Personally, I have been a prosperous beneficiary of Loot 2.0. Life has not allowed me to thoroughly test the newest patch with higher legendary drop rates, but Kadala did improve from giving me 1 legendary per 1000 blood shards spent to two legendaries per 100 blood shards spent. Again, this is a small sample size, but the improvement in drops are notable.
In the first part of this post, I discussed my cleve/rend Barbarian. That’s actually my alternate character.
My first love, my main, is my Witch Doctor.
Here’s the artwork I’m talking about
Before Loot 2.0, I was using an AH-acquired 1000 damage ceremonial kinfe with large life on hit (LoH), leeching beasts, and rain of toads/slow burn/wall of zombies runes. It was good, but like all WDs, the build lacked oomph. Post-Loot 2.0, I traded in my toads for vampire bats/fetish sycophants passive like every other WD on the entire internet, though I took burning locusts despite the criticism of damage over time (DoT) skills only doing critical damage if the first strike does (because it will “tick” for crit for every second it lasts). I wanted to be unique. After some insane luck while running rifts, I picked up literally TWO legendary ceremonial knives within ten minutes of each other, and a Quetzalcoatl out of some random debris that I broke. The Homunculus mojo is from Kadala. Both items are build-changing.
Something else hotfixed into the game is that pets now do full crit damage instead of some half % that they used to do. Additionally, Blizzard buffed haunt to 4000% damage. These are META-SHIFTING changes even without the helm I found that reduces the time for DoTs to do full damage, so expect more WDs but not too many more; unfortunately, there are some who won’t play WD not (only) because the class is a “poor man’s wizard,” but because of its…ethnicity.
Sigh. I celebrate the WD because it is a character class that accommodates a gap of representation in gaming. Voodoo for the forces of good is juxtaposed with the holy crusaders. Speaking of crusaders, I have yet to play that class because as I was leveling my other characters and beating Act V, my clan was discussing how underpowered they were. So I waited for Blizzard to buff them and they did, so I’ll get to that soon.
Because I “role play,” I train up my characters to sometimes only use 2H weapons like I did with my cleave/rend Barb, “Pallas Athena.” In the case of my WD, I always use a ceremonial knife+mojo, though I have used a shield before. You’ll never (never say never? NEVER!!!) see me place an axe or sword on my monk, because monks don’t use these weapons in their attack animation, so I reuse to use non-class specific gear or gear that ruins the “theme” of the character I’m running.
That said, I found some weapons that many of my clanmates had been searching for, but I knew nothing about them because of my “role play rules.” I stuck them on my Wizard because I planned to resurrect my “light sorc.” I don’t necessarily the sword, but what else would I do? Everything is bound to account (BOA) now, so I can’t even trade.
Perhaps that is the next step for Blizzard: allow players the ability to trade. Then again, that would open the floodgates for all the riff-raff I discussed concerning DII. We’ll see what Blizzard does in the near future. It took them two years to fix DIII, but we finally have a product worth that is worth getting excited.
**Hit it me up on Twitter @AbsoluteZero0K**
