Here are the patch notes...it's a big one! Been waiting for this for awhile, a lot of really positive changes. Time to get even more overpowered than ever!

Link to patch notes:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/19859662/patch-230-now-live-8-25-2015

I tried to paste them into the topic but they are way too long and the formatting just breaks.

There's a cool rumor floating around that seasons will be added to consoles. Hope that's true.

Great! Downloading now. Can't wait to check out this cube.

Is there a Giant Bomb group for PC Diablo 3? Would love to play with people.

I believe there is. Search 'Giant Bomb' in the Community menu. Hasn't been very active, this patch might see more activity though.

I read about a lot of the new items and builds from the PTR and I'm pretty hyped. I haven't followed every D3 patch but its about time to go back.

Is this patch expected to hit consoles as well? Would love to tinker with the Horadric Kanai's Cube.

Hmmm, need an excuse to leave work early...

The new monk armor set doesnt look great but the abilities are so good.

My PS4 just finished downloading it.

The Realm of Trials has been removed from the game

Thank fucking god. This change alone makes me want to go back to the game again. Seriously having to do the friggin trials before every grift just got on my nerves eventually, to the point where I just didn't even want to bother with grifts anymore.

Keywardens now drop Infernal Machines instead of keys

Also yay! This is great for people like me who mostly roll solo as before trying to do that stuff was too much of a time sink.

Ah and that new not Horadric cube sounds cool.

I've recently moved to consoles and don't regret it, love D3 on PS4. Hope the patch hit soon.

Plus I want seasons on consoles please.

@tennmuerti: Oh wow, I may actually go for the Hellfire things with that change to the Keywardens. I never tried farming them but I've killed about 10~ and have only ever gotten one key.

Probably won't play much until the weekend but I'm gonna go update it now. Been looking forward to the cube.

Sadly I destroyed all my legendary items the day before they announced this patch. An entire stash full of legendary equipment I could now re purpose with the cube... well... season 4 is going to be a loot grind! I never suspected those legendary items would be useful again... I was so wrong.

@therealmoot: It's ok! The materials needed to use the Legendary Extraction everytime will require a lot of grinding, so by the time you have enough to extract ever possible legendary, high odds most of em will have dropped for you again!

This patch is rad. I fooled around for a bit, getting the cube and seeing some of the new stuff, and now am gonna save my energy to go strong Friday when the season starts. Gonna roll a seasonal Barb, maybe go Whirlwind build? Not sure what's good anymore, been forever since I played a Barb

I love this game and it keeps getting better. I'll be sure to join up with whatever GB clan that exists.

playing die-ablo till the day i die-ablo :(

I'm super excited for this patch

probably would require some beefing of infrastructure as all that stuff would have to be online only. but it'd be nice.

Maaaaan the PS4 got 2.3 before EU did :(

Really looking forward to this patch, probably gonna run another hardcore Barb when the season starts, hopefully the GBEU guild picks up, it's been a barren wasteland these past few months.

That came from a Blizzard employee this week saying that they should probably revisit the decision that seasons were going to be PC only. I don't think it was more than that.

@takayamasama: When I played the patch in the PTR (like a month ago) the drop rate for legendaries was CRAZY high. I'm talking like 50 or 60 on one bounty run, at least. I'm guessing that's been reduced? I assume they did that so people could get a feel for how extracting powers would work. I kind of hope it's the same, but maybe not, since it was a little overwhelming trying to figure out what to do with all of them.

The legendary drop rate on PTR is 2000% or something, it's for testing purposes. People can't test gear and builds if they don't have items to actually test.

@Mike: Okay, that's pretty much what I figured. It would still be cool if they upped the drop rate a little.

@billygoat117: Drops rates seem pretty nice nowadays. Blizzard put some good systems in place to increase drop rate, while also limiting the amount of time you go without a legendary.

Also early rumblings on the new difficulties seem to suggest a prettttttttttttty dumb (in a good way) drop rate, provided you are correctly geared to be there. It's a good thing that legendarys drop like they do also, since the re-roll legendary recipe takes 50 souls, among other things!

Getting specific legendaries is also easier than ever thanks to the cube. Since you can now upgrade rare items to a legendary, it's a way of ensuring you get at least a specific type instead of a whole class of weapon like from Kadala.

