Top 10 Things Returning Diablo Players Should Know When Coming Back To The Console Version
Welcome back Nerds!
It's been a long week, my day(night) job is taking a lot out of me. But I wanted to give a "Top Ten" article this week, and it's fitting that I would make it about the game I cannot seem to put down, even if I have already "Completed" it according to my trophy list.
Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition.
If you have played it and quit for a while, or perhaps left to play the game on the superior PC version. Or have never touched the series, let me start by explaining very briefly what this game is. Diablo is an ARPG (Action Role Playing Game) with a largely gothic setting. You'll kill millions of demons and collect thousands of pieces of gear to best craft your character and tailor to their skills, create builds so that you can venture out and slaughter millions of more minions from hell. So on, and so fourth. Simply put, it's fucking awesome.
I played quite a bit of Diablo in my life. Losing my childhood to Diablo 2, losing my mind when I got into the beta for Diablo 3, and spending many days of my life playing Diablo 3 on PS3/PS4 when it was released. If anyone has played on the consoles, you should be very pleased with my first fact..
1. No More Cheaters
I should elaborate. Before the recent patch that introduced a feature that we will talk about later on the list, it was simple for people to go into the game and hack themselves a weapon and some gems that would completely destroy the game. All one would have to do was to equip this gear, walk into a room and watch the lightning bolts pour out of your body instantly killing every single demon in the room. Yes, Once I received my Platinum trophy I fell victim to this. I didn't hack my own weapon. No, I am far too dumb for that. A random person popped into my game, dropped all of this hacked gear and left. Curiosity got the better of me and I had to try it, and it was fun! Until it wasn't. The game became boring. What was I grinding for if I already had unbeatable gear? You'll be glad to know you won't have to worry about this because of the feature Blizzard finally patched into consoles..
2. Seasons Have Arrived
Yes, Seasons! This was the reason I was waiting to come back to the game. And goddamn did it deliver. I haven't been able to put the game down since the patch came out. Which has been effecting my progress towards writing other reviews and I'm not even sorry!
Due to this mode always needing to be online people can no longer hack the insane weapons and gems into the game. And with the introduction of Leaderboards as well, I can feel my progression when I compare myself to friends and other players.
Essentially if you have not played the PC version and experienced Seasons for yourself. It is basically a fresh start. You create a brand new character and nothing from your main account will carry over. No gold, gear, paragon levels, nothing. You point is you build this character from the ground up at the same time everyone else is and you earn special exclusive Seasonal rewards for competing. Once you reach level 70 you will automatically receive two cosmetic transmogrification pieces. However, that is just the start of your seasonal journey. By completing the challenges you will earn a free complete set for whichever class you choose to play. You can only earn one free one per season, so choose wisely. Every time you finish a chapter of challenges (There are four chapters), you will earn two pieces of your set, equalling out to a full 6 piece set.
Once this is complete you will be ready to start attacking the meta game. Complete Greater Rifts and grind your way up those leaderboards and start powering up that Paragon Level while mastering your build.
Once the season is over, your character will be transferred to your regular account where everything you have accumulated will merge with the rest of your characters. And you will be ready to start a new Season!
3. Greater Rifts
Depending on when you last played, this might no be strange to you. But for those who have no sweet clue what I'm mentioning, here you go.
A rift is a portal to a randomly generated dungeon filled with demons to kills. You will have a bar that needs to be filled up located on the left side of your HUD. You kill the demons and bar will fill up, and once the bar us completely full a Rift Guardian will appear. This is essentially a much more challenging boss than anything you have faced inside the rift you are currently in. Once the you have defeated the Rift Guardian you can collect your loot, head back into town and speak to Orek to obtain a ton of gold and experience
A Greater Rift on the other hand is a little more stressful. Same concept as the regular rift with a few changes. First change, none of the enemies drop loot. Only the Rift Guardian does. Making your quest to the end of the rift that much more important. If that isn't enough, point number two, you have a time limit to complete the rift. It's a fairly generous time limit, 15 minutes. However, the faster you complete the rift the better the rewards. And that's why you're playing the game, so once you're good enough do your best to speed run it.
Third, the difficulty for Greater Rifts is unlimited. In the standard game, whether you are playing campaign or Adventure Mode, the absolute current max difficulty is called "Torment XIII". You basically have Normal, Hard, Expert, Master, then Torment I through XIII. Torment XIII is pretty hard and will take you plenty of grinding for the best gear to even step foot outside New Tristram. Only the dedicated players can make it to Torment XIII.
A Greater Rift and go far, far beyond that difficulty making Torment XIII feel like you're playing a traditional Call of Duty game at the absolute lowest difficulty setting. This is where the meta lies. The quest to show everyone in the leaderboards what level of Greater Rift you have completed Solo.
