|
Something New
Of course, there's plenty of new experiences to be had in Lord of Destruction. Let's go into the goodies first.
For starters, as you'd guess, there are plenty of new modifiers available for armor and weapons, giving an even larger array of potential goods to be found out on the plains. Some new modifiers allow armor and weapons a roll chance to cast a spell upon striking, while others are now "ethereal", meaning that they've got enhanced properties, but due to their mystical origins, cannot be repaired by a blacksmith.
Playing back to weapons from the original Diablo, some items are now enhanced with magical abilities, giving the bearer access to a fixed number of spell casts, regardless of job class. To restore charges, simply have the item repaired by a blacksmith. An odd way to restore magical properties. I think it would've made more sense to make the town magician able to recharge these items, but I digress.
Newer unique and set items are also available to the player. On top of those, set items now gain a small group stat increase, in case you have some, but not all of the items you need. As if that weren't enough, you can now earn Elite Items in the advanced difficulties, which have properties similar to the exceptional items, but have much better stats and abilities. You can also now find socketable unique and exceptional items, which is good, since now you'll need those sockets more than ever to house your growing collection of gems, jewels, and runes.
Jewels are insertable items that offer similar properties to a magical item once inserted in a socketed item. Runes are also insertable, which alone offer respectable bonuses. The real power in runes comes when they're put together in special combinations, offering enhanced power beyond their original strengths.
Their tiger-style kung fu is strong, but our dragon-style will defeat it! |
|
For even more enhanced stat boosts, you can find and use charms. Charms are items just like amulets and rings, but they only need to be kept in your inventory for you to earn their bonuses, so you even keep them if you die. Unfortunately, they frequently offer only small bonuses, and often take up more room than they are worth. The largest size charm, the Grand Charm, takes up three inventory slots, but offers no advantage to the small charms other than the annoyance of a lot of room being taken up.
Lord of Destruction also adds new weapon classes, many of which are designed to be useable only by one job class, as opposed to Diablo II, where anyone could use weapons, but some would have class-specific skills. Some of the items are quite unique, like the animal skin helms for the Druid and the severed heads for the Necromancer. Unfortunately, some of the other weapon classes seem like they were just made off the cuff. The new helmet and shield classes have new artwork for them, but others seem less thought out and implemented, like some of the throwing weapons and pole arms.
One strange "problem", if you will - I noticed that Lord of Destruction suffers a similar item allocation problem that Hellfire did. Basically, in adding the new weapon and armor classes, they tend to drown out the drop rate on original Diablo II items. To prove my point, by the end of Act I with the Druid, I had seven charms, but I had only found two rings and two amulets, and very few weapons that were of any value. I noticed this happening in Act V as well. The new items are nice to have, but the balance, in my opinion, could have been improved upon.
>> Something Borrowed
|
