Despite the many patch notes and topics, I feel a few things might have been a little glossed over for the casual player. I'm talking more about Quality of Life style changes rather than super high end efficiency.
General
+ I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the paragon tab now opens on the tab you just got a point in when you click the popup button.
Greater Rifts
~ Elites are much more valuable to kill now (not sure if this is good or bad for high level rifts.)
+ Fewer crappy maps and less time wandering around alone wondering if there are any monsters to play with.
+ Legendary gems upgrade around twice as quickly as before (at least that's my experience on PTR.)
+ Pylon placement feels a lot more even.
+ Much lower health for solo/2/3man.
Nephalem Rifts
+ Pylon spacing improvements.
- Don't have GR density.
- Keep the crappy empty, dead end filled cave maps. Commonly hit level 4-5 because of crap maps without enough elites to fuel the rebalanced progress meter.
- no lower health monsters for solo.
- No more kill streaks to keep you amused, making rifts feel kind of bland to me. Also no experience bonus from them. This is accentuated by how pronounced it is in Adventure mode now.
- Potentially less experience than bounties now due to the action combat multiplier.
Bounties
+ The new bounties seem cool - and are not location specific. I had the same portal event in two different places.
+ New Action Combat! I think the system is super fun. Just don't go near a rift.
+ The Pity Arrow appears way earlier now on a lot of the most annoying bounties (Find the Plague Tunnels!)
+ Keywardens on the map are highlighted with a purple arrow.
~ Objectives now take twice as long to channel for completion (releasing prisoners, etc.) but you can start them before killing the associated monsters now.
- Act V still exists.
Set Dungeons
+ Really fun cool concept.
+ Fun objectives.
- Hunting down stray monsters for completion is aggravating.
Did I miss anything? Do you disagree? These are the sorts of things I notice when I'm actually playing, but maybe others see things differently.
Edit 1: Added info from JunoBug about GRs and Bounties.
Edit 2: Added pylon placement from Midknite.
Edit 3: Added some general things I remembered.
Edit 4: Adding that the health change to monsters per player is only in GR.
My only real issue with the patch is that so many areas of the game improved so much (it's not perfect, but much better than it was) but regular rifts became worse, and you have to keep doing them anyway because keys.
One of the biggest things that made me stop playing Season 4 was empty rifts, and on the PTR there were still a few times in regular rifts where I could use an entire bar of Discipline vaulting before finding a monster (on the same level, no backtracking, with TacAdv.)
In comparison with regular rifts:
- GRs offer far more exp, legendary gems and their upgrades, more reliable legendary acquisition, more blood shards for comparative difficulty.
- Bounties offer a ton of crafting mats without stopping to loot, Act specific mats, slightly fewer Death's Breaths, and now more experience and variety of things to do - Oh and the Vault, too (not counting rainbow land because its rubbish.) Oh also keywardens for Hellfire Amulets.
Regular rifts offer ... slightly better Death's Breath farming, and the keys that let you escape for a bit to do the good rifts.
You forgot about gold. Its now something to farm and you get it in rifts.
You get almost no death's breath doing bounties because bounty specific elites don't drop them and you don't want to waste time on taking out other elites while doing the bounty. Sure some will drop along the way but its peanuts compared to what you get in rifts.
Releasing prisoners takes longer yes, but it doesn't require you to kill all the marked monsters before you do it. Might not be important for most but as a WD I can spirit walk and start releasing and almost always finish before a monster can get to me.
Grifts didn't get longer, the progression just shifted more towards the elites so its actually beneficial to kill them now.
I like carrots! They help you see in the dark if there's a World War II on.
Yeah by longer I meant that high level people might still be ignoring elites and therefore having to kill more white mobs. I only do mid level GRs where you can still play normally so I have no idea.
I actually didn't notice that you could click things before killing the associated monsters now. Or I noticed and it didn't really register. It doesn't really matter much either way, but I feel like sitting around waiting time never feels good to players.
On a related note, I just remembered - legendary gems seem to upgrade way faster now.
Umm, no, not at all the same distance.
The base XP from mobs has been doubled, and the health of mobs when not playing with 4 others has been reduced. I recall that solo is basically 50% less health now? So, essentially, the amount of time needed for the Paragon grind has been reduced by half (Because XP leech gear only increased lvling speed by around 20% at lower GRifts levels, nowhere NEAR double the XP)
Gems will also upgrade faster now - Its pretty cheap to buy the extra runs up to GR 40 or so, so the first 30 lvls of a gem (most important lvls!) go by 25% faster.
In addition, Grifts have been optimized, and are more dense than before. Finally, almost ALL sets have been greatly buffed, and there are many more sources of 50% damage reduction than before.
