Well, the expansion has been out a couple of days and I thought I'd post my thoughts about it aswell, and maybe find a couple of bros to hang out with in tempest/warbands too.
The good:
-Lockstep: Pretty awesome, obviously. It does have its issues with Lightning Warp though, sometimes you dont see the cast animation or the camera/character dont move to your new position, but you actually moved so its basically a reverse-desync and you get used to it pretty quickly.
-Loot filter: Didn't use one up until I started mapping and the lootsplosions really started, but after finding one that suited my needs and configuring it a little more I have only one thing to say: Best feature ever
-Act 4: Overall a pretty enjoyable experience. The soundtrack and area-designs are pretty great, though I would've liked a little more lore-exposition especially once you get into the belly. Kaom/Daresso get quite the introduction compared to the 3 guardians and only Maligaro has a few simple lines during the bossfight (though it makes sense that Doedre has no voice, having had her tongue ripped out and everything). I'd also like to know why Doedre is the only one that got twisted into the form she has now, since all the others are atleast somewhat close to their original bodies. Bossfights are memorable and great, and still easy to learn. Unfortunately the tuning in normal was a little off, so learning some of the encounter usually killed you off, which sucks for HC. Make the encounters punish mistakes more in cruel/merciless if you must.
-Divination Cards/Gem Vendors: Its amazing that you don't have to trade for every little gem or important uniques anymore. Being able to farm a Tabula in ~4hours seems a little broken to me, but it's not an endgame item so who cares. Currently farming the new Ice-Staff, havent gotten a single card in 2hours so it's still quite grindy and RNG based.
-New gems/itembases/yadda yadda yadda: More choices for builds are always a good thing.
The bad:
-The tuning of certain bosses(mainly Daresso, Corrupted Piety and Malachai) seemed a little of on normal difficulty. What I particularly disliked was the fact that you had little exposition as to what resistances you may wanna end up using during some of the fights. Apart from Daressos Portal being "frosty" and him being Merveils husband you really had no idea he'd only be using frost-spells, or that you will want lightning-res for Shavronne.
-Thats pretty much it, can't think of anything else that actually annoyed me. Maybe a new master could've found its way into act 4 or something, but with everything we got already we can't be picky.
-Oh, forgot one. Fuck the desert map boss. Like seriously, fuck him, kill him, throw his corpse into the water (if you actually manage to kill him instead of just TPing out and opening a new map).
All in all the new content is simply improving on the entire experience. My first tempest character died to Kaom because I'm an idiot, the second one is lvl 80 and running maps quite alright. Levelled with flame totem (dont judge me) and respecced into a summoner at around 55. Once I got into the belly on cruel and got my hands on those stygian revenants the game has become quite easy. Killed Kaom/Daresso on merciless because I wanted access to merciless belly for better spectres, but apart from that there is absolutely no reason to even attempt killing piety and the others. Some cool quest reward for killing the guardians/malachai on merciless would've been a good thing. I will probably be starting to expand my map-pool in the upcoming days, a couple of people are complaining already how it's basically impossible to maintain a pool of 75+ even when running 120%+ IIQ 74s, but I'd like to see that for myself.
Tempests are fun, for the most part. Killed Daresso on cruel when the energizing tempest was up, that was a real pain in the ass. Way too risky, should've just waited for it to disappear. I'd like some unique items revolving around the tempests, their duration is pretty short and they dont really influence your playstyle. Only really annoying ones for me are crushing (playing with 0 armor and almost getting oneshot by the shockwave proc simply sucks) and the animating tempest sucks as a summoner because minions don't attack raging spirits/weapons.
Also playing a warbands character (currently lvl 65) but haven't played around the warbands themselves yet so there is little to say about it. At least warbands has league-specific uniques, so that's better already.
Also, while some may argue that flame-totem is broken, so are revenant-spectres, firestorm, cyclone, incinerate and a couple of other skills. There always have been a couple of spells that made the levelling experience easier and that you could respec out of later, which isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Why drain yourself levelling with 3 zombies and a handful of skeletons that deal no damage, when you can just flame-totem your way into cruel without spending a single point into fire-dmg and respeccing once you get the required links/gems/gear for whatever you want to play.
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