14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has confirmed that it's going to make some big changes to the Horadric Caches and Blood Shards with Diablo 3 update 2.0.5, so that players earn more shards when playing on Torment 2 or higher and get Torment-only Legendary gear from Horadric Caches.
Diablo 3 received its first major expansion back in March and, with it, a variety of new gameplay mechanics were added to the dungeon crawling role-playing game, including an Adventure Mode, in which players perform bounties to earn Horadric Caches, which are basically bundles of different loot.
Unfortunately, the caches haven't exactly offered a lot of great items and it didn't matter if you attained them at Normal difficulty or at the toughest Torment one.
With Diablo 3 patch 2.0.5, Blizzard wants to change this behavior and make Horadric Caches give Legendary gear more often, especially if they were obtained on Torment difficulty or higher.
"We’re looking to make two changes to Horadric Caches," a Blizzard representative said on the Battle.net forums. "The first change is to allow the caches to drop Torment-only Legendary items. The second is to increase the chance that you’ll find a Legendary item in Horadric Caches, including Act-specific Legendaries like the Royal Ring of Grandeur, based on the Torment difficulty."
"What this means is that Horadric Caches earned in Torment I+ will be able to drop Torment restricted Legendary items, and caches earned in Torment II+ will have a scaling bonus for dropping Legendary items (which includes those items only found in a cache)."
The representative emphasized that a release date for patch 2.0.5 still isn't available, as the studio is working on implementing more new things into the update.
Besides the buffed Horadric Caches, the new patch is also going to change the amount of Blood Shards offered by Rift Guardians at Torment 2 or higher difficulties.
"We're also planning on changing Rift Guardians so that they drop more Blood Shards for each level of Torment past the first (i.e. in Torment II+). For clarity, this means Rift Guardians would drop the same amount of Blood Shards as they currently do in Torment I, but starting in Torment II they would drop additional Blood Shards per each Torment slider tick."
You can expect to hear more about Diablo 3 patch 2.0.5 as we get closer to its potential release in the following weeks. Until then, you might want to prepare your characters for Torment 1 and higher difficulties.