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Some highlights.

Loot 2.0

Loot is no longer randomly dropped, rather the system looks to see what class you are playing and a higher chance is given toward you getting something appropriate for your class. There's still a chance to get drops for other classes, just not as high of a chance. This is also true when you are crafting items. In addition a bunch of new legendaries have been introduced and most legendaries now have special buffs that no other equipment has to promote diversity in builds. Legendaries also drop far more often then in the past since the AH will be going away on March 18th.

Paragon 2.0

Paragon levels are only acquired after reaching level 60 on a character, however Paragon levels are now account wide, not character wide. So once you hit level 60 and start gaining Paragon levels on a character, if you switch to another character that character also gets credit for the paragon levels you have acquired. Also Paragon levels no longer give standard bonuses, instead each Paragon level gives you a point to spend in one of 4 categories. Each category has 4 seperate bonuses that you can apply that point into to increase it's stats. Each character can then determine which stats to boost with his Paragon points hopefully leading to better build diversity.

Clans and Communities

You can now start a clan which allows you to have your own chat channel, message of the day, etc. Clans are meant to be small in size, less then 100 players or something like that. Communities are similar but for larger groups of people. Basically this just gives you more options to find people to group up with.

New Difficulty settings

Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno are gone. Monster Power is also gone. Now you can choose between Normal, Hard, Expert, Master and Torment difficulty settings at any time, you do not need to "beat" the game on Normal to move to Hard for example. The only stipulations are that you must have completed act IV on at least 1 character to play on Master difficulty and you must have reached level 60 on at least 1 character to play on Torment difficulty. Torment also has a slider from 1-6 to increase the difficulty even further. As you go up in difficulty you get a buff to your experience gain as well as other incentives to play at harder difficulties.

Class changes

All classes have undergone a thorough revision of their abilities. One of the main themes of the changes is for runes to change damage types. For instance in Vanilla Arcane Orb always did Arcane damage, now depending on which rune you put into Arcane Orb it can do Cold or Fire damage for instance. Effectively you can now choose between the Arcane Orb as it existed pre-patch, a Frozen Orb similar to what was available in Diablo 2 or a Fire Orb that leaves a molten trail behind. Hopefully this will help with build diversity as well.

Other stuff

Pools of reflection give a boost to your experience gain. Naphalem globes offer power-ups. Cursed chests produce mini events, etc.

The expansion itself Reaper of Souls launches on March 24th and includes a bunch of additional changes, this is just the pre-expansion changes that Blizzard likes to do to get people to come back to the game and maybe convince them to purchase the expansion. When it goes live, I'll give a run down of the changes in the expansion.

If you are playing, I have created a Miami Dolphins Community. Check it out.

I have the game, and have barely played it.  I was a huge D2 player and was disappointed with D3.  I got bored very quickly, but I might pick it up again.  Do all the patches really make that much a difference in the game play?

Yes.

Read what some others have had to say about the patch after one day. Keep in mind that the launch was actually delayed about 8 hours due to a hardware issue, so most of this is from playing only after a few hours last night. The initial response has been VERY positive.

Patch 2.0.1 thoughts (http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/1yytv0/patch_201_thoughts/)

Edit: After reading the thread again, it appears that we now have some dissenters, mostly because the mob density was throttled down, however this is only true if you were playing vanilla on MP10 up to now. If you quit playing months ago, the mob density will actually be much improved for you because they have normalized the zones. What I mean by that is that mob density progressed from Acts I through IV for the most part in Vanilla and with MP you were able to scale it up to having hundreds of mobs on screen at once. This was actually causing performance issues for the servers, so it had to be scaled back. However In this patch, it's no longer necessary to play through the game from Act I through Act IV Normal, go to Nightmare and play through again, then on Hell etc. You can play any act you want over and over and you can change the difficulty to match as the mobs scale with you as you level up. What that means is that Blizzard was able to make all acts essentially the same in mob density. Mobs in Act I and Act II will be greater then they were in the past, while mobs in Act III and Act IV are somewhat less. Mobs on the other hand scale with your character so you will not be able to faceroll hundreds of mobs on screen at the highest difficulty like you could before, so there is no need to have that many on screen at once. Some people really enjoyed mowing down hundreds of mobs at a time with their ultra over geared RMAH toons, so they are unhappy. Most everyone else is happy with the mob density changes.

Ok, I'll give it a shot....so in D2 there were very few end game characters without getting God gear...Sorcs, Palis, Bone Necro...every character pretty much even in D3 or are some better than others?  You have a favorite?  Like I said, I only played for a couple of weeks and got bored with it, so I'm pretty new to D3 still.

