Sure, this isn't the most exciting change, but it's necessary.
Full decently rolled ancient gear can be obtained after perhaps 100-200 hours into a season if you work straight towards that goal. At that point, with full level 80ish augment you can expect to have about 16k mainstat points. An additional 200 paragon levels gives another 1k mainstat points yielding a 6.25% increase in damage (and some associated survivability). The rate of return on this does diminish, but pitifully slowly. At 25k main stat points (around paragon 2600 or so) an additional 200 paragon levels is still giving an additional 4% damage increase.
By the time you have full augmented ancient, its going to take considerably longer to squeak 6.25% more damage from gear upgrades than it would to grind 200 paragon levels. If you ever get 2k+ paragon your gear would probably be nearly capped out. It's unlikely to even be possible to get 4% more damage out of gear upgrades by that point.
The end game progression turns into nothing more than a horrible slog of grinding paragon. There isn't isn't even another option on how to progress a given character let alone a competitive or compelling one.
Introducing super rare, more powerful versions of existing items greatly extends the longevity of the item hunt. I'm not sure it would extend all the way up to 2k+ paragon, but it would easily extend to 1500ish if not higher. Super rare meaningful items are necessary if the item hunt is ever to compete with the paragon hunt.
And besides, implementing primal ancients isn't exactly a huge time sink for the dev team. This is an easy and necessary improvement. It will shift the mid and late game back towards item hunting and further delay the importance of paragon grinding until levels past what most people ever achieve in a season.
I definitely want to see more new items, better balancing of builds, and other horizontal progression options. But for vertical progression, the benefits of implementing primal ancients FAR outweighs the costs. It's a no brainer.
Hellgate: London was a game that experimented with this style of view (though it was first person was available too). It was an ARPG made by some former employees of Blizzard North that left to make their own gaming company.
While the game ultimately failed, the first person view was really immersive. In reference to Lamack's list above, there were still large packs of mobs to aoe down. Speed builds were still popular for farming. Teleport skills still existed. The aoe effects were quite impressive (for the day). Pet builds were very viable (even a little TOO viable in some settings). There were more NPC's than in diablo, but that was for story reasons, not for gameplay reasons. Environmental factors were much MORE influential than they are in diablo (cover and elevation were very impactful on what builds worked at high difficulties).
There's no reason an ARPG cannot be made with that camera perspective and still maintain the mechanical variety we expect from an ARPG.
It will, however, have a dramatic impact on the perception of your character. A first person or over the shoulder view makes us view the characters as embodying ourselves. It's a much more personal style. Isometric views tend to have us think of someone controlling a character (as opposed to being the character).
I would argue this is a core aspect of the Diablo series thus far. Changing the camera view would shift the focus away from the world and towards the character. This shift in focus, both literally and figuratively, would be a gamble. But it isn't necessarily a bad one. Different isn't always worse. Blizzard certainly has the resources and talent to pull it off well if they desire to do so.
In the long run, I don't think simply blending the good aspects of diablo 2 and 3 will work. Games have progressed far too much in 20 years for that. If/when we ever see a Diablo 4, it will have to be a fairly substantial evolution of the series. A new camera perspective is likely first of many potential changes that will have to be weighed.
the 20 min boss run is absolutely trivial with a helltooth gargantuan angry chicken build. You do not need very high damage; even missing some of the support legendaries for the build wouldn't really matter much.
With mediocre gear I finished the 20 min boss run on the first try with like 3 minutes left, solo. Then my friend logged on and I did it for him (he just stood in town and accepted the fights) with 3 minutes to spare again.
When you are soloing this it makes no difference at all what order you do them in. Just slap on helltooth, some gargantuan support legendaires (if you have them - mask of jeram, tasker and theo, short man's finger), manajuma set, and as much run speed as you can get. If you die once in a while while running (which you probably won't since by the time something attacks you, you're 3 screens away already), it won't matter.
I completely understand that some other classes can make a 20 min boss run solo very hard. But on a witch doctor its almost impossible to fail if you have a garg / chicken build.
