I literally fell of my chair while reading this. Where to start from?
That paragon does not make a big difference? LOL! try with 1k paragon Wizard to do a 102 rift. Even as support you need paragon.
That skill is way more important than paragon? LOL! Since when Diablo 3 has anything to do about skill??? It is freaking 90% Paragon dependable, since anyone can get items VERY easy, specially after cube was introduced and since you can fish for good map layouts.
Do you realize that you provide absolutely no evidence at all? All you say is "you're wrong, because I say otherwise and I'm right". While I believe you ARE right, please step up your game and actually explain WHY with a proper argumentation, or just don't post, it'll get people frustrated, especially those who think you are wrong and realize they are arguing with a wall.
this stories about VERY EASY gear)) show us you items lmao, it was discussed hundred times, it is still very hard to get decent rolls on every ancient piece of gear
you mentioned several reasons why paragon gives even a huge benefit when not including the obvious progression (+5 mainstat / lvl).
and that is also the reason why it's overall too big of a boost (let it be 3-4 griflvls for 2k paragons just from a character stat pov).
the mainstat boosting just needs to change. whether that's in form of a simple mainstat nerf (e.g. +1 instead of +5) or a complete new paragon 3.0 is probably a question of ressources blizzard puts into D3.
The only thing I can't understand is that it takes them so long to change (it obviously will change in the future...)
in all antiparagon discussions i can't get one thing: why lowskilled lowparagon players with 300+ played hours are so worried about 3k people and top100 leaderboards. why people that played 15+ hours during the hole era or season must have the same mainstat/damage/gear/closed rifts as others?
I said it many times but I will say it again. Only fix to paragon system without an all over overhaul, to have paragon leagues that seperate players based on their paragon levels and on top of that an overall leaderboards.
This way we would have incentive to try and be better knowing we have the possibilty of beating players that acquired same paragon boost. Ofc there will be more powerfull players and players with high level gems but at least we wont have to compete against players that have 2k more paragon levels than us.
This would give a good boost to NS players which have to deal with 4k paragon players now and also players who cant give 15 hours/day or not botting to have a fair playing ground.
I know I myself would try very hard to beat my own division's rankings ^^
The best way would be to organize leaderboard ranking through paragon lvl brackets, that records your highest GR run in the lvl bracket you were at. Every 200 lvls seems good, 0-200, 201-400, ect.
Paragon itself allows for people to continue progressing smoothly. Exponential XP scaling past a certain point sucks - Do you REALLY want to spend 3-4 hours of time just to get a 5 stat boost? Nerfing the amount of stat boost given by Paragon also does the same thing - It makes it take 5x the amount of time to reach the same point that you were before.
Think about it - Do you REALLY want to have to spend over 20 straight hours, JUST to go 1 GR higher? Some people want to have NO upwards progression whatsoever it seems, once you have reached the cap, thats it, you may as well put D3 up because there is no more progression for you at all. As it stands, the problem is NOT paragon lvling, as that fixes a problem inherent in the game. The problem is that leaderboards do NOT reflect your paragon lvl. Just seperate leaderboards by paragon lvls, and see all the so-called problems with paragon go away.
I can only speak from my limited xp, since I didnt do way more that 2k grifts last season, and maybe 10% of those were in meta 4ppl groups.
Maybe when you do some 1k of those you get some crazy routine so you can play while watching some movie or reading shit and still be great for your group, but that is way beyond me.
Well there are some level of skill needed for barbs to pull mobs. I didnt believe that myself but when I saw few 110+ runs on twitch I learned few usefull things, basically how to unstuck mobs or how to move them in large groups over entire screen. And there is for sure some skill involved in proper scouting and preparing ground for wizz to spam twisters.
There is a lot of skill needed for wizzards to call moves for the group, and position twisters in right spots. That is how I see it. Maybe if you play with same group over and over you get to do things without mistakes, but in community games or even public games, I saw many wizzards who, despite 1.3-4k paragons simply did position twisters in wrong spots and that have resulted failed grifts.
