A few days ago, a hotfix was deployed to alter the Bounty rewards system. There are 25 bounties throughout Sanctuary. 5 Bounties per Act. Before this hotfix, you would get a Horadric Cache per Bounty (25 caches for all 5 Acts).

This was awesome, because you got a whole lot of loot. However, there were several problems I quickly noticed. I would spend a lot of time emptying my bags, and clicking caches, and collecting them from the ground, and then emptying again my bags, and so on.

Add to the equation that Diablo III: Reaper of Souls is meant to be a cool experience playing with four friends. Each of them were going through these 25 bounties and each of them emptying their bags, and clicking their caches, etc.

You want to play and kill monsters. You don’t want to spend that much time emptying bags and doing all that process. Another problem I noticed was that I wouldn’t use Blood Shards for gambling or for Greater Horadric Caches. Nephalem Rifts were sort of meaningless. I heard people say they would rather do bounties than to do a Nephalem Rift. I agreed.

So the Diablo III team heard the feedback, and this was the hotfix applied:

  • Completing individual bounties will no longer reward a Horadric Cache.
  • Completing all five Bounties in an Act now also provides Blood Shards.

Now you only get a Horadric Cache when you complete all 5 bounties in an Act — instead of 5 Horadric Caches as it was before. You are still getting Blood Shards on each Bounty, though. So now Blood Shards are more abundant than the Horadric Caches, giving them a bit of a more value as a currency to buy Greater Horadric Caches (which cost 100 Blood Shards); or to gamble.

With Nephaelm Rifts, they had no reward. They didn’t have as much value other than a challenge. I had piled up over 60 Rift Keystones. With the hotfix, Nephalem Rifts now grant a Greater Horadric Cache. When you click those, a bunch of loot falls to the ground. There’s a chance for a Legendary to pop, some yellow items, and materials for the Blacksmith, Jeweler, and Mystic.

I had stopped playing Diablo III a long time ago. Mostly helping with beta testing or PTR testing, adding content to the website for each of those. I missed many new features introduced in past patches. Playing Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, it feels like the Diablo III team has brought new breath and life to the gameplay experience.

To keep track of the latest hotfixes, visit the official forum to read Nevalistis’ latest updates.

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