A consistent 5ms ping time to a remote game server is almost literally impossible. That's on the order of response time you'd expect if you were on the same local network as the server itself.
For most people, just pinging their own ISP would have a response time of about 10ms. Each hop beyond that would usually add about another 5-7ms at least. A typical number of hops from a home pc to a game server would be about 10 or 15 hops.
Heck, with the CSGO servers in Seattle and DC (if you are on the US server; of course, that may not be the case), you wouldn't even be able to to ping from most of the southwest, texas, or virtually the entire midwest without breaking the speed of light (5ms*speed of light = 931 miles). And that's neglecting processing time altogether.
A 16ms lag time in LoL is also bordering on incredible.
Wonderful response times for most games is 30-40ms with average 'good' response times being much more on the order of 70-80ms.
Try a trace route. If you get 5ms responses all the way up to blizzards ping block, then you have room to complain to them. My money isn't on it.
Try using d3planner.com if you want to understand how various things affect your damage. Import your character via your battle tag, spend your paragon points, then turn on the buffs you want to use. Your skills will display the damage they will actually do in game, including breaking down everything affecting that damage and its source. It's a pretty nifty lil site.
To keep the recovery and add the 10% damage you could shift the recovery off to another location.
All slots except pants, belt, boots and shoulders can get life per hit. You could consider rolling off +vit or +% life into LoH or LpS. Prime candidates for this would be chest or bracers. You also could consider rolling the life per fury spent onto a belt instead of vit.
Whether dropping max life for greater recovery ends up being worth it is going to be up to you.
Yes. The last bit you said is essentially correct. There are also about 20ish other stats that get involved at various stages, but as far as +damage is concerned, you've got it right.
While not intending to put words in Vladimeir's mouth, I don't think he literally meant it won't affect locust swarm in any way whatsoever. That's just silly. Of course it will.
What i think he meant is that AFTER your weapon damage has been determined (which very much depends on +damage of whatever type your weapon has) locust swarm ITSELF will not look directly at that stat anymore. That is, locust swarm will not double dip on both the weapon damage computation and some later step of the final applied damage computation.
It doesn't affect it directly, but it will affect things indirectly because it is increasing your weapon damage.
The element type for the +damage on your weapon is irrelevant for nearly all skills. If i recall, it still does affect some things like being able to proc elemental exposure for a wizard, but largely its just a holdover from vanilla d3 that could be simplified into a simple +damage roll for the weapon without element modifier.
That is to say, if you had a 100 damage weapon and had +50 to poison on that weapon, your locust swarm would consider your weapon damage to be 150. If instead you had +50 arcane damage it would still treat your weapon damage as 150. And in both cases the element type applied by the skill (that is to say, what +% element gear would affect it) would depend solely on the skill/rune combo you use.
The magnitude of +damage matters enormously. The element type of +damage only matters in a few very specific scenarios (of which locust swarm would not be one).
Yes, they really are that good. However, blizzard said they are 'tweaking' them. It's incredibly unlikely the rings will retain their current level of absurdity into live.
I was excited to try it as an alternative to piranhas by trading uptime for CC and debuff potency. It falls far short. I noted the same shortcoming. The aoe is too small to use as a reliable CC, particularly with no ability to control targeting at range. It's better than it was. Currently there are not many builds that would use it. I could see it as an interesting addition to a zdps doctor replacing possibly mass confusion or, if you feel particularly suicidal, spirit walk.
Pets (all pets) proc toxin and pain enhancer. They do not proc teardrop. For what its worth they do proc boon of the hoarder. Zei's is calculated as distance from damage source to the target. That is, it sucks for melee pets. I presume it actually might not be a bad gem for a darts build. But i haven't tried a darts build in a long time.
