Diablo III launched in 2012 to complaints about its always online DRM and real money auction house. While the always online requirement has stayed, Blizzard will be ditching the real money auction house later this month. Now the developers are launching the game’s first expansion on March 25, and have prepared a massive patch to help prepare the way.

With Diablo III version 2.0.1, Blizzard says the biggest change is coming in the form of itemization updates, or what it likes to call “Loot 2.0.” All new loot items will now have stats separated into two categories – primary and secondary. Primary stats are those that have a direct effect on your character’s base stats whereas secondary stats will add perks, like larger gold drops.

With Loot 2.0, Blizzard is also introducing a new feature called smart loot. With smart loot, characters will no longer receive a lot of items their class can’t use. In other words, there’s now a larger chance that you’ll receive items relevant to your class when rolling for that item’s stats.

As for the Paragon system, Blizzard has introduced three major changes: it has removed the level cap, the paragon levels are now shared and there are even more paragon points now available. It should be noted that paragon levels are still separated between normal and hardcore characters.

Finally, Blizzard has introduced clans and communities to Diablo III. Clans are the small groups that you frequently play together with while communities are the large groups of players who just want to mingle together online while looking for players.

Diablo III version 2.0.1 is already out and version 2.0.2 just went live yesterday with some random bug fixes. You can read more on that here.

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