Experience Bonuses Averaged in Patch 2.3

Diablo III patch 2.3.0 is burning up the Public Test Realm, as the upcoming patch starts the testing process. One major change in the patch involves how experience bonuses are handled for players. All experience gains and bonuses will be averaged across the players in a group, instead of divvied up individually. That is one of the changes that will dramatically shift group composition and gearing in the new patch.


The big change regarding experience bonuses was edited into the patch 2.3.0 patch notes, and mentioned by developer John Yang:
This means that the experience bonuses from items like Leoric's Signet will be averaged across everyone in the party, instead of individually applied. This will prevent the groups that have become popular, with a few heroes doing all the damage, essentially carrying the other heroes who stack a lot of +Bonus Experience % equipment.

Between that change and the reduction in the ability to crowd control monsters in patch 2.3, the overall gameplay and composition of groups at the high end will shift in the new patch. There won't be the sort of popular group setups that includes a zDPS (Zero DPS) character, who often stacks that +experience gear and provides crowd control on monsters. There will likely be a change towards all players providing at least some amount of damage, along with utility buffs to help the entire group perform as well as possible.

As seen above, there are also new Torment levels coming in patch 2.3, as the difficulty system expansion to add Torment VII (7) up to Torment X (10). In the standard Adventure Mode outside of Rifts, this will impact public groups. Fewer players will be able to adequately handle Torment X compared to Torment VI. There will not be many highly geared players in games of the lower Torment difficulty levels, since they will all be hanging out with other extremely well geared players at Torment X.


The new Kunai's Cube artisan in patch 2.3 provides multiple recipes, that each changes items in some way. The Skill of Nilfur recipe allows one Set item to be changed into another item of that same Set. Right now there is a bug that makes the new Set item tradeable between players. The recipe also makes it easy to keep rerolling items from 2-piece sets back and forth, such the Focus and Restraint rings, until the player gets a powerful Ancient version. Developer Travis Day stated that both of those issues will be dealt with, as the Kunai's Cube recipes are tweaked during the PTR process.

The new features for Seasons, and the Season 4 items, are not yet available for testing on the PTR. That will all be available to try out, further into the testing process.

Here is the current list of major issues already known about by the Diablo III Quality Assurance team. These will be dealt with, mainly in upcoming PTR patches.

As seen above, right now the Mac Diablo III clients cannot properly access the PTR. The official posts note that an updated PTR build, which is likely arriving in the next few days, will take care of the issue. There is a player-created workaround for the issue, but that could potentially cause issues down the road.
As the next PTR patches arrive for patch 2.3.0, the early noted oddities and bugs will be ironed out, and testing will arrive for the next Season. We are still early in the test process for patch 2.3, and the patch will solidify over the next couple of weeks of testing.