Prime example of this is for Witch Doctor spears - since there are only two spears on the legendary loot table for Witch Doctors, each time you upgrade a yellow spear, it's either going to be one or the other. Not to mention a 10% chance each time of the item being an Ancient.

Man, every time I see a new patch it seems like they're doing crazy shit to the game. Makes me want to start playing again except there are so many changes that it's like this impassible wall of relearning that I can't bring myself to even try and climb.

Like what the fuck is this Kadala shit? Sounds ridic.

@starvinggamer: That's actually probably the easiest to understand. She's a merchant who sells gear for blood shards, and the gear is random. Like, she sells a piece of gear, but the icon is just a question mark in her merchant interface thing. Buy it, and you get a random loot of that type. So you buy some pants, and they can roll either crappy blues, or legendary, etc.

Short version: Gambling for gear using Blood Shards.

And honestly, make a new character and run through the campaign. It'll get you used to the game, and then later on you can start looking into the end-game stuff. It's what I did when me and a friend got Reaper of Souls a bit ago.

This patch is another great step in improving the game again. Getting rid of trials and the ability to select grifts, gaining torment 7-10, and the new cube alone are all awesome additions. New sets and weapons for most classes seem pretty great too. Bounties have more meaning now of course for cube mats, and I swear gobby packs are way more common. Drops rates seem the same to me but I've only been farming T7 so far. XP for advancing higher paragons seems to be dependent on grifting for the most part still. Super anxious about the new seasonal stuff on pc come Friday...I think it starts then.

Any duders from GB who wanna add me:

Seasonal on pc: Achilles5(#1771) or Xbox One legit only: PWEID5

@starvinggamer: It's still Diablo. Play for 10 minutes and you'll have it mostly figured out then spend 30 more reading about how to max your dude when it becomes relevant.

@starvinggamer: Kadala is a gambling system. Super easy to understand. Spend a currency for a randomly rolled item. This patch is actually easier to understand imo. No more farming for rift fragments. Rifts are free to enter. No more doing trials to get into greater rifts either. You just pick from a drop down list now. Just jump in, flounder around in adventure mode for a bit and have fun. It's all self explanatory; its still just an arpg.

Edit: Also, if whoever was in my Goblin Portal farming group last night sees this, it was fun! Thanks for joining.

Man this game just keeps on giving and I just keep on going back to it.

Remember when everyone hated the shit out of this game and bitched and bemoaned its always online component? :)

I always liked the game quite a bit, but man what a turnaround. And it just gets better too. I really hope they have a 2nd expansion down the line.

@ripelivejam: People were angry because the game was bad when it was released. It wasn't because you had to be online, it was because the drop rates were awful and way too random so the AH was pretty much required. The hardest difficulty was also poorly tuned and unfun.

@hunkulese: yeah i was pretty clear on why people were angry, more commenting on how they turned the ship around. That stuff never bothered me much, though i didn't play it enough around launch for it to i suppose.

@hunkulese: Fact. Outside of day 0 server issues due to them getting slammed, the negative opinion on classic D3 didn't start for about a month, when a large amount of people got to Inferno and realized something wasn't right.

2 days till season 4! I'm pretty excited to get back in since I haven't touched the last season.

@sparky_buzzsaw: That would require blizzard cracking down on the rampant cheating on consoles. It's pretty much impossible to get into a matchmaking group where people don't have broken weapons that have 180,000 dps and 3 sockets and have like 500% increased attack speed. The season would just turn into who can cheat best unless something was done about that first.

There were folks who had issues with the game before that, including negative opinions on the always online and RMAH.

Anyways, yeah, it's pretty crazy how far this game's come. Fuckin RMAH was such a weird thing.

@strangestories: As I understand it, season mode characters are completely separate and can not interact with any characters made in any other mode. All they would have to do is make season mode always online like the PC (and characters stored server side) and it would basically be on the same playing field as the PC version.

Of course that would be a lot of extra work to implement that they might not find worth the effort.