To give a quick example. The highest I have completed so far in Season 10 solo, is Greater Rift level 55. That is equal to playing on Torment XII difficulty. Torment XIII is equal to Greater Rift level 60. By the end of the season, you will see players completing GR level 110 and above. Which is absolutely fucking ridiculous... And I will make it there someday... Once you complete the GR, the Guardian you killed will drop a metric fuck-ton of loot and a Gem. Which bring us to...
4. Gems
Like I just mentioned, you obtain these from Greater Rift Guardians. They are to be used like Jewels, socketed into your Rings, Amulets and sometimes Weapons. The best and most intriguing part about gems is that they can be levelled up. When you obtain one of these gems, you will see an NPC in place of the Guardian you just smacked down, this NPC will give you the chance to upgrade a gem three times. In the early levels (1-25) the upgrade will never fail. After you rank a gem up to level 25, if you are not pushing yourself to do higher rifts the gem upgrade has a chance to fail. Always a reason to keep pushing yourself.
Each gem has a unique skill to help you in in fights. Whether it is healing you, slowing the enemy or throwing out even more damage in Hells face. These skills will become more powerful as you level the gem up. once the gem reaches level 25, the secondary skill on the gem will unlock making it more valuable. This is likely a rabbit hole of grinding you will not come out of.
5. Kanai's Cube
If anyone played Diablo 2, you should know the basics of this one. If not, in simple terms, you are using crafting materials to create (hopefully) powerful equipment. And just life Diablo 2, it's pretty overwhelming your first time obtaining this item.
You can place a rare item in the cube and upgrade it to a Legendary item. You can convert a set piece you have two of for a chance at obtaining a piece that you need to complete that set. Most importantly, you can extract the magic properties of your legendary items and keep them as a passive bonus on your character without having to equip said item. You may do this for one of the following: A Weapon, Armour Piece, Jewelry.
This completely blows open the amount of customization in builds and an endless amount of experimenting. Once I learned how to manipulate the cube this way, it became an endless carrot at the end of a stick.
6. Character Armoury
This one is fairly simple. So simply in fact it is surprising that it took so long to add. Yet, it is a wonderful welcome. You can finally save a build to your armoury and switch to it by simply going back into town, selecting the armoury, and then the build you want. You no longer need to carry all the gear you need for different builds around with you, or searching through your stash to get all the right equipment out. It's something that was sorely needed, and I never knew it until I had it.
7. The Puzzle Ring
Simple. It's a legendary ring you can obtain by running bounties or rifts. It has a semi cool perk of summoning a treasure goblin by your side to collect loot. Whatever.
Except not "Whatever". Throw this bitch into your Kanai's Cube and travel to the Treasure Goblins lair where there are plenty of goblins to kill and gold to collect (You will likely never run into a shortage of gold after finishing this quick dungeon). Confront the Giant goblin at the end, collect your legendary loot and mutilate the goblins body by slamming him into a giant treasure chest over and over again. Seriously, it's pretty fucked up.
8. Ancient Legendaries / Primal Ancient Legendaries
For equipment you have Common (White), Uncommon (Blue), Rare (Yellow), Legendary (Orange) and Set Pieces (Green).
That would appear to be it until relatively recently. There is even a small chance you have gotten one of these items without noticing. These are amplified legendary equipment meant for the hardcore to grind for. An Ancient Legendary sword will be roughly 30 percent higher quality than its Legendary counterpart. The same goes for the newly introduced Primal Ancient items. The difference here being that you won't be able to find any Primal Ancients until you have cleared a Greater Rift level 70 or higher solo. Refer back to number three to find out how fucking hard that might become. It's all about the grind!
Cosmetically there are no visual difference between the a Legendary and an Ancient Legendary. The only way to tell the difference besides the higher stats is the golden boarder surrounding the item and its description in your inventory. Some wont care too much about this feature. Others like myself will stay hungry to max out all of my equipment.
9. The Last of Us Rift
This one isn't a new addition to the game, it's been there since the initial release on PS3. However if you are coming the playstation version for the first time, or maybe you never noticed/got lucky enough to come across this easter egg before, there is a change upon entering a Rift or Greater Rift that it will be populated by Clickers and Bloaters from the extremely popular video game The Last of Us. An exclusive little easter egg only on Playstation (This, plus a Shadow of the Colossus armour skin). Also, those bloaters are bastards, bring poison resist because you wont be smiling and enjoying this easter egg, rather you will be cursing Neil Druckman for thinking up these mushroom people.
10. The Red Portal
Blizzard has lied to you. There is in fact, a Cow Level. Now go fourth a slay some Hell Bovines!
It's been a long week, my day(night) job is taking a lot out of me. But I wanted to give a "Top Ten" article this week, and it's fitting that I would make it about the game I cannot seem to put down, even if I have already "Completed" it according to my trophy list.