My favorite is probably the Demon Hunter but it has nothing to do with them being the best character or anything like that, in fact many complain that the DH is underpowered. I have taken every class to 60 and beyond both normal and hard core and I didn't find any class any more difficult to play. What you probably should do is figure out what type of class you like to play and then decide which class fits that best. Barbarian and Monks are both extremely good melee classes. Barb is a little more tanky and the monk a little more agile, but not really that much different. Demon Hunter and Sorcerer are the ranged classes, Demon Hunter being a bit more squishy then the Sorcerer, but the DH's strength is mobility. They rely on staying out of reach and kiting mobs around the screen. Sorcerers are a little more durable but don't have as much escapability as the DH so they don't rely on kiting as much. The Witch Doctor is the pet class. They can stay out of harms way for the most part and let their pets tank for them, but you can also forgo the pets and play the class much like a Sorcerer if you want. So the choice is yours, pick one that seems to match up with your personal play style and you can't go wrong.

I was always a fan of summon necro bc I like to play lazy.  WD get good enough pets to do damage or are they there just to take the heat off your toon?   

I enjoyed all the classes in D2 except assassin and amazon (even though I had a badass javazon), but I think I'll go with a barb. Always hated how they were nerfed in D2 and last time I tried a monk survivability wasn't all that good.

^^^ My favorite D2 character was a dueling WW Barb named BigSmellyFukker...

Mine was a bonenecro named DeadDik

EDIT:  I take that back. My favorite was my zealadin, NikNakPaliWak

Both. You won't just be sitting back and letting your pets do all the work, you will be firing off spells at the same time much like the Necro from D2, but they do enough damage to compliment your damage. There are some skills that boost the Witch Doctors damage quite a bit that you can take in lieu of using pets, but in my opinion the Witch Doctor becomes too similar to playing the Sorcerer that way. I have never really tried to play with no pets, so can't really say how effective that is.

Thanks Pappy.  I started with a Barb last night, then quickly changed to a WD.  I think I'll stick with the WD for a while.  I always love naming my characters.  Went kind of bland with my Barb (KillEmAll), but like my WD name (ABadAcidTrip).

Is there really only one new character coming out in the new expansion?

Yep. Crusader. Sort of a Paladin class.

Kindof disappointing. I thought they'd go the LOD route and come out with two.

When I get the training wheels off, I'll hit you up for some online play.

I will have to look for the group

At the same time it kind of makes sense because it evens everything out. The Crusader is a strength based character which there was only 1 previously (Barbarian) and there were already 2 each of intellect based characters (Witch Doctor & Sorcerer) and dexterity based characters (Demon Hunter & Monk). It's also the 3rd melee class (Barbarian, Monk & Crusader) whereas there are already 3 ranged classes (Demon Hunter, Sorcerer & Witch Doctor).

I guess you'll just have to wait for the next expansion for a couple more classes and perhaps another type of resource? Yes, I do expect another expansion for D3. I have not heard of any plans for another yet, but I think it makes sense. I still think there are a lot of places to go with the franchise (PvP, more classes for example) and I don't think they want to start building D4 yet. An expansion is the next best thing.

When you get the new expansion, let me know how it is.  I'm still on the fence whether I'm getting it or not.

I do like the adjustable difficulties whenever you want.  It feels like my character levels up faster, plus it gives a little bit of a challenge without being over the top.

I'm playing between the Barb, Sorc and WD right now.  When I get bored with one, I switch to the other character.  WD has the best survivability for me right now at expert level, but I'm sure that will change.  Sorc is fun to just blow things away, and there is always something fun about cutting shit up with an axe with the Barb.

Spider, don't know if you saw but Blizzard has a 50% XP boost going on now till the expansion hits. You can come back and try out patch 2.0.1 and get a 50% xp boost to slap on a few Paragon levels to your character before the expansion. On top of that you can reset your quests and get a guaranteed Legendary for killing the skeleton king. Legendaries are dropping about at a rate of 1 every 2 or 3 hours playtime now. Lots of reasons to come back and try out the game again and see if they have made any changes for the better. The patch has changed the minds of a lot of people that quit and are enjoying the game and are now planning on getting the expansion. It's worth a look anyhow. I know you left the game with a bad taste in your mouth and so did a lot of others, but the patch has changed a lot of their minds about the game.

I must admit the orange drops are nice to get.

Some of my friends are back playing it but I'm not particularly interested.  I'm busy with Final Fantasy XIV for the time being and I'm not really a hardcore Diablo player anyway.  D3 was OK when it was new, but I'm not one of those guys who was still playing D2 in 2007 or whatever.  I'm pretty much over it.

I've been playing pretty regularly with all characters lately. I do like the new gameplay with the adjustable difficulties, plus the 50% XP boost is nice.  I'm digging all the ranged characters and the WD especially.

I was playing Saturday Morning on my lvl 48 Hardcore Barb and decided that Hard difficulty was too easy so I moved to Expert difficulty. About 15 minutes later I hit a really nasty Arcane Enchanted boss and ended up dead. Total time played, 29 hours 56 minutes. But hey, that's how things go in hardcore, so I started over and yesterday I hit lvl 46 with a new HC Barb. Total time played, 8 hours 46 minutes. The new difficulty settings, loot 2.0 and the 50% exp boost we are getting now sure is nice. I think I'm gonna stay at hard difficulty for awhile though just in case.