I played some of the 2.0 patchthat everyone is raving about. About 10-12 hours I think. I can see why people are so excited, with how loot is "smart", and how you have a good chance of getting upgrades through drops instead of having to resort to the AH. That was definitely one of the biggest issues in the game for me, that you could be 5-stack NV farming elite packs for hours and not get any upgrades or anything even good to sell in the AH. So I like that. Having legendaries drop with a pity timer is pretty exciting too although I think the novelty wore off once I realized that 80% of them were sidegrades or downgrades to my gear.
I still have two main issues with the game:
First, maps are still not random enough. This was a hallmark of D1 and D2 and every other ARPG I can think of. I'm sure you are all familiar with how most maps are static save for the placement of landmarks/objectives. E.g. when you are finding Kulle's blood it's always in a large desert shaped like a ring with inaccessible terrain in the middle, and his lair is always in the northwest part of the desert. If you name any other outdoor map in the game (and even some indoor ones) chances are it's the same overall layout. And even objectives aren't random a lot of the time, e.g. act 3 signal fires, catapults, trebuchet always being in the middle of the map, etc. Even maps that are somewhat randomly generated (most indoor maps) often have objectives in the same relative positions, e.g. Butcher's room is always northeast, the Breach is always northwest, etc.
Travis Day, game designer, even commented on this almost exactly a year ago
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8518301745#3, claiming they were "actively investigating" how to make more random experiences, and that running parts of act 3 is "less random than what [they] would like the experience to be."
So has the patch done anything to make the experience more random than before? I don't see that it has. That was one of the issues with the game for me.
Second, the problem with loot progression still remains, and I'm not sure what their plan going forward with it is. Let me elaborate: when you are leveling, it is very easy to find upgrades. Once you hit the max level, it's still easy to find upgrades...at first But as your gear gets better and better, it becomes more and more difficult to find upgrades. The time interval between upgrades gets longer and longer, and this is especially true when you can reroll undesirable affixes with the Mystic. What is Blizzard going to do about this? You could sidestep this problem with ladders, by resetting everyone every few months. That way no one but the most diehard players will get to that point where they have to play 50 hr to find one upgrade. For people who don't want to play on the ladders I suppose you could update the game regularly and add new gear. I'm just speaking to my experience with vanilla, where I played a great deal from launch (May) to about August and then stopped entirely because I felt the game no longer had anything to offer me. I don't want that to happen again with RoS.
Other thoughts:
I like teleporting to any waypoint or party member from anywhere in the world. Even though it only saves you a few seconds from TPing first, it feels a lot more convenient.
Infinite Paragon system is neat, no longer being pushed into playing one character is good.
The PvP arena system promised in 2012 is nowhere to be seen. I wonder if they're ever going to come out and say it's scrapped once and for all.
People who don't buy the expansion are 100% screwed if they want upgrades to pre-2.0 2Hs, sources, or mojos.