So, overall, people will likely be 5-10 GRifts ahead (Which is why the Conquests for season have been increased by 5 GRift lvls across the board), and this means more legendaries, more gem levels, and MUCH more XP. If you only managed 300 in this season, you'll get close to 500 next season with the same effort. If you got 800 this season, you'll get pretty close to 1500 next season with the same effort.
I like carrots! They help you see in the dark if there's a World War II on.
Yeah by longer I meant that high level people might still be ignoring elites and therefore having to kill more white mobs. I only do mid level GRs where you can still play normally so I have no idea.
I actually didn't notice that you could click things before killing the associated monsters now. Or I noticed and it didn't really register. It doesn't really matter much either way, but I feel like sitting around waiting time never feels good to players.
On a related note, I just remembered - legendary gems seem to upgrade way faster now.
On PTR no one is ignoring elites, in fact many solo clears are made using nemesis bracers because elites are so valuable now, which tbh is alot better, skipping elites was kinda retarded.
Little question to those who played on ptr - can i reroll in cube 2.3 version of legendary item after 2.4 ang gain "new" version, with new properties (like Woh, Manticore)?
I like carrots! They help you see in the dark if there's a World War II on.
Yeah by longer I meant that high level people might still be ignoring elites and therefore having to kill more white mobs. I only do mid level GRs where you can still play normally so I have no idea.
I actually didn't notice that you could click things before killing the associated monsters now. Or I noticed and it didn't really register. It doesn't really matter much either way, but I feel like sitting around waiting time never feels good to players.
On a related note, I just remembered - legendary gems seem to upgrade way faster now.
The change to Rift progression means you ALWAYS want to kill Elites. The overall number of white kills for Rift/GRift completion has increased by bout 40%, whereas the contributation of Elites to progress has increased to 6% of your overall progression. That is HUGE. Essentially, each elite pack is now worth close to 150 white kills. In addition, we've had a few sets added that GREATLY increase your damage to a single target - The new "melee" Demon Hunter set absolutely slaughters elites. Combined with the change to density on most GRift maps, overall Grifts will be completed faster.
Little question to those who played on ptr - can i reroll in cube 2.3 version of legendary item after 2.4 ang gain "new" version, with new properties (like Woh, Manticore)?
I haven't tested it personally but I've read that it works for those types of items, yes.
The change to Rift progression means you ALWAYS want to kill Elites. The overall number of white kills for Rift/GRift completion has increased by bout 40%, whereas the contributation of Elites to progress has increased to 6% of your overall progression. That is HUGE. Essentially, each elite pack is now worth close to 150 white kills. In addition, we've had a few sets added that GREATLY increase your damage to a single target - The new "melee" Demon Hunter set absolutely slaughters elites. Combined with the change to density on most GRift maps, overall Grifts will be completed faster.
Thanks for the numbers on that - I knew that the elite assassin type builds felt faster now but it's interesting to see just how much more valuable they are. I love the Nemesis Bracers mechanic.
Little question to those who played on ptr - can i reroll in cube 2.3 version of legendary item after 2.4 ang gain "new" version, with new properties (like Woh, Manticore)?
I haven't tested it personally but I've read that it works for those types of items, yes.
I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned but pylon placement has greatly improved. You tend to find them closer to the start of a map instead of in some remote area you wouldn't normally go to (unless it was a dead end on accident) or at the end of a map. Not to mention you have less instances of going 3 floors without seeing one. That coupled with every pylon being useful for (almost) every class and build, I think the pylon rework deserves some hype.
I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned but pylon placement has greatly improved. You tend to find them closer to the start of a map instead of in some remote area you wouldn't normally go to (unless it was a dead end on accident) or at the end of a map. Not to mention you have less instances of going 3 floors without seeing one. That coupled with every pylon being useful for (almost) every class and build, I think the pylon rework deserves some hype.
You're right, I definitely got that sense too, though I wasn't really concentrating on it. Updated the OP to add them (someone please correct me if it's GR only; I can't remember if normal rifts were like that too.)
Nothing actually has been added. Just aiming at higher GRs.
Except Greyhollow Island, Set dungeons, new cosmetics, and such, what havethe RomansBlizzard added this patch?
New area with same mechanics/monsters (wow they have new colors (!!)...
Set Dungeons with no actual reward (yea lets waste our time for cosmetics!! )
New cosmetics (lol really no comment)
So what else ACTUAL new? Nothing. The last new addition was the Greater Rifts.
It is actually new monsters, and around 25-30 quests tied into the new map, greyhollow island is almost a mini act with all the variety it brings.
