This past Tuesday morning Diablo III came down for patching, and when it came back up, 2.3 was live. I’ve talked about the new patch quite a bit in recent posts and have brought it up a few times on the podcast because honestly, it’s refreshing to see a single player or small multiplayer game getting new updates and being kept alive like this. In the past year and a half Diablo III has seen the complete loot system rework in 2.0, along with removal of the shitty auction house system, a full expansion in Reaper of Souls, and the introduction of Adventure mode and seasons. This patch adds to that considerable amount of new content in such a short time, it makes you wonder why Blizzard couldn’t keep up with content production for some of their other titles. Anyway, I jumped into the game the other night to check out the new changes and work on my Demon Hunter a little more before the new season was to start up on Friday.

The new entry screen gives you a taste of what you can expect in the patch, and my first order of business was to check out the new zone, The Ruins of Sescheron.

For those curious, it’s located on the Act III map in the top right corner. The zone consists of the first area called the ruins, another large area, and then a third level that contains a throne room and what you would think would be a boss, but I couldn’t find a way to interact.

The Ruins and subsequent zones all have this snowy ruin look to them, and I think it keeps with the feel of that particular act. Overall I fought a few unique bosses, took part in an event that rewarded a resplendid chest, and earned two levels worth of experience clearing out the three areas.

While clearing the various areas, I managed to find Kanai’s Cube, and our old buddy Zoltan Kulle shows up to become the newest “vendor” in the base camps across all acts.

I can report that it doesn’t matter who you find Kanai’s cube with, once you have found it, it’s yours across all characters (probably separate for normal and hardcore but I did not confirm this). There was also a big change in the way Rifts work, in that you no longer need rift keys, so selling all of the ones on my characters netted me 100k, which was nice. I also confirmed that I have the transmogrifications from finishing season 3 with a level 70, so that is no longer a mystery. Anyway, Rifts are now accessible without the rift keys, but you do have to be level 70 to get into greater rifts, and there’s another stipulation as well, but I don’t remember exactly what it was.

Lastly, checking out Kanai’s cube in town, you can click on the little book symbol and you’ll be able to check out the various things it can do for you. It turns out that being able to remove the passives from legendaries to add to your characters isn’t just a simple task, they have added new crafting components to the horadric caches, which are those chests you get at the end of series of bounties. 1 of each type of crafting component (1 from each act) is required along with some death’s breath and the item you want to remove the passive from. There are loads of other functions as well, but each requires some old and some new crafting components, but seems to be pretty fair. I look forward to checking out more of these features in the coming season.

That’s all I have to report for now. Have you checked out any of the new features yourself yet?

---

Today’s run features Y.V. and a stupid melee death on world 3. Woooo!