Cleared 44 with no trouble at all. Got a horrible roll for 45 mobs. I did not finish, but not due to lack of damage. Without a weapon upgrade I feel like this build would be capable of 46 easily and with a weapon upgrade we're looking at about 50ish. At that range I'd have to be swapping over to survival gems and lose gruesome feast. In any case, upper 40s are clearly within reach.
Loosing unity is not a particularly big deal for this build. There's room to pick up another 30-40ish percent survival without losing all that much dps. I don't consider that practical however. We run out of dps before we run out of survival as is. Trading dps for even more survival doesn't have much point.
For those just interested in mechanics: Yes, the rings do exactly what they say they do (the buff does not show up on character sheet). I did not check if its multiplicative or tossed into the overall buff category. In any case, solo it wouldn't make a big difference either way.
Unless Bastion of Will / Zunimassa's Huant are changed, there is absolutely NO WAY zuni could possibly compete with the rings for a melee fetish build.
I've not tried a carvevil build. Maybe tomorrow night.
I'm having trouble finding a build that contributes to speed runs on 2-3 person normal t6 rift.
I understand that witch doctors just aren't ever going to match up to other classes on speed runs of normal rifts. I feel though that I should be able to do much more than collect loot and follow behind.
I've got endgame gear for just about every build for witch doc. Full ancient armors and jewelry. Ancient of every relevant weapon except smk or darts. I also have a full assortment of legacy cool down gear if needed.
I find that even with ridiculous overkill on damage potential I just can't apply any damage before my group mates (firebird wizard and/or dh usually) kill everything. With trash and even elites dying in a blink I have trouble keeping fetishes rolling for smk. Dots seem a total waste. I've found some success with sacrifice nuke builds but it's only because of the front loaded damage.
Have been thinking of trying a fire aura big dog.
How does a doc continue to contribute once your group is consistently doing 2-min rifts?
Or should i just stop caring since we're about at the floor for time anyway?
3
Sure, this isn't the most exciting change, but it's necessary.
Full decently rolled ancient gear can be obtained after perhaps 100-200 hours into a season if you work straight towards that goal. At that point, with full level 80ish augment you can expect to have about 16k mainstat points. An additional 200 paragon levels gives another 1k mainstat points yielding a 6.25% increase in damage (and some associated survivability). The rate of return on this does diminish, but pitifully slowly. At 25k main stat points (around paragon 2600 or so) an additional 200 paragon levels is still giving an additional 4% damage increase.
By the time you have full augmented ancient, its going to take considerably longer to squeak 6.25% more damage from gear upgrades than it would to grind 200 paragon levels. If you ever get 2k+ paragon your gear would probably be nearly capped out. It's unlikely to even be possible to get 4% more damage out of gear upgrades by that point.
The end game progression turns into nothing more than a horrible slog of grinding paragon. There isn't isn't even another option on how to progress a given character let alone a competitive or compelling one.
Introducing super rare, more powerful versions of existing items greatly extends the longevity of the item hunt. I'm not sure it would extend all the way up to 2k+ paragon, but it would easily extend to 1500ish if not higher. Super rare meaningful items are necessary if the item hunt is ever to compete with the paragon hunt.
And besides, implementing primal ancients isn't exactly a huge time sink for the dev team. This is an easy and necessary improvement. It will shift the mid and late game back towards item hunting and further delay the importance of paragon grinding until levels past what most people ever achieve in a season.
I definitely want to see more new items, better balancing of builds, and other horizontal progression options. But for vertical progression, the benefits of implementing primal ancients FAR outweighs the costs. It's a no brainer.
1
Hellgate: London was a game that experimented with this style of view (though it was first person was available too). It was an ARPG made by some former employees of Blizzard North that left to make their own gaming company.
While the game ultimately failed, the first person view was really immersive. In reference to Lamack's list above, there were still large packs of mobs to aoe down. Speed builds were still popular for farming. Teleport skills still existed. The aoe effects were quite impressive (for the day). Pet builds were very viable (even a little TOO viable in some settings). There were more NPC's than in diablo, but that was for story reasons, not for gameplay reasons. Environmental factors were much MORE influential than they are in diablo (cover and elevation were very impactful on what builds worked at high difficulties).