If you do not care for cosmetics and portraits, do not waste your time, but do not for a second think that your intricacy's are shared by all!
I, along with almost every hardcore Diablo player love unlocking cosmetics, we love portraits, pets, etc.... basically anything that we can unlock as we grind our way through the game is something that we appreciate from the D3 Dev team. On top of that, the story that they tell in Greyhollow Isle has a lot more importance than is being let on, so if you care about D3 lore, and what is to come, you are going to love the island.
If not, take your grief somewhere else, we do not care!
Achievements are also a point of progress that add variety to just paragon and GRs.
The biggest point of the patch for me is that I can now play at least 4-5 different specs with every class that can play to ok GR levels of efficiency. Will they all be on top of the leaderboards? No, of course not. But despite only ever seeming to talk about top GR builds that they didn't even create and don't understand, most of the playerbase is not topping the leaderboards. Comparing that past patches have only given one new build for each class at most, this is a massive improvement.
Could more be done for the game? Could more things be improved? Of course. But the changes that are coming make the game significantly better than it was before.
Quality of Life is also super important to me, because it's always these aspects that cause me to quit the game until the next season+patch. Each time for the past few patches, the thing I hated the most that made me quit have been fixed.
Saying cosmetics are meaningless just shows you don't understand the majority of players - if you want more development on the game, what you should actually want is purchasable cosmetics, because that'd get the dev team more funding to add more to the game.
Why does it have to be new core features OR cosmetics and aesthetics? You do realise that the people who make the portraits aren't the people who add new core features, right?
Also, I didn't say players wanted cosmetics OVER core features - just that people would happily chase after them and/or buy them, which would help fund the obviously tiny dev team. Why they aren't using opportunities to make money in non-game-breaking ways I still don't understand, but the slow development sure isn't because of laziness. They're misguided a lot of the time, but the idea that one entire team is still employed by Blizzard while lazing around all day is ridiculous.
"Ppl want more freedom to their builds" uh, that's exactly what this patch brings. That's why it's such a great improvement over all previous patches.
Quality of Life and aesthetics are completely different things. QoL means things like the new buff bar, gems upgrading faster, solo/2/3 player improvements. Monster retuning (Act V jumpy things are so much better now) new bounties, more reasons to do them, the new Action Combat combo system (which is awesome but then completely ruined by not being in rifts where everyone actually spends most of their time.) All the little things that slowly piss you off more and more as you're playing in general.
Is the game perfect? No. Is the game better than it was last patch? Yes. No one's throwing a party for Blizzard being flawless; the point of this thread was just to point out a few things that might have slid under the radar - and there were plenty of bad things to go with the good.
While not precisely the topic of this thread (dont want to make useless threads for this question) ill still ask here:
In preparation for the patch i wanted to make a list of items to be found for the cube. Just to be sure i checked on PTR (because there i noticed some items that i already had were missing, but thought it was only for items that were completely changed) and noticed that 14 of the items i have in cube (and had for sure before i copied characters onto PTR) were removed from the cube in 2.4. And what surprised me was that some changed items stayed, most changed items were removed, but also several unchanged items were removed.
The question is: is this just some messed up bug or do i simply have to deal with patch deleting items from cube that werent even touched in the patch? Because, to be honest, it kinda does piss me off.
EDIT: these items disappeared from the cube: oculus ring, short mans finger, fazulas chain, sacred harness, drakkons lesson, winterflurry, vengeful wind, triumvirate, three hundreth spear, demons demise, star metal kukri, henris perquesition, fist of azturrasq, buriza
Going to say bug. The items that changed (like Oculus Ring) were removed, but my short man's finger, henri's etc, are still in place on the PTR.
@Psyborg: Right even from DH only perspective there is more for DH in this patch (sets, legendaries, new melee concept (or rather the rise of the assassin single target killers) perma vengeance builds, not all leaderboard but all at least T10/GR60 or so) than there has been in any other patch. There's also more in this patch than there has been since seasons started. It's not perfect and they can do more things, but it's not a pointless patch overall.
There is no reason for a carrot, there is literally 0 incentive to keep people in the game after they've played through the content. There is no subscription or micro transactions, you should be happy they release regular big content patches at all ungrateful twat.
Updated because I finally realised that the lower monster health change for fewer than 4 players is only in Greater Rifts. So Nephalem Rifts are even worse than I originally thought and solo players are still third class citizens :/
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Despite the many patch notes and topics, I feel a few things might have been a little glossed over for the casual player. I'm talking more about Quality of Life style changes rather than super high end efficiency.
General
+ I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the paragon tab now opens on the tab you just got a point in when you click the popup button.