Diablo 3: Ultimate Evil Edition.
If you have played it and quit for a while, or perhaps left to play the game on the superior PC version. Or have never touched the series, let me start by explaining very briefly what this game is. Diablo is an ARPG (Action Role Playing Game) with a largely gothic setting. You'll kill millions of demons and collect thousands of pieces of gear to best craft your character and tailor to their skills, create builds so that you can venture out and slaughter millions of more minions from hell. So on, and so fourth. Simply put, it's fucking awesome.
I played quite a bit of Diablo in my life. Losing my childhood to Diablo 2, losing my mind when I got into the beta for Diablo 3, and spending many days of my life playing Diablo 3 on PS3/PS4 when it was released. If anyone has played on the consoles, you should be very pleased with my first fact..
1. No More Cheaters
I should elaborate. Before the recent patch that introduced a feature that we will talk about later on the list, it was simple for people to go into the game and hack themselves a weapon and some gems that would completely destroy the game. All one would have to do was to equip this gear, walk into a room and watch the lightning bolts pour out of your body instantly killing every single demon in the room. Yes, Once I received my Platinum trophy I fell victim to this. I didn't hack my own weapon. No, I am far too dumb for that. A random person popped into my game, dropped all of this hacked gear and left. Curiosity got the better of me and I had to try it, and it was fun! Until it wasn't. The game became boring. What was I grinding for if I already had unbeatable gear? You'll be glad to know you won't have to worry about this because of the feature Blizzard finally patched into consoles..
 |
| This is fun! |
 |
| And... Now it's not |
2. Seasons Have Arrived
Yes, Seasons! This was the reason I was waiting to come back to the game. And goddamn did it deliver. I haven't been able to put the game down since the patch came out. Which has been effecting my progress towards writing other reviews and I'm not even sorry!
Due to this mode always needing to be online people can no longer hack the insane weapons and gems into the game. And with the introduction of Leaderboards as well, I can feel my progression when I compare myself to friends and other players.
Essentially if you have not played the PC version and experienced Seasons for yourself. It is basically a fresh start. You create a brand new character and nothing from your main account will carry over. No gold, gear, paragon levels, nothing. You point is you build this character from the ground up at the same time everyone else is and you earn special exclusive Seasonal rewards for competing. Once you reach level 70 you will automatically receive two cosmetic transmogrification pieces. However, that is just the start of your seasonal journey. By completing the challenges you will earn a free complete set for whichever class you choose to play. You can only earn one free one per season, so choose wisely. Every time you finish a chapter of challenges (There are four chapters), you will earn two pieces of your set, equalling out to a full 6 piece set.
Once this is complete you will be ready to start attacking the meta game. Complete Greater Rifts and grind your way up those leaderboards and start powering up that Paragon Level while mastering your build.
Once the season is over, your character will be transferred to your regular account where everything you have accumulated will merge with the rest of your characters. And you will be ready to start a new Season!
 |
| My life is now yours |
3. Greater Rifts
Depending on when you last played, this might no be strange to you. But for those who have no sweet clue what I'm mentioning, here you go.
A rift is a portal to a randomly generated dungeon filled with demons to kills. You will have a bar that needs to be filled up located on the left side of your HUD. You kill the demons and bar will fill up, and once the bar us completely full a Rift Guardian will appear. This is essentially a much more challenging boss than anything you have faced inside the rift you are currently in. Once the you have defeated the Rift Guardian you can collect your loot, head back into town and speak to Orek to obtain a ton of gold and experience
A Greater Rift on the other hand is a little more stressful. Same concept as the regular rift with a few changes. First change, none of the enemies drop loot. Only the Rift Guardian does. Making your quest to the end of the rift that much more important. If that isn't enough, point number two, you have a time limit to complete the rift. It's a fairly generous time limit, 15 minutes. However, the faster you complete the rift the better the rewards. And that's why you're playing the game, so once you're good enough do your best to speed run it.
Third, the difficulty for Greater Rifts is unlimited. In the standard game, whether you are playing campaign or Adventure Mode, the absolute current max difficulty is called "Torment XIII". You basically have Normal, Hard, Expert, Master, then Torment I through XIII. Torment XIII is pretty hard and will take you plenty of grinding for the best gear to even step foot outside New Tristram. Only the dedicated players can make it to Torment XIII.
A Greater Rift and go far, far beyond that difficulty making Torment XIII feel like you're playing a traditional Call of Duty game at the absolute lowest difficulty setting. This is where the meta lies. The quest to show everyone in the leaderboards what level of Greater Rift you have completed Solo.