There's no reason an ARPG cannot be made with that camera perspective and still maintain the mechanical variety we expect from an ARPG.
It will, however, have a dramatic impact on the perception of your character. A first person or over the shoulder view makes us view the characters as embodying ourselves. It's a much more personal style. Isometric views tend to have us think of someone controlling a character (as opposed to being the character).
I would argue this is a core aspect of the Diablo series thus far. Changing the camera view would shift the focus away from the world and towards the character. This shift in focus, both literally and figuratively, would be a gamble. But it isn't necessarily a bad one. Different isn't always worse. Blizzard certainly has the resources and talent to pull it off well if they desire to do so.
In the long run, I don't think simply blending the good aspects of diablo 2 and 3 will work. Games have progressed far too much in 20 years for that. If/when we ever see a Diablo 4, it will have to be a fairly substantial evolution of the series. A new camera perspective is likely first of many potential changes that will have to be weighed.
0
the 20 min boss run is absolutely trivial with a helltooth gargantuan angry chicken build. You do not need very high damage; even missing some of the support legendaries for the build wouldn't really matter much.
With mediocre gear I finished the 20 min boss run on the first try with like 3 minutes left, solo. Then my friend logged on and I did it for him (he just stood in town and accepted the fights) with 3 minutes to spare again.
When you are soloing this it makes no difference at all what order you do them in. Just slap on helltooth, some gargantuan support legendaires (if you have them - mask of jeram, tasker and theo, short man's finger), manajuma set, and as much run speed as you can get. If you die once in a while while running (which you probably won't since by the time something attacks you, you're 3 screens away already), it won't matter.
I completely understand that some other classes can make a 20 min boss run solo very hard. But on a witch doctor its almost impossible to fail if you have a garg / chicken build.
0
A consistent 5ms ping time to a remote game server is almost literally impossible. That's on the order of response time you'd expect if you were on the same local network as the server itself.
For most people, just pinging their own ISP would have a response time of about 10ms. Each hop beyond that would usually add about another 5-7ms at least. A typical number of hops from a home pc to a game server would be about 10 or 15 hops.
Heck, with the CSGO servers in Seattle and DC (if you are on the US server; of course, that may not be the case), you wouldn't even be able to to ping from most of the southwest, texas, or virtually the entire midwest without breaking the speed of light (5ms*speed of light = 931 miles). And that's neglecting processing time altogether.
A 16ms lag time in LoL is also bordering on incredible.
Wonderful response times for most games is 30-40ms with average 'good' response times being much more on the order of 70-80ms.
Try a trace route. If you get 5ms responses all the way up to blizzards ping block, then you have room to complain to them. My money isn't on it.
0
Try using d3planner.com if you want to understand how various things affect your damage. Import your character via your battle tag, spend your paragon points, then turn on the buffs you want to use. Your skills will display the damage they will actually do in game, including breaking down everything affecting that damage and its source. It's a pretty nifty lil site.
0
To keep the recovery and add the 10% damage you could shift the recovery off to another location.
All slots except pants, belt, boots and shoulders can get life per hit. You could consider rolling off +vit or +% life into LoH or LpS. Prime candidates for this would be chest or bracers. You also could consider rolling the life per fury spent onto a belt instead of vit.
Whether dropping max life for greater recovery ends up being worth it is going to be up to you.
0
Yes. The last bit you said is essentially correct. There are also about 20ish other stats that get involved at various stages, but as far as +damage is concerned, you've got it right.
While not intending to put words in Vladimeir's mouth, I don't think he literally meant it won't affect locust swarm in any way whatsoever. That's just silly. Of course it will.
What i think he meant is that AFTER your weapon damage has been determined (which very much depends on +damage of whatever type your weapon has) locust swarm ITSELF will not look directly at that stat anymore. That is, locust swarm will not double dip on both the weapon damage computation and some later step of the final applied damage computation.