Greater Rifts
~ Elites are much more valuable to kill now (not sure if this is good or bad for high level rifts.)
+ Fewer crappy maps and less time wandering around alone wondering if there are any monsters to play with.
+ Legendary gems upgrade around twice as quickly as before (at least that's my experience on PTR.)
+ Pylon placement feels a lot more even.
+ Much lower health for solo/2/3man.
Nephalem Rifts
+ Pylon spacing improvements.
- Don't have GR density.
- Keep the crappy empty, dead end filled cave maps. Commonly hit level 4-5 because of crap maps without enough elites to fuel the rebalanced progress meter.
- no lower health monsters for solo.
- No more kill streaks to keep you amused, making rifts feel kind of bland to me. Also no experience bonus from them. This is accentuated by how pronounced it is in Adventure mode now.
- Potentially less experience than bounties now due to the action combat multiplier.
Bounties
+ The new bounties seem cool - and are not location specific. I had the same portal event in two different places.
+ New Action Combat! I think the system is super fun. Just don't go near a rift.
+ The Pity Arrow appears way earlier now on a lot of the most annoying bounties (Find the Plague Tunnels!)
+ Keywardens on the map are highlighted with a purple arrow.
~ Objectives now take twice as long to channel for completion (releasing prisoners, etc.) but you can start them before killing the associated monsters now.
- Act V still exists.
Set Dungeons
+ Really fun cool concept.
+ Fun objectives.
- Hunting down stray monsters for completion is aggravating.
Did I miss anything? Do you disagree? These are the sorts of things I notice when I'm actually playing, but maybe others see things differently.
Edit 1: Added info from JunoBug about GRs and Bounties.
Edit 2: Added pylon placement from Midknite.
Edit 3: Added some general things I remembered.
Edit 4: Adding that the health change to monsters per player is only in GR.
My only real issue with the patch is that so many areas of the game improved so much (it's not perfect, but much better than it was) but regular rifts became worse, and you have to keep doing them anyway because keys.
One of the biggest things that made me stop playing Season 4 was empty rifts, and on the PTR there were still a few times in regular rifts where I could use an entire bar of Discipline vaulting before finding a monster (on the same level, no backtracking, with TacAdv.)
In comparison with regular rifts:
- GRs offer far more exp, legendary gems and their upgrades, more reliable legendary acquisition, more blood shards for comparative difficulty.
- Bounties offer a ton of crafting mats without stopping to loot, Act specific mats, slightly fewer Death's Breaths, and now more experience and variety of things to do - Oh and the Vault, too (not counting rainbow land because its rubbish.) Oh also keywardens for Hellfire Amulets.
Regular rifts offer ... slightly better Death's Breath farming, and the keys that let you escape for a bit to do the good rifts.
You forgot about gold. Its now something to farm and you get it in rifts.
You get almost no death's breath doing bounties because bounty specific elites don't drop them and you don't want to waste time on taking out other elites while doing the bounty. Sure some will drop along the way but its peanuts compared to what you get in rifts.
Releasing prisoners takes longer yes, but it doesn't require you to kill all the marked monsters before you do it. Might not be important for most but as a WD I can spirit walk and start releasing and almost always finish before a monster can get to me.
Grifts didn't get longer, the progression just shifted more towards the elites so its actually beneficial to kill them now.
I like carrots! They help you see in the dark if there's a World War II on.
Yeah by longer I meant that high level people might still be ignoring elites and therefore having to kill more white mobs. I only do mid level GRs where you can still play normally so I have no idea.
I actually didn't notice that you could click things before killing the associated monsters now. Or I noticed and it didn't really register. It doesn't really matter much either way, but I feel like sitting around waiting time never feels good to players.
On a related note, I just remembered - legendary gems seem to upgrade way faster now.
The base XP from mobs has been doubled, and the health of mobs when not playing with 4 others has been reduced. I recall that solo is basically 50% less health now? So, essentially, the amount of time needed for the Paragon grind has been reduced by half (Because XP leech gear only increased lvling speed by around 20% at lower GRifts levels, nowhere NEAR double the XP)
Gems will also upgrade faster now - Its pretty cheap to buy the extra runs up to GR 40 or so, so the first 30 lvls of a gem (most important lvls!) go by 25% faster.
In addition, Grifts have been optimized, and are more dense than before. Finally, almost ALL sets have been greatly buffed, and there are many more sources of 50% damage reduction than before.
So, overall, people will likely be 5-10 GRifts ahead (Which is why the Conquests for season have been increased by 5 GRift lvls across the board), and this means more legendaries, more gem levels, and MUCH more XP. If you only managed 300 in this season, you'll get close to 500 next season with the same effort. If you got 800 this season, you'll get pretty close to 1500 next season with the same effort.
