Pappy13
Uber Member
Posts: 8655
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« Reply #16 on: April 11, 2014, 03:37:39 pm » |
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Now that I've had a chance to play RoS, I'd like to give you a little more info on the new game type, Adventure mode. In vanilla D3, the only way to play was campaign mode which meant following the quests in the order they are presented to you. You could pick any act and any quest as a starting point for the game once you had made it that far, but once you started the game if you wanted to change you had to exit the game, change the starting point and create a new game.
In RoS once you have completed the game once in campaign mode, Adventure mode becomes available. In Adventure mode all 5 acts and all waypoints in every act are available. In each act there will 5 "bounties" scattered around the act that can be collected. Bounties come in the form of killing a boss, killing a specific unique mob that has spawned or killing all the creatures within a certain area. The waypoint closest to each bounty will be displayed on the map so you know exactly where to go to complete each bounty. Once you have completed all 5 bounties for an act one of the NPC's in town will give you a cache and gold for completing the bounties. Inside the cache will be an assortment of items, gems, blood shards, crafting materials and rift keys. If you complete all 25 bounties an even larger cache is given.
Blood shards can be redeemed at another NPC in town for loot. The NPC will display a list of how many blood shards are required for each item type, but there are no stats on any of the items. If you choose to trade you will be given a random item of the type selected for the number of shards required. It's similar to gambling in D2. The idea here is that if you are looking for a specific item type like say maybe a ring, you can trade in your blood shards for rings, hoping that one of them will be an upgrade. My first couple of attempts at this were pretty horrendous, just blue items of no value whatsoever. There has been some complaints that chances of getting something decent are too low and Blizzard has said they will look at improving the odds.
Collecting 5 Rift keys allows you to open a rift at another NPC. Rifts are supposed to be a way to challenge yourself. When you open a rift a portal will take you to a randomized area stocked full of elites and unique mobs. There's also an assortment of just regular mobs, but it's the sheer number of elites and uniques mobs that make rifts interesting. When you first spawn inside a rift you may have one on your tail already. No sooner have you dispatched one before you run into another. If you run around a bit trying to stay alive you'll have 2 or 3 on your tail, so it's pretty easy for things to get pretty hectic right from the moment you step into a rift. Rifts have a sort of kill meter that fills up as you kill mobs. Once you fill the kill meter the final rift boss will spawn which will be a special version of one of the games bosses or uniques. These fights are quite a bit different from the boss fights in game which tend to have certain mechanics. Rift bosses are more just super powerful bosses with no special mechanics. Whittle them down slowly till they die to complete a rift. Completing rifts rewards you with another cache of goodies.
I really like Adventure mode. Since mobs now scale in difficulty with your toon you can play adventure mode from the beginning as long as you have completed campaign mode on one of your toons. I recently lost a hard core toon and started a new one and have been playing Adventure mode with that toon the whole time and it's been really fun leveling him up by doing bounties and rifts. It's fun being able to jump right into Act V areas with a brand new toon. Surprisingly playing this way seems to give you about the same amount of experience and loot that playing the campaign does so there doesn't really seem to be any reason to play one or the other, it's just your personal preference. It's nice because it gives the average player an easy way to just go kill bosses and collect bounties without having to start your game over. This also makes it much easier to team up with friends to play this way in fact it's spawned a new way to play called split farming. Essentially what it entails is each of you picking a different bounty and completing the bounty on your own. Once all bounties for an act are completed, all of you can complete the act and get your cache reward and then move onto the next act, rinse and repeat. The thing to remember here is that the game scales the mobs to how many are in game so with 4 people in game completing a bounty alone won't be easy. Once someone has 5 rift keys a rift can be opened for everyone for some teaming up. Adventure mode has really added a lot of playability to the game.
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