Yep, that's part of the seasonal content.

With a map and a pre-planned route, you can bang them out in an hour or two while watching Netflix. But yeah, it's just a little extra tedium.

They were originally going to have everything be a clean slate, as I would typically expect for a seasonal start. Reportedly, they changed due to "overwhelming community feedback" so that's why we have this awkward "keep the map visibility and altars" solution.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if it comes to Game Pass. Even as a PC user, I like subscribing to this every so often just to play random new games for a month.

Your skeletons:

You blink first.

No, you blink first.

It's alright. I really enjoyed the campaign and have played a total of 140 hours across 4 different classes. I bought it at $110 AU so it's down to less than $1 per hour. It's gotten to the point where I'm only really jumping on for an hour or two each night to smash some nightmare dungeons or helltides, but I'm still enjoying that while I do it. I'm nowhere near level 100 (highest char is 70 sorc) and still a long way to go with levelling glyphs and whatnot, so definitely still plenty to grind out.

If you're big on D2, then you might not enjoy it heaps. It's much more like D3 than D2. There's practically no item trading as the good stuff is account bound. End game is basically just running nightmare dungeons over and over again in a search for better gear rolls, better aspect rolls, and more paragon points. But then again, D2 endgame was just running Mephisto/Baal/Pindleskin over and over again just hoping for a better drop. In my opinion, it's the same grind but with a different flavour. You might like it or you might not.

I'm really enjoying barbarian / HotA after playing my ice sorcerer to level 70 or so. I smashed through Elias at level 60 barbarian which felt good. It's just so satisfying to be constantly smashing things and actually have survivability. The sorcerer is definitely faster at clearing screens as you can freeze and then everything just explodes, but it also dies at the drop of a hat.

It's really up to you. The non-sacred rares are pretty much useless except to salvage or sell, so if you're after money or materials then it's still worth picking them up. But if you're specifically looking for gear upgrades then there's not much point taking non-sacred items.

I'm at the point in Torment that I no longer bother picking up non-ancestral item drops. Same with gems - I have so many that there's no point picking up yet another bunch of flawless gems.

I had that bugged for a while. Just keep checking back on it. I checked maybe 4 or 5 times before finally the guys started moving and I could finish that quest.

Yeah, I thought the two subreddits were pretty bad... and then I visited the Battle.net forums. Holy crap.

I enjoyed The Way of the Three. It's a hidden quest as it doesn't initially have a marker. From the Caldeum waypoint, head towards the hell gate and you find a mysterious symbol on the floor, an altar with three unlit braziers, and 3 plaques giving clues. I had fun deciphering the clues, but I guess you could just read a guide - the clues take you out across the map to find 3 hidden statues.

Looks pretty sweet. Only problem I have is that it's a staff and not a wand. I tend to prefer the extra stuff you can get from having a weapon and offhand at the same time.