I know shit about WD and Monk so can't tell what level of skill is required for those in high group grifts.
maybe some "basic skill" yes. But trust me the diablo community is full of people unwilling to learn basic stuff, or just not trying (or dont wanna try).
At the end of the season I ran many 4 man grps (usually Im a solo player) with my wizard (so I was more or less the only paragon dependant class).
There was a huge difference between running 85, 90, 95 or 100+ just depending on what the barb/monk/wd did right or wrong.
Sometimes it was a struggle to do 90 and sometimes 99 was a 100% clear in time.
So yes, experience and proper play was a much more deciding factor than paragon was.
You could argue that it's only about the paragon when you always play with the same people who you know what they're doing. Then yes, paragon (and gear) of the DPS class is more or less the only thing you can try to improve to get higher in grifts (beside of RNG of course)
So, we get into a discussion of skill? This might be slightly off-topic since it's a thread about paragon. But since it's my thread, and I think distinguishing skill and paragon is important, "I'll allow it". Let's look at the definition of skill (from the OED):
"Capability of accomplishing something with precision and certainty; practical knowledge in combination with ability; cleverness, expertness. Also, an ability to perform a function, acquired or learnt with practice"
So basically, paraphrased: A combination of having knowledge about something and then being able to put this knowledge to use without mistakes.
I am not playing Wizard class [...] Please tell me about the "skills" behind Wizzys rushing into a negative corner and spamming/stacking twisters. Much skills, so wow...
That's very telling. You believe the wizard doesn't require any skill? Just run up to a corner and sure, the Twister will automatically stack? Oh boy, please roll a wizard just for fun and give it a try. You'll be in for a surprise. Here's something you can do: watch a random video of a paragon 3000 wizard, and you'll at least once in their rifts hear "damn why doesn't it stack" and you'll quite a few times in every rift see the wizard reposition himself. I really can't believe that I have to read that Twister stacking does not require skill. Going back to the definition, Twister stacking is absolutely the best example of knowledge+execution, and never before has any spec in D3 required as much skill as Twister, as you literally have to have tried every corner on every map before KNOWING if it works and EXECUTING it without "wasting" Twister casts in a rift. Really, saying the ET wizard doesn't require skill is nothing short of ridiculous.
Tell me about the skills behind Barbs pulling trash mobs
While wizards are about a mix of execution and knowledge, support barbs are 90% about execution. And it's damn hard to play a Raekor support barb really, really well. That encompasses:
Animation cancelling for Furious Charge to move faster
Making sure to scout, pull, and come back to the group all within 10 seconds to re-cast Ignore Pain
Pulling mobs that are CC immune (i.e., on average 19 out of 20 pulls will be resisted)
Watching your resource to not let Aquila Cuirass drop (i.e., switching between FC and Spear)
Constantly pull mobs in to never let the wizard run out of resource, increase area damage and APD procs
Correctly scout for pylons (or do not!)
I *know* all of this. I know how to to all of this. Still, I recognize that my skill for executing these particular things all together in the pressure of a high GR was not as good as that of many other support barbs I've played with. Support barb was easily the most skill-dependent spec in the S5 meta. (WW barb in S6 will be a bit easier.)
Tell me about the skills that Monk has to do by just spamming skills inside twisters
Tell me about the skills that WD (which I personally play last few weeks) has to do by running around to grab globes and just spam Big Bad Voodoo and rest skills inside twisters (do not tell me that frog placement needs skill....)
