Hey guys,

Went onto battle net and saw that my account had access to the Diablo 3 PTR so downloaded the client and was able to start playing all of the Reaper of Souls build except for the new crusader class and the new "act 5 chapter". Thought i post some first impressions of things i noticed were different from the current D3 build.

First off, the game really puts off the vibe they're trying to bring back in D2 player who weren't impressed with D3. To that effect, some interesting changes have been made.

• As Blizzard said, loot is doled out in a much more generous manner. Even as someone who tried to start a new character with their Monster Power system in the current build cranked all the way up to 10 to try to maximize my magic find, i still have never seen as much useful loot out of D3. i played up to level 10, and i was already getting regular yellow loot in act 1 before the Skeleton King.
• Even better, most of this loot pretained to my current class or was better than what i was currently using.
• White loot is now useful for crafting material
• Other crafting materials drop as loot items now. (essences, tears, etc)
• Health potions now heal a percentage of a player's health rather than a set number of HP. Default potion heals 60% and has a 30 second cool down.
• Area maps are contiguous with other areas, even ones separated by loadscreens. Helps with continuity of the world i think.
• There's an overworld map that appears at the fast travel points now. Looks nice, i'm a map nerd.
• in your inventory/character panel, there are now values for Damage, Toughness (an aggregate score of dodge, health, and armor/resist factors) , as well as a healing score rather than just the current Damage and Armor numbers.
• UI font looks less Arial like and more fitting of the game.
• Gamma and color pallete look adjusted to fit a more gloomy tone a la Diablo 2.
• There is an Item icon feature that you can enable that will place a colored circle with the class of item that has dropped (ax, sword, chest, gloves, pants, etc)
• The game seems much more inclined toward throwing larger numbers of enemies and faster moving ones at you this time.
• New random events - one i encountered was a kill as many waves of enemies that spawn near a chest as you can before time runs out with a tiered reward given depending on how well you do.
• Found a lore item that discussed the new Crusader Class
• The new paragon system (which i assume is still endgame only) has 4 classes (core, offense, defense, utitlity) each of which have 4 abilities for you to assign points into. These points can range from simple movement speed to health regen, to critical hit damage or chance, etc. I'll play more and learn more about this later hopefully.
• Still server based as far as gameplay is concerned. Hit a lag spike during gameplay and my character attacks suddently were delayed by a second or two. it resolved quickly but that's still going to be a thing even with the RMAA gone.

Edited 12/14

played some more this morning, it looks like Blizzard is stress testing the PTR that i've been playing which will go live for Reaper of Souls and closed beta for reaper of souls this weekend. Some server queues logging into PTR but i did notice more stuff that i forgot to mention above.

• In addition to health orbs, there are now player buffing orbs which activate for 2 minutes at a time which act as damage flourishes for normal attacks, I.E. my wizard's magic missle has a chance to take on a chain lightning effect. Health orbs collected while this buff is active has the chance to stack and increase the effectiveness. Not world changing but cool.
• Normal difficulty elite mobs now stack attributes like they used to do in higher difficulty playthroughs.
• I imported my existing characters into PTR. my level 10 wizard i started a few weeks ago within about 10 minutes of playing had already gotten several item drops that were better than anything craftable with my existing fully leveled blacksmith. New loot system appears to be doing a good job.
• Load times seem much quicker
• Was able to play with the paragon system using my level 60 monk paragon 11. Was able to assign 11 stat points to all my characters paragon skills as soon as i started. The additional points are tied to you continuing to level you highest level character up the paragon ranks. Buffs are not earth shattering but are welcome. Reminds me of the Borderlands 2 badass rank system a bit.
• I liked Diablo 3 already but was frustrated by the frugal loot drops, and a little bored with the similarities of dungeons on subsequent playthroughs. A lot of what i see here does a good job to help this and makes the game more fun.
• The pacing of the combat as far as numbers of the mob and speed of enemies now feels more in line with something like Torchlight 2 than the initial build of diablo 3.
• As @ares42 mentioned below, they did restructure some skills and change the order in which runes unlock and outright change the way some passive skill function.

Pretty much all welcome changes. Game plays at a much faster pace than before, you feel like badass mowing down hordes of enemies and are being great loot for your "trouble". Can't wait for reaper of souls to be here. It's a must buy for next year for me.

If you have any questions that i didn't mention or if you want me to check something out, ask below. I'll update this as i notice stuff or get a better grasp on the new content.