7 reasons to play Diablo III again

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls is just around the corner, and Blizzard recently released a new patch in preparation for it.

If you’re the sort who has a lot of gamer friends on your social networks, you may have noticed rapturous status updates celebrating the changes this patch has wrought on the game. And you may be wondering: is this patch really all that awesome? After all, Diablo III was quite the disappointment to the casual player, and being one myself, I’ve had little to no incentive to head back to the game after I gave it up about three months after launch.

The answer, of course, is yes. Here are seven reasons why you should pick Diablo III back up again.

1. The increased droprate

Remember when you couldn’t get a blue item to save your life? They now drop in bucketloads. In fact, I pick blues up more than I pick up yellow (rare) items. The increase in good item drops makes the game ever so much more rewarding, and you even have a chance of scoring some good loot from random corpses. If that doesn’t make you want to endlessly run through the ramparts of Bastion’s Keep, turning over demon corpses and smashing barrels, I don’t know what else will.

2. The new difficulties

Where you previously had the standard Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties, you now have Normal, Expert, Hard, Master, and Torment, all six levels of the latter. Each difficulty comes with a short blurb describing how much of a bonus you get if you choose to run a game in it, with Torment being the best mode for grinding. A word of warning, though. If you were formerly well-geared for Inferno, you’ve still got nothing on Torment VI. Be afraid, be very afraid.

3. The buffed items

While I don’t own enough legendary items to tell you how much they’ve been buffed, I can tell you that all the gear I used to own was easily outclassed and replaced by a bunch of random drops I got running Act I in Hard difficulty. The increased droprate certainly helps with an upgrade in your gear, but so does the gear’s buffs. It was ridiculous how my DPS doubled itself in a matter of minutes, and if I had to make a comparison, it was like how it felt when I first entered the Outlands from Azeroth, and had all my gorgeous gear replaced with greens that were three times as strong.