1
It doesn't affect it directly, but it will affect things indirectly because it is increasing your weapon damage.
The element type for the +damage on your weapon is irrelevant for nearly all skills. If i recall, it still does affect some things like being able to proc elemental exposure for a wizard, but largely its just a holdover from vanilla d3 that could be simplified into a simple +damage roll for the weapon without element modifier.
That is to say, if you had a 100 damage weapon and had +50 to poison on that weapon, your locust swarm would consider your weapon damage to be 150. If instead you had +50 arcane damage it would still treat your weapon damage as 150. And in both cases the element type applied by the skill (that is to say, what +% element gear would affect it) would depend solely on the skill/rune combo you use.
The magnitude of +damage matters enormously. The element type of +damage only matters in a few very specific scenarios (of which locust swarm would not be one).
0
Yes, they really are that good. However, blizzard said they are 'tweaking' them. It's incredibly unlikely the rings will retain their current level of absurdity into live.
0
I was excited to try it as an alternative to piranhas by trading uptime for CC and debuff potency. It falls far short. I noted the same shortcoming. The aoe is too small to use as a reliable CC, particularly with no ability to control targeting at range. It's better than it was. Currently there are not many builds that would use it. I could see it as an interesting addition to a zdps doctor replacing possibly mass confusion or, if you feel particularly suicidal, spirit walk.
0
Pets (all pets) proc toxin and pain enhancer. They do not proc teardrop. For what its worth they do proc boon of the hoarder. Zei's is calculated as distance from damage source to the target. That is, it sucks for melee pets. I presume it actually might not be a bad gem for a darts build. But i haven't tried a darts build in a long time.
0
I just did a run with the following loadout:
focus + restraint (horrible rolls on them)
non-ancient SMK
ukhapian serpent
3 piece aughlid
3 piece blackthorne
witching hour
taskers
MoJ
fetish army
voodoo
spirit walk
leech dogs
piranhas
rain of toads
pierce the veil
fetish sycophants
jungle fortitude
gruesome feast
Cleared 44 with no trouble at all. Got a horrible roll for 45 mobs. I did not finish, but not due to lack of damage. Without a weapon upgrade I feel like this build would be capable of 46 easily and with a weapon upgrade we're looking at about 50ish. At that range I'd have to be swapping over to survival gems and lose gruesome feast. In any case, upper 40s are clearly within reach.
Loosing unity is not a particularly big deal for this build. There's room to pick up another 30-40ish percent survival without losing all that much dps. I don't consider that practical however. We run out of dps before we run out of survival as is. Trading dps for even more survival doesn't have much point.
For those just interested in mechanics: Yes, the rings do exactly what they say they do (the buff does not show up on character sheet). I did not check if its multiplicative or tossed into the overall buff category. In any case, solo it wouldn't make a big difference either way.
Unless Bastion of Will / Zunimassa's Huant are changed, there is absolutely NO WAY zuni could possibly compete with the rings for a melee fetish build.
I've not tried a carvevil build. Maybe tomorrow night.
0
I'm having trouble finding a build that contributes to speed runs on 2-3 person normal t6 rift.
I understand that witch doctors just aren't ever going to match up to other classes on speed runs of normal rifts. I feel though that I should be able to do much more than collect loot and follow behind.
I've got endgame gear for just about every build for witch doc. Full ancient armors and jewelry. Ancient of every relevant weapon except smk or darts. I also have a full assortment of legacy cool down gear if needed.
I find that even with ridiculous overkill on damage potential I just can't apply any damage before my group mates (firebird wizard and/or dh usually) kill everything. With trash and even elites dying in a blink I have trouble keeping fetishes rolling for smk. Dots seem a total waste. I've found some success with sacrifice nuke builds but it's only because of the front loaded damage.
Have been thinking of trying a fire aura big dog.
How does a doc continue to contribute once your group is consistently doing 2-min rifts?
Or should i just stop caring since we're about at the floor for time anyway?
Advice appreciated.