On PTR no one is ignoring elites, in fact many solo clears are made using nemesis bracers because elites are so valuable now, which tbh is alot better, skipping elites was kinda retarded.
Those Who Do Not Know True Pain Cannot Possibly Understand True Peace...
Little question to those who played on ptr - can i reroll in cube 2.3 version of legendary item after 2.4 ang gain "new" version, with new properties (like Woh, Manticore)?
I haven't tested it personally but I've read that it works for those types of items, yes.
Thanks for the numbers on that - I knew that the elite assassin type builds felt faster now but it's interesting to see just how much more valuable they are. I love the Nemesis Bracers mechanic.I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned but pylon placement has greatly improved. You tend to find them closer to the start of a map instead of in some remote area you wouldn't normally go to (unless it was a dead end on accident) or at the end of a map. Not to mention you have less instances of going 3 floors without seeing one. That coupled with every pylon being useful for (almost) every class and build, I think the pylon rework deserves some hype.
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I didn't know that about the keywarden positions. That is a great addition to the game.
the RomansBlizzard added this patch?If you do not care for cosmetics and portraits, do not waste your time, but do not for a second think that your intricacy's are shared by all!
I, along with almost every hardcore Diablo player love unlocking cosmetics, we love portraits, pets, etc.... basically anything that we can unlock as we grind our way through the game is something that we appreciate from the D3 Dev team. On top of that, the story that they tell in Greyhollow Isle has a lot more importance than is being let on, so if you care about D3 lore, and what is to come, you are going to love the island.
If not, take your grief somewhere else, we do not care!
Achievements are also a point of progress that add variety to just paragon and GRs.
The biggest point of the patch for me is that I can now play at least 4-5 different specs with every class that can play to ok GR levels of efficiency. Will they all be on top of the leaderboards? No, of course not. But despite only ever seeming to talk about top GR builds that they didn't even create and don't understand, most of the playerbase is not topping the leaderboards. Comparing that past patches have only given one new build for each class at most, this is a massive improvement.
Could more be done for the game? Could more things be improved? Of course. But the changes that are coming make the game significantly better than it was before.
Quality of Life is also super important to me, because it's always these aspects that cause me to quit the game until the next season+patch. Each time for the past few patches, the thing I hated the most that made me quit have been fixed.
Saying cosmetics are meaningless just shows you don't understand the majority of players - if you want more development on the game, what you should actually want is purchasable cosmetics, because that'd get the dev team more funding to add more to the game.
Why does it have to be new core features OR cosmetics and aesthetics? You do realise that the people who make the portraits aren't the people who add new core features, right?
Also, I didn't say players wanted cosmetics OVER core features - just that people would happily chase after them and/or buy them, which would help fund the obviously tiny dev team. Why they aren't using opportunities to make money in non-game-breaking ways I still don't understand, but the slow development sure isn't because of laziness. They're misguided a lot of the time, but the idea that one entire team is still employed by Blizzard while lazing around all day is ridiculous.
"Ppl want more freedom to their builds" uh, that's exactly what this patch brings. That's why it's such a great improvement over all previous patches.
Quality of Life and aesthetics are completely different things. QoL means things like the new buff bar, gems upgrading faster, solo/2/3 player improvements. Monster retuning (Act V jumpy things are so much better now) new bounties, more reasons to do them, the new Action Combat combo system (which is awesome but then completely ruined by not being in rifts where everyone actually spends most of their time.) All the little things that slowly piss you off more and more as you're playing in general.
Is the game perfect? No. Is the game better than it was last patch? Yes. No one's throwing a party for Blizzard being flawless; the point of this thread was just to point out a few things that might have slid under the radar - and there were plenty of bad things to go with the good.
Going to say bug. The items that changed (like Oculus Ring) were removed, but my short man's finger, henri's etc, are still in place on the PTR.
@Psyborg: Right even from DH only perspective there is more for DH in this patch (sets, legendaries, new melee concept (or rather the rise of the assassin single target killers) perma vengeance builds, not all leaderboard but all at least T10/GR60 or so) than there has been in any other patch. There's also more in this patch than there has been since seasons started. It's not perfect and they can do more things, but it's not a pointless patch overall.
There is no reason for a carrot, there is literally 0 incentive to keep people in the game after they've played through the content. There is no subscription or micro transactions, you should be happy they release regular big content patches at all ungrateful twat.
Updated because I finally realised that the lower monster health change for fewer than 4 players is only in Greater Rifts. So Nephalem Rifts are even worse than I originally thought and solo players are still third class citizens :/