Right. As you all know I play this game for the achievements.

And so far 2.0 was very interesting.

This is just some random rambling on things I have seen, found, done. Sorry for the wall. But if you are achievement hunting you might find some of it interesting.

*** SPOILER ALERT *** *** SPOILER ALERT *** *** SPOILER ALERT *** *** SPOILER ALERT ***
If you want to figure out things for yourself don't read the rest of this post, as I will be spoiling a lot of achievements here.




I immediately noticed 3 things when logging on.
1) My achievement count has been significantly reduced.
2) My Feat of Strength count has been significantly increased.
3) Some of the achievements I have previously done are back again with slightly different wordings.

Elaborating on these points.
Obviously points 1 and 2 are related. A lot of the achievements have now be re-classified as FOS. Mostly things that refer to a specific difficulty like Inferno or Nightmare etc.

On point 3 some the things that has to be redone are:
Anything involving killing bosses with specific criteria.
Like kill Belial without getting hit by his breath attack.
Or Kill Butcher while he is stunned by his own charge attack.
Or Kill Azmodan without killing any of his adds.
They all previously mostly required nightmare or higher diff, they now require master or higher diff.
Oh, aslo all boss kills on HC and co-op must be re-done.

PS> I have also noticed a potential bug in the achievement system on this one. For belial there is a new group of achievements that has to be done. Some of them can be re-done, some not. On my list the ones that doesn't have to be redone has a date showing when I actually got them but they are NOT marked as done. So if/when I finish up all the rest I don't know whether I will be given the total one. Will have to wait and see, since the last one I'm missing is killing max lvl belial on torment difficulty on HC.



As for new achievements: (Excluding crusader and act 5 stuff which we obviously can't do yet)
The first new thing I really grinded was the cursed chests.
I have found quite a lot of them, avering about 10 to 15 runs per area. Some much quicker.
For act 1 there are 8.
Cursed Cellar - Damp Cellar, next to Old Tristram road. (This one I haven't found yet, and is the only one I have done about 100+ runs on, but @h311o found it there) - eventually found it for myself here.
Cursed Chamber of Bone - Cathedral 1
Cursed Court - Cathedral 2 (typo fixed)
Cursed Grove - Secluded Grove inside Fields of Misery
Cursed Hatchery - Caverns of Araneae
Cursed Camp - Southern Highlands
Cursed Bellows - Halls of Agony 3 (This one has been temporarily removed in hotfix because people were abusing the crap out of it to xp grind)
Cursed Mill - NOT FOUND YET. This is supposedly found in Old Mill (where you find the Scoundrel) but nobody I know has found the chest yet.

For act 2 there are 6.
Cursed Battlement - Howling Plateau
Cursed Outpost - Howling Plateau (Not a typo, these two spawn on the same place, obviously not at once)
Cursed Pit - The Storm Halls
Cursed Shallows - Flooded Cave inside Oasis. (This was a bit of a pain because the cave is not 100% spawn, and the chest is not 100% spawn, so you need both)
Cursed Archive - Vault of the Assassin
Cursed Spire - Unknown Depth

For act 3 there are 4. (All 4 done, achievement for getting all of them gained)
Cursed Caldera - Arreat Crater 2
Cursed Depths - The Keep Depths 2
Cursed Garrison - The Battlefields
Cursed Glacier - Icefall Caves (like the one in the oasis this requires the dungeon to spawn first, and then the event)

For act 4 there are 2.
Cursed Chapel - Silver Spire 2
Cursed Dias - NOT FOUND YET.

Obviously more for act 5, but can't know their location yet. ;)



Hmmm.... another interesting set of achievements was killing bosses on max level torment in short time.
Now obviously this is actually intended to be lvl 70 fights, but I have found that since max level is currently 60 I can finish these off now.
I tried with several classes, but in the end found my wizard (roughly 300k dps on new system) with archon spike damage the best by far to do this with.
They included:
Kill Skeleton king in 60s.
Kill Magda in 30s
Kill Diablo in 180s.
There are others, but I figure you get the picture.