While monk and WD are definitely way easier to play than wizard+barb, they still require a lot of knowledge and skill. Some of which even high-end groups did not display. For example, an exceptional monk (as opposed to just a very good monk) knows that it's not just about spamming in the middle and constantly hitting all buttons. It's about knowing when to stop pulling to reduce CC immunity. It's about sometimes going out and pull certain mobs AWAY from the Twister so that others can walk IN/be pulled IN (basically "cycling through mobs"). As for the WD, the way you describe the WD you might've benefited from this thread to know that the WD actually can have quite a high skill cap if you want to min-max your actions: https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/475u9l/written_guide_tips_for_support_wd_in_season_5/
I really can't stand it if people say "D3 requires no skill" and think they end up 10 below the #1 clear just because of paragons. No, paragon are only half (or maybe even 20-30%) of that. The rest is skill - and skill is a combination of knowledge and execution. So in the end, paragon is an issue, but only for a few hundred (or maybe a few thousand) of players. 99% of the playerbase could easily improve their ranking by 5 GR tiers or more just by playing more SKILLFULLY (i.e., acquire more knowledge and put it to use). One thing I never see popping up and that easily makes a difference of a few tiers is Pylon mechanics... I'm thinking of writing a guide about that since no one seems to know how pylons work. Not sure if anyone would be interested in that.
Anyways, sorry for off-topic, but I had to respond to that. We're discussing paragon here because it got out of hand and is an issue for the very top players as it becomes boring (e.g., it incentivizes no boss runs which are terrible). But for 99% of the playerbase paragon is not an issue, nor any of the changes discussed here would ever affect them.
Each class has a role, if you know that role that is the basics. This is not skill. If a Barb does not know how to pull and when to pull he doesn't know his basic role, etc. for the rest. This is not rocket science..
Get the best Wizard in knowledge, since Wizards are the DD, so the runs are more dependable from Wizards, with 1k paragon and with 2k paragon, who both know how to stack twisters and how to position and with the same 3 supports and same maps. Who will get further?
I will tell you, the 1k will get ~92 and the 2k ~102
Wont agree with you here.
As I said. I was the wizard in my grps and it was a huge difference when I compared the people I played with. Same for the wizard of course (only that I dont had the experience for that matter). I know it's no rocket science but I can only tell what I've experienced with the people I played with from so called "high end grift communities"
Of course the grp with the 2k p wizard will get higher than the 1k p wizard (with same 3 support people). But when both wizards would in theory be played by the same guy then the difference would be more like maybe 2 griftlvls at most.
the 10 lvls could be the case if the 1k wiz is less experienced, has worse gear, caldasanns and not only the 1k paragon levels of stat points are missing. But with your example it's more like 2 grift levels NOT 10.
Grinding Paragon is pretty much the only thing i cannot effectively do in this game. I absolutely hate playing zdps. I can still remember how depressive it was to build pull/healing monk a patch ago. AS well as god damn zsader, zbarb and so on. I pretty much was FORCED to create zdps characters or i could not find party to play with.
Grinding Paragon is pretty much the only thing i cannot effectively do in this game. I absolutely hate playing zdps. I can still remember how depressive it was to build pull/healing monk a patch ago. AS well as god damn zsader, zbarb and so on. I pretty much was FORCED to create zdps characters or i could not find party to play with.
Then create a DPS character, find people to play support and quit crying that you don't like to play Zdps.
Grinding Paragon is pretty much the only thing i cannot effectively do in this game. I absolutely hate playing zdps. I can still remember how depressive it was to build pull/healing monk a patch ago. AS well as god damn zsader, zbarb and so on. I pretty much was FORCED to create zdps characters or i could not find party to play with.
Then create a DPS character, find people to play support and quit crying that you don't like to play Zdps.
He's not crying, he's stating a fact. Sometimes the game forces you to choose a gameplay you hate, just because you won't get anywhere higher if you do not. If you choose to stick to a gamplay you like, you won't find many willing to play with you.
especially the dh leaderboards display this really good.
