Side missions removed from story mode

[ReigorMuerte]

Some thoughts:

Waiting until story mode is completed for doing side missions means losing xp bonus items. maybe put those back in or provide some other process to get them.

Is the expectation people will pick up the side missions while running stories at heroic level? The biggest benefit for the rewards from the side missions is at the earliest part of the game. A new player will not know they can go back to normal mode and pick up all these additional missions and will only get them as they struggle to play at heroic difficulty.

[Kardinaal]

Also, some of the side quest rewards are useful when running low gem AnB. Two less free xp boosts, the gem collection a few missions into act 2… It looks to me this change was done to ehm… encourage gem spending for Anb.

[Teebs]

Those three items amount to 174 gems - so I am not too sure how much that was an intentional strategy to be honest.

The redesigned Act 2 has done far more to discourage running Story Mode at all beyond Act 1 than the removal of side quests - if anything, the removal is basically just a 'force multiplier' which will even further discourage Story running.

Overall - I think it a silly decision born of not wanting to have to answer so many newbie questions regarding side-quests upon the Steam release. Steam users already seem so impatient and imprecise, the Dev's didn't want to overburden Steam users' mayfly attention span amounted to : "We didn't want to confuse new (STEAM) users' - the implication (correctly in my opinion) that they are flaky as hell.

However - I did see a suggestion regarding the idea of rebooting Quests so that you have new sets of Quests for Heroic / Legendary. I think that if that happens, that would be a good outcome.

... KTB

[davidz]

With shared resources, it’s just too easy to get those boosters, so they have to remove those tasks.