Nearly all of it is just reskinning and renaming, and yes, I know it’s free and you’re never allowed to complain about anything free, but man, it’s just not great. It’s a tribute to a great old game within a great new game, but it’s a half-hearted one at best. Many have complained that this was a limited time only event as it’s departing after January, but it turns out that doesn’t really matter because there’s very little reason to spend more than an hour or two with it. But playing through at level 1 with the old classes is boring, and with your existing characters it’s probably too easy and there’s not even anything like Blood Shards or gem upgrades for you at the end like in a normal rift. I think it would have been better to launch this alongside the Necromancer, so you could play through the old content and get those early levels out of the way experimenting with a new class, at the very least. This gives you a few pets, portraits, transmorgs and an outrageously terrible gem. Hardcore Diablo 3 players want new activities that allow them to grow their character, even a tiny bit. Diablo 1 and 2 purists probably don’t like D3 anyway and this won’t change their mind. I know a lot more work went into it than that, but despite that, it doesn’t feel that way.Īnd who is this for? New players are better off playing the normal game from the start. What this feels like to me is that Blizzard suddenly remembered it was Diablo 3’s 20th anniversary like two weeks before it happened and got Scott and Dave from the third floor to bust out a reskin and rename a bunch of crap over a long weekend. The ultimate reward, Diablo’s gem, is an item that periodically stuns you in order to do damage to enemies which seems like some sort of bad practical joke. It really does seem like the biggest prizes of this entire event are the Cleaver transmorg and a mini Butcher you get as a pet if you beat the Labyrinth from level 1. In my Torment X run, I found three legendaries in 16 levels, and they were just generic ones from D3. There are one or two exceptions like the Butcher’s Cleaver and Wirt’s Leg, the only legendary, but that’s really it. Instead, the Diablo 1 items that do appear are garbage blues that use existing skins from D3 items when you wear them, even if the internal art is pulled from D1. Like, it prevents you from blowing through it (as I did on Torment X with my 1.7M DPS Demon Hunter in about twelve minutes), but that’s about it.Ī cool implementation of this concept might have been that you want to farm this Labyrinth for a bunch of new legendary items pulled from Diablo 1. The idea of a “fresh start” for this Diablo 1 content sounds good in theory, but I really don’t think it added much to it given that you just end with a level 20-25 character decked out in terrible gear.
Yes, I could have upped the difficultly more but I didn’t feel like making it even more of a slog, because it’s already sort of lame to only have like 8 of a zillion skills unlocked, and maybe 1 out of 5 runes if you’re lucky. I beat the first playthrough with my fresh Barbarian on Normal in about an hour. But with that said, I don’t understand why it was designed the way it was, nor what the purpose is other than a few fleeting hits of nostalgia. I will say up front that I respect the amount of work whatever’s left of the Diablo team put into this event.
After playing through the new area in full twice, once with a level 1 character as recommended, once with my godlike, min-maxed Demon Hunter, I still just…don’t really get it, as I said yesterday.