1st: gr92, p2708
2nd: gr89, p1541
3rd: gr88, p2056
4th: gr88, 1154
we can see the same in other leaderboards too.
so i agree that 1.5-2.5k paragon wont push you like 10 grift levels, its more like 3-5. especially on the solo leaderboards.
whats most important to go for the top of the leaderboards: decent gear, some skill, (very) much time to fish for the right grift, paragon. each one of these aspects will make the difference of a few grift lvls.
now dont call me a casual for this "opinion", as i wouldnt consider myself a casual^^
It's a mess, because the paragon system creates the need for 3 types of leaderboards and we only have one:
1) The one we have right now - the mixed LB, grind + skill
2) The one the competitive players want - the skill LB, based purely on skill, with capped paragon and gem levels
3) The one the paragon lovers want - the grind LB, based purely on paragon level
Wudijo run the last week of the season clearly showed that even the best DH in the world can NOT be rank 1 and overcome the time variable on the mixed LB (case 1). Has wudijo been competing on a case 2) LB he would have reclaimed the rank 1 position again.
I personally don't expect any changes in the paragon system until the next D3 expansion (aka Q3 2017). A lot of time passed since the paragon problem has emerged and the devs didn't show any initiative at all to solve it. It's their game after all. It's their mess also.
I have a monk friend who got rank 2 world on NS with just about ~1200 paragons. He was a very dedicated cool player. He fished like crazy for good rift. He said he blew about 300 gr keys to get THIS ONE DREAM RIFT.
So this is possible indeed with a lot of dedication and fishing.
But with botted paragons it's just SO MUCH EASIER, unfortunately. 3000 paragon player need just a couple of attempts to surpass a low paragon player.
mb here? http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/omfgkittens-2893/hero/76903777
so what is your paragon?
this stories about VERY EASY gear)) show us you items lmao, it was discussed hundred times, it is still very hard to get decent rolls on every ancient piece of gear
well written @bagstone.
you mentioned several reasons why paragon gives even a huge benefit when not including the obvious progression (+5 mainstat / lvl).
and that is also the reason why it's overall too big of a boost (let it be 3-4 griflvls for 2k paragons just from a character stat pov).
the mainstat boosting just needs to change. whether that's in form of a simple mainstat nerf (e.g. +1 instead of +5) or a complete new paragon 3.0 is probably a question of ressources blizzard puts into D3.
The only thing I can't understand is that it takes them so long to change (it obviously will change in the future...)
in all antiparagon discussions i can't get one thing: why lowskilled lowparagon players with 300+ played hours are so worried about 3k people and top100 leaderboards. why people that played 15+ hours during the hole era or season must have the same mainstat/damage/gear/closed rifts as others?
I said it many times but I will say it again. Only fix to paragon system without an all over overhaul, to have paragon leagues that seperate players based on their paragon levels and on top of that an overall leaderboards.
This way we would have incentive to try and be better knowing we have the possibilty of beating players that acquired same paragon boost. Ofc there will be more powerfull players and players with high level gems but at least we wont have to compete against players that have 2k more paragon levels than us.
This would give a good boost to NS players which have to deal with 4k paragon players now and also players who cant give 15 hours/day or not botting to have a fair playing ground.
I know I myself would try very hard to beat my own division's rankings ^^
And what if you are near next paragon division and fail to do what you wanted? You enter next one as rock bottom.
Season 6 barbarian solo sc EU grift 85 12m 23.199s MotE build
The best way would be to organize leaderboard ranking through paragon lvl brackets, that records your highest GR run in the lvl bracket you were at. Every 200 lvls seems good, 0-200, 201-400, ect.
Paragon itself allows for people to continue progressing smoothly. Exponential XP scaling past a certain point sucks - Do you REALLY want to spend 3-4 hours of time just to get a 5 stat boost? Nerfing the amount of stat boost given by Paragon also does the same thing - It makes it take 5x the amount of time to reach the same point that you were before.
Think about it - Do you REALLY want to have to spend over 20 straight hours, JUST to go 1 GR higher? Some people want to have NO upwards progression whatsoever it seems, once you have reached the cap, thats it, you may as well put D3 up because there is no more progression for you at all. As it stands, the problem is NOT paragon lvling, as that fixes a problem inherent in the game. The problem is that leaderboards do NOT reflect your paragon lvl. Just seperate leaderboards by paragon lvls, and see all the so-called problems with paragon go away.