@pweidman: I played for like an hour or so last night with a buddy and the first goblin we came across opened a portal to the Vault. We were absolutely flabbergasted. I've only ever gone there once myself, so that was a hell of a surprise. And we were just doing T6! Even then, I think you're right, goblins seemed much more frequent. I'm excited to dig in a little more tonight and try T7 or T8 and some greater rifts.

Really enjoying the patch, they must be throwing in a lot more of the Vault goblins because I'd only ever had one and since the patch dropped I've had 2 more, it also feels nice to push out some more Grift levels after hitting the ceiling at level 48.

Now announce an expansion at Blizzcon please!

I'm noticing a lot more goblins in general. Part of me is wondering if it's an undocumented change where the frequency of goblins scales with Torment level, because playing on T10 I see them all the time now.

Another undocumented change from late PTR 2.3 is that elites seem much more likely to drop two Death's Breaths instead of one on Torment X. It's not necessarily every time, but it's quite often. Pretty handy for farming up Death's Breath with all of the new Cube recipes requiring it.

Right now where I'm at with my Witch Doctor on non-seasonal, Torment 8 or 9 is my sweet spot where I can tear through it at about 5 minutes per rift. Beyond that at T10 things take a little longer to die, and I start getting one-shotted by tougher elites and certain Rift Guardians, especially Perdition. Made it up to GR 49 with my current gear, but I think with a few new specific pieces I'm looking for I could push my current build up to GR 55+.

Yay I spent 10 hours getting myself to level 70 for hardcore season and the very first level 70 rift I run I get to the boss and all of bnet crashes and RIP my crusader. What a waste of a Saturday. And I was so pumped to play this season 2 after not playing season 3. Awesome.

@cjduke: Aw man I'm so sorry to hear that. Ever since the really bad network crashes of Vanilla D3, where thousands of hardcore characters screamed out and were suddenly silenced, I can't do hardcore mode. The risk of their servers messing up, which still happens time to time, is a risk I'm not willing to take anymore, and one that doesn't make hardcore better.

I loved hardcore in D2, the thrill of losing it all is amazing, but losing it all because blizzard's stuff went down for any amount of time...that's just not cool.

@takayamasama: Yeah, unfortunately ever since I started playing hardcore I can't go back to softcore. I don't know why it just doesn't feel the same. It's such a gamble to play it, somehow I got my Monk all the way through season 2 without dying. No such luck this season.

@allthatbacon: Que?

@cjduke: totally agree that the normal game is duller in comparison. Even with my minor time in Hardcore, it's still such a thrill and I'm always tempted to try it. Maybe I will give it a very careful shot later this season, after I get bored of my WW Barb. The Kanai cube passives just add another layer of survive-ability, so might be easier to stay alive..provided one plays smart.

@takayamasama: It's really interesting hearing you talk about hardcore hero's. I have never touched purely because that loss sounds way too great. I love permadeath in a lot of games, but I just can't imagine building a hero in D3 only to have them die due to a stupid mistake.

@ssully: I have limited experience, so someone else could probably word something more elaborately, but when I played hardcore (a buddy who only ever plays hardcore wanted to play together) it was a thrill unlike most things found in other games. Maybe the first time somebody plays Darksouls without reading about it is a close feeling.

It's dangerous at every corner, you have to have a ton of foresight (knowing what champion affix's will murder you, knowing when to retreat and farm easier stuff/better gear, knowing what skills increase survive-ability while also letting you still kill stuff and progress). And when we eventually reached 70, oh man it was a HUGE feeling of accomplishment. I never did much stuff deep after 70 on the hardcore Demon Hunter, I think T1 was all it could clear, but I still felt satisfied and super impressed with myself.

I think I may give it a shot for real this season, after all this talking about it. I have no idea what class is best suited for Solo Hardcore play (I mainly play D3 solo due to having a newborn and having to step away from the computer at random times for random lengths), so I'll have to do some research, but being able to say I got a seasonal 70 hardcore character, and maybe trying some deeper endgame stuff on it, seems like a heck of a badge of honor. I know there is already a Lvl 70, Paragon 40 guy in my clan, and every time I see him play I'm impressed.

Patch is great, i''v played a lot of the game before this patch, but this is the first time i feel really hooked. I played a ton this weekend and can see myself really pushing my paragon this season. Also, i really hope there's a expansion in the works, would be a shame to stop it now.