Back home after a nice 5-6 hour marathon at the friends house. Really peeves me off about no preload since that means i cant pull any VPN shenanigans and will have to wait until Thursday or Friday in Europe
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We kept going pure finesse and it got better and better.
I'm not sure if we were lucky or if the game "gamed" the odds for drops in our favor, but 90% of the nice equips were for our chosen spec and the stuff we invested talent points in, for example our first purple drop was a nice set of daggers and two rogue set items.
We also got a house and upgraded it. Ironically the bed was moved farther away so healing up is going to take him longer now
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We also found another boss that was of the "summon ~15 friends" category. Luckily we were able to dps the boss down rapidly (using our just found purple daggers) or that might have been extremely hard.
We stayed on hard mode and felt that it was nicely balanced altough the +0.1% hp regen amulet we found was very helpful, although that boss battle could have gotten very hairy very fast.
Oh and if you like exploring dungeons freely don't be surprised if you get sent back on a mission and have to double clear it.
Also we felt that missions were cleverly placed, minimizing backtracking (kill spiders and gather spider drop items at the same time for example).
The only negative aspect we found was that the enemy AI is a bit wonky if one starts kiting them and moving away from the location of initial combat/contact. Often only 1-2 will follow with the rest turning brain dead. This, combined with the fact that enemies apparently don't (or only very slowly) regain health if one resets them by running away far enough can make it a bit easy/exploitable even on hard - so beware to those who want a challenge.
Final verdict (so far): IGN sure wasn't lying when they named this a GOTY contender.