I can only speak from my limited xp, since I didnt do way more that 2k grifts last season, and maybe 10% of those were in meta 4ppl groups.
Maybe when you do some 1k of those you get some crazy routine so you can play while watching some movie or reading shit and still be great for your group, but that is way beyond me.
Well there are some level of skill needed for barbs to pull mobs. I didnt believe that myself but when I saw few 110+ runs on twitch I learned few usefull things, basically how to unstuck mobs or how to move them in large groups over entire screen. And there is for sure some skill involved in proper scouting and preparing ground for wizz to spam twisters.
There is a lot of skill needed for wizzards to call moves for the group, and position twisters in right spots. That is how I see it. Maybe if you play with same group over and over you get to do things without mistakes, but in community games or even public games, I saw many wizzards who, despite 1.3-4k paragons simply did position twisters in wrong spots and that have resulted failed grifts.
I know shit about WD and Monk so can't tell what level of skill is required for those in high group grifts.
Season 6 barbarian solo sc EU grift 85 12m 23.199s MotE build
@Psyborg
maybe some "basic skill" yes. But trust me the diablo community is full of people unwilling to learn basic stuff, or just not trying (or dont wanna try).
At the end of the season I ran many 4 man grps (usually Im a solo player) with my wizard (so I was more or less the only paragon dependant class).
There was a huge difference between running 85, 90, 95 or 100+ just depending on what the barb/monk/wd did right or wrong.
Sometimes it was a struggle to do 90 and sometimes 99 was a 100% clear in time.
So yes, experience and proper play was a much more deciding factor than paragon was.
You could argue that it's only about the paragon when you always play with the same people who you know what they're doing. Then yes, paragon (and gear) of the DPS class is more or less the only thing you can try to improve to get higher in grifts (beside of RNG of course)
So, we get into a discussion of skill? This might be slightly off-topic since it's a thread about paragon. But since it's my thread, and I think distinguishing skill and paragon is important, "I'll allow it". Let's look at the definition of skill (from the OED):
"Capability of accomplishing something with precision and certainty; practical knowledge in combination with ability; cleverness, expertness. Also, an ability to perform a function, acquired or learnt with practice"
So basically, paraphrased: A combination of having knowledge about something and then being able to put this knowledge to use without mistakes.
That's very telling. You believe the wizard doesn't require any skill? Just run up to a corner and sure, the Twister will automatically stack? Oh boy, please roll a wizard just for fun and give it a try. You'll be in for a surprise. Here's something you can do: watch a random video of a paragon 3000 wizard, and you'll at least once in their rifts hear "damn why doesn't it stack" and you'll quite a few times in every rift see the wizard reposition himself. I really can't believe that I have to read that Twister stacking does not require skill. Going back to the definition, Twister stacking is absolutely the best example of knowledge+execution, and never before has any spec in D3 required as much skill as Twister, as you literally have to have tried every corner on every map before KNOWING if it works and EXECUTING it without "wasting" Twister casts in a rift. Really, saying the ET wizard doesn't require skill is nothing short of ridiculous.
While wizards are about a mix of execution and knowledge, support barbs are 90% about execution. And it's damn hard to play a Raekor support barb really, really well. That encompasses:
I *know* all of this. I know how to to all of this. Still, I recognize that my skill for executing these particular things all together in the pressure of a high GR was not as good as that of many other support barbs I've played with. Support barb was easily the most skill-dependent spec in the S5 meta. (WW barb in S6 will be a bit easier.)