Note. There is also a HC set of these. Which I have no chance of even attempting now. And it will be a very very very long time before I will be able too. So thats quite sad.
That brings me to the HC. There are a TON of HC achievements this time around. And once again I have the same feeling I had when D3 originally came out. I saw I had to finish Inferno way back when and though "No way am I ever doing that". Well, I feel like that again.

a) There are the same kill max level bosses on Torment difficulty in insane short time.
b) There are a bunch of new set of elites and champions to hunt.
c) And most terrible of all, the unique list is for HC as well this time. Based on how long unique hunting took me on the first set makes me want to cry thinking I have to do that on HC this time around.
And last time I had the AH to get gear from. This time its grind gear, and if you die restart. And with my 300ms+ standard latency dying is a reality. :)


There are also a couple of new class specific achievements. This also include a couple that can only be done using lvl 61+ class skills so obviously for official ROS.
Most of these look ok. The Monk one will probably be the hardest. Healing 2bilion total on allies. Guess that simply means I have to run a lot of party games with my monk. So far I have done about 1mil in heals, so rough 0.05% of achievement done. So, who-ever came up with that number.... what were you thinking. Other ones you can do in like a day or two. This one will take some serious monk dedication. And for someone mostly playing solo due to real life interference it sucks. :)
Some of them have been achieved by multiple people in my clan already. Like 2000 kills in archon for wizard or 10000 kills with battle rage active for barbarian. Both these are easy enough.


There is also one act 1 challenge that is insane. Seriously, the team that came up with that one must be shot.
It is to kill trees (Wood Wraiths of Highland walkers). Any difficulty, so doesn't sound too bad. But the number is just crazy.
25000. So even killing average of 8 every 4 minutes (which is the best I have been able to do so far) it means more than 200 hours just doing this.
2500 would have been sensible. 25000 is just plain stupid.
Seriously.... wtf blizzard.



There are also a bunch of adventure mode achievements, but no data available until the game mode comes with ROS.


Think thats about it for now.


Oh wait.... in other news the way rares works seems to have changed quite a lot. So previously the rare boss and his minions was normally the same type. This is no longer the case. The rare and his followers are all over the place now, so basically most of my elite hunting guide is probably no longer relevant.

At some point I guess I'll do an update. Will definitely keep track of new stuff I do.

hehe I love you @Bort
Now I don't have to read through the achievement pages in game but can do it at job.

But I have a question regarding Act 1 Cursed Court. Did you really find it on Cathedral 3 or is it a typo?
I'm sure I got it on Cathedral Level 2.

And thanks again for this summary though you told me almost all of them in chat :)

Oh - after @Anuiran mentioned adventure mode I remembered I saved some info from BNet forums about cursed chests.

Now I'm 99 % sure I don't have to search for Cursed Mill till RoS hits as it seems to be a Bounty. Read about it in the first post by MissCheetah here

Will go double check the cathedral chest locations. But think you are correct it was on 1 & 2.

@Bort - I agree with just about everything you said. I'm also annoyed at the tons of HC achievements, since I can't play HC on my terrible internet connection. I think I'd have a rage stroke. Also, the 2 billion heals for the Monk and the Highland Walker achievements are terrible.

This latest patch was supposed to buff the chest spawn rate, so hopefully those last few missing ones will pop up soon.

I'm hoping that monk healing scales with level, so for lvl 60 2 bil is too much, but hopefully 2bil at lvl 70 will be more reasonable.

Also, I have past the 1000 tree kill mark today. 1 down, 24 to go.

Killed HC torment butcher yesterday. And got 4 blue items drop. Not even a rare or gem. What a dissapointment.

Cursed Mill

Just finished it in an Act 1 Bounty - Shrine where you have to fight 5 waves.
Found it in the Fields of Misery following the right side from FoM entrance to the way up to the mill. Was just around the halve of the way.

Yip. Cursed mill from act 1 and cursed dias from act 4 can only be done as bounties afaik. I also believe that all the act 5 cursed chests that count for the achievement can be found as bounties.