutable" stat as many times as you want, but the other 4 stats (200 str, 200 vit, 80 res all and +400 Life on Hit) are now "locked in" and cannot be rerolled.
3. We want to ensure enchanting is meaningful on Legendary items. We are working hard to make sure Legendary items are awesome. If we want enchanting to be a meaningful end-game sink, it needs to work on the best items in the game. It has not yet been determined whether this means you can enchant the "guaranteed" properties of a Legendary, or if you can only reroll the "random" properties of a Legendary. This aspect of the design is still under iteration but at the end of the day we want enchanting Legendary items to be worthwhile.

Value: We want to avoid "Buyer's Remorse"
How enchanting supports this: Have you ever played an RPG with an enchanting system that sometimes randomly made the item worse? Since we're allowing the result to be random, it's possible that your choices for enchanting are worse than the property you're replacing. Oftentimes this can lead to a feeling of dread when you begin the enchanting process. Or maybe you re-enchant the item over and over hoping to at least get something better than what you started but you get unlucky and run out of money or reagents before you get a good roll! To mitigate this, when we present you the list of options one of the options is ALWAYS the original property. So if you don't like the new options you can always choose to keep the old one. Now you can enchant with peace-of-mind.

Standard disclaimer. Enchanting is a work-in-progress. Expect it to change before it's done, but this is a glimpse at the current state.

I think the answer is yes, if I did not hear it wrong, Josh said on the Gamescom presentation.
Correct. Sockets are a possible affix that can be re-rolled onto an item (at least currently).

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Pinged 37...

Toto rang the bell this weekend, and is well on his way to paragon 50. Then it is on to level my Monk (Ivana) and my Witch Doctor(Mugabe). Only after these guys have climbed the mountain i will go back to Toto. Currently the paragon leveling will advance to slowly for my liking past P50. ... for more clarity please consult this handy chart! -->

The above image is from the  diablo.incgamers article where paragon 2.0 is discussed, it makes for a good read and anyone willing to invest into paragon leveling now will benefit greatly after ROS and patch 1.9 is released.

Based on my calculations to maxs out your characters in all their customized levels you need to paragon to 600 over all your characters. (50 x 12) after that it becomes nigh impossible to see any advancement.

so i will be happy to level up my characters to:

Toto 60 (P100) - - - - current 60(37)
Mugabe 60 (P50) - - -current 50
Ivana 60 (P50) - - - - -current 39
VanHelsing 60 (P50) - current 60(1)
Silvana 60 (P50) - - - -current 20
Betti 60 (P50) - - - - - current 39

My current worry is that Betti is great fun to play, but Silvana is running with +55 XP bonus gear, VanHelsing is in desperate need for better gear as he squeels with a simple Inferno MP2 one-shot death...not to mention that Mugabe will benefit the most reaching lvl 60 and enheriting allot of AH bought handmedowns from Toto. Ivana too has some nice found items waiting for her. . .

If anyone is wanting to do runs with me please contact me on EU servers as LordBacon_2129 or twit me on @hpbotha