While monk and WD are definitely way easier to play than wizard+barb, they still require a lot of knowledge and skill. Some of which even high-end groups did not display. For example, an exceptional monk (as opposed to just a very good monk) knows that it's not just about spamming in the middle and constantly hitting all buttons. It's about knowing when to stop pulling to reduce CC immunity. It's about sometimes going out and pull certain mobs AWAY from the Twister so that others can walk IN/be pulled IN (basically "cycling through mobs"). As for the WD, the way you describe the WD you might've benefited from this thread to know that the WD actually can have quite a high skill cap if you want to min-max your actions: https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/475u9l/written_guide_tips_for_support_wd_in_season_5/
I really can't stand it if people say "D3 requires no skill" and think they end up 10 below the #1 clear just because of paragons. No, paragon are only half (or maybe even 20-30%) of that. The rest is skill - and skill is a combination of knowledge and execution. So in the end, paragon is an issue, but only for a few hundred (or maybe a few thousand) of players. 99% of the playerbase could easily improve their ranking by 5 GR tiers or more just by playing more SKILLFULLY (i.e., acquire more knowledge and put it to use). One thing I never see popping up and that easily makes a difference of a few tiers is Pylon mechanics... I'm thinking of writing a guide about that since no one seems to know how pylons work. Not sure if anyone would be interested in that.
Anyways, sorry for off-topic, but I had to respond to that. We're discussing paragon here because it got out of hand and is an issue for the very top players as it becomes boring (e.g., it incentivizes no boss runs which are terrible). But for 99% of the playerbase paragon is not an issue, nor any of the changes discussed here would ever affect them.
Wont agree with you here.
As I said. I was the wizard in my grps and it was a huge difference when I compared the people I played with. Same for the wizard of course (only that I dont had the experience for that matter). I know it's no rocket science but I can only tell what I've experienced with the people I played with from so called "high end grift communities"
Of course the grp with the 2k p wizard will get higher than the 1k p wizard (with same 3 support people). But when both wizards would in theory be played by the same guy then the difference would be more like maybe 2 griftlvls at most.
the 10 lvls could be the case if the 1k wiz is less experienced, has worse gear, caldasanns and not only the 1k paragon levels of stat points are missing. But with your example it's more like 2 grift levels NOT 10.
Grinding Paragon is pretty much the only thing i cannot effectively do in this game. I absolutely hate playing zdps. I can still remember how depressive it was to build pull/healing monk a patch ago. AS well as god damn zsader, zbarb and so on. I pretty much was FORCED to create zdps characters or i could not find party to play with.
http://www.angryroleplayer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/c/angryroleplayer
https://www.diablofans.com/builds/105329-2-6-7-rend-bleed-whirlwind-gr130
https://www.diablofans.com/builds/105301-2-6-7-fist-of-the-heavens-aegis-of-valor-gr110
so you are 1100. ok nice to know))
It's a mess, because the paragon system creates the need for 3 types of leaderboards and we only have one:
1) The one we have right now - the mixed LB, grind + skill
2) The one the competitive players want - the skill LB, based purely on skill, with capped paragon and gem levels
3) The one the paragon lovers want - the grind LB, based purely on paragon level
Wudijo run the last week of the season clearly showed that even the best DH in the world can NOT be rank 1 and overcome the time variable on the mixed LB (case 1). Has wudijo been competing on a case 2) LB he would have reclaimed the rank 1 position again.
I personally don't expect any changes in the paragon system until the next D3 expansion (aka Q3 2017). A lot of time passed since the paragon problem has emerged and the devs didn't show any initiative at all to solve it. It's their game after all. It's their mess also.
I have a monk friend who got rank 2 world on NS with just about ~1200 paragons. He was a very dedicated cool player. He fished like crazy for good rift. He said he blew about 300 gr keys to get THIS ONE DREAM RIFT.
So this is possible indeed with a lot of dedication and fishing.
But with botted paragons it's just SO MUCH EASIER, unfortunately. 3000 paragon player need just a couple of attempts to surpass a low paragon player.
http://www.angryroleplayer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/c/angryroleplayer
https://www.diablofans.com/builds/105329-2-6-7-rend-bleed-whirlwind-gr130
https://www.diablofans.com/builds/105301-2-6-7-fist-of-the-heavens-aegis-of-valor-gr110
Most Paragons comes meta play not bots.
Bots do all the crap we don't like to do like farm keys, grind mats and level gems for augmenting 1-65.
Not saying it doesn't help then (it does), not saying they don't get Paragons from it (they do but not as much as you think)