To give a quick example. The highest I have completed so far in Season 10 solo, is Greater Rift level 55. That is equal to playing on Torment XII difficulty. Torment XIII is equal to Greater Rift level 60. By the end of the season, you will see players completing GR level 110 and above. Which is absolutely fucking ridiculous... And I will make it there someday... Once you complete the GR, the Guardian you killed will drop a metric fuck-ton of loot and a Gem. Which bring us to...
 |
| First option is regular, everything below is Greater |
4. Gems
Like I just mentioned, you obtain these from Greater Rift Guardians. They are to be used like Jewels, socketed into your Rings, Amulets and sometimes Weapons. The best and most intriguing part about gems is that they can be levelled up. When you obtain one of these gems, you will see an NPC in place of the Guardian you just smacked down, this NPC will give you the chance to upgrade a gem three times. In the early levels (1-25) the upgrade will never fail. After you rank a gem up to level 25, if you are not pushing yourself to do higher rifts the gem upgrade has a chance to fail. Always a reason to keep pushing yourself.
Each gem has a unique skill to help you in in fights. Whether it is healing you, slowing the enemy or throwing out even more damage in Hells face. These skills will become more powerful as you level the gem up. once the gem reaches level 25, the secondary skill on the gem will unlock making it more valuable. This is likely a rabbit hole of grinding you will not come out of.
 |
| Every Gem tells you what its level 25 skill is |
5. Kanai's Cube
If anyone played Diablo 2, you should know the basics of this one. If not, in simple terms, you are using crafting materials to create (hopefully) powerful equipment. And just life Diablo 2, it's pretty overwhelming your first time obtaining this item.
You can place a rare item in the cube and upgrade it to a Legendary item. You can convert a set piece you have two of for a chance at obtaining a piece that you need to complete that set. Most importantly, you can extract the magic properties of your legendary items and keep them as a passive bonus on your character without having to equip said item. You may do this for one of the following: A Weapon, Armour Piece, Jewelry.
This completely blows open the amount of customization in builds and an endless amount of experimenting. Once I learned how to manipulate the cube this way, it became an endless carrot at the end of a stick.
 |
| These are the passives I have chosen |
 |
| All the Recipes for the cube |
6. Character Armoury
This one is fairly simple. So simply in fact it is surprising that it took so long to add. Yet, it is a wonderful welcome. You can finally save a build to your armoury and switch to it by simply going back into town, selecting the armoury, and then the build you want. You no longer need to carry all the gear you need for different builds around with you, or searching through your stash to get all the right equipment out. It's something that was sorely needed, and I never knew it until I had it.
 |
| You can save five loadouts |
7. The Puzzle Ring
Simple. It's a legendary ring you can obtain by running bounties or rifts. It has a semi cool perk of summoning a treasure goblin by your side to collect loot. Whatever.
Except not "Whatever". Throw this bitch into your Kanai's Cube and travel to the Treasure Goblins lair where there are plenty of goblins to kill and gold to collect (You will likely never run into a shortage of gold after finishing this quick dungeon). Confront the Giant goblin at the end, collect your legendary loot and mutilate the goblins body by slamming him into a giant treasure chest over and over again. Seriously, it's pretty fucked up.
8. Ancient Legendaries / Primal Ancient Legendaries
For equipment you have Common (White), Uncommon (Blue), Rare (Yellow), Legendary (Orange) and Set Pieces (Green).
That would appear to be it until relatively recently. There is even a small chance you have gotten one of these items without noticing. These are amplified legendary equipment meant for the hardcore to grind for. An Ancient Legendary sword will be roughly 30 percent higher quality than its Legendary counterpart. The same goes for the newly introduced Primal Ancient items. The difference here being that you won't be able to find any Primal Ancients until you have cleared a Greater Rift level 70 or higher solo. Refer back to number three to find out how fucking hard that might become. It's all about the grind!
Cosmetically there are no visual difference between the a Legendary and an Ancient Legendary. The only way to tell the difference besides the higher stats is the golden boarder surrounding the item and its description in your inventory. Some wont care too much about this feature. Others like myself will stay hungry to max out all of my equipment.
 |
| Sexy gold trim |
9. The Last of Us Rift
This one isn't a new addition to the game, it's been there since the initial release on PS3. However if you are coming the playstation version for the first time, or maybe you never noticed/got lucky enough to come across this easter egg before, there is a change upon entering a Rift or Greater Rift that it will be populated by Clickers and Bloaters from the extremely popular video game The Last of Us. An exclusive little easter egg only on Playstation (This, plus a Shadow of the Colossus armour skin). Also, those bloaters are bastards, bring poison resist because you wont be smiling and enjoying this easter egg, rather you will be cursing Neil Druckman for thinking up these mushroom people.
10. The Red Portal
Blizzard has lied to you. There is in fact, a Cow Level. Now go fourth a slay some Hell Bovines!
 |
| Moo. Moo moo moo |
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