Favorite:
PVP progression rewards adjustment
Like babinro said, it was incredible that they dropped the top progression reward by 300. I was expecting peanuts, and they delivered well beyond my expectations.
Least Favorite:
Shards in PVP.
I still may be in the minority on this, and I say this knowing that I’ve adjusted and can make it work for me now, but I still hate that they put shards in PVP.
Everyone’s issues with shards was PVEs where you could go to sleep with 12 hours to go and wake up having dropped 100 places.
PVP didn’t really have this problem. Scoring was gated by roster, not time available. So putting shards in PVP made no sense.
And besides, they didn’t even help people with end times for the most part. Every competitive player I know won’t touch shards 2 and 3 with a 10 foot pole because everyone knows (or thinks, depending on your viewpoint) that you can really only get 800 points at most in shards 2 and 3.
Pre-cooldown, you could get 1100 in shard 1 but if you wanted 1300, you had to enter shard 4 or 5, where the big dogs lay, in order to get enough high point matches to reach 1300.
Pre shards, every high scoring player was in the same player pool, so you were never going to run out of high point matches as long as you were lower than the highest players. With shards, you had to hope enough high point players entered the same shard as you in order for you to get to the progression rewards that you wanted.
Now, obviously, with the new progressions rewards, it won’t have as much of an impact. But it was still pretty frustrating knowing shard 2 or 3 would work better for me in regards to end time, but I couldn’t enter either of them because I wanted to go for 1300. Shard 5 ends at 4am for me. Not ideal. But I need to enter it in order to get the highest number of points I can.
Overall, shards didn’t have nearly the impact D3 thought it would. All it did was significantly cut down the number of people you could face and it made you choose sub optimally in order to get the amount of points you needed.