Doing a regular ping test isn't normally enough data. Try this command in windows:
ping -n 200 12.129.222.10
(12.129.222.10 is the diablo 3 server for north america)
More pings means it will give a bigger time frame where you will get a better idea of any packet loss and latency spikes. Packet loss and latency spikes tend to be the cause of a lot of the rubber banding. A tracer route can show you what hops are causing the problem but if it's intermittent and you don't catch it during the specific trace you are doing it won't be much good to you. You're best bet is to run them manually in windows or mac and to run the trace right when you see the packet loss/latency spike during the ping test. With that you can at least get some sort of idea where to go from there and you should have enough info to narrow down the interval and send it to your ISP. Hope this helps.
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.
It's about even. You should be able to clear a solo GR faster than a 4man of the same level but you'll get more XP from the strength in numbers buff (not sure if it's still called that). Take your pick really.
If you use sanwuko, every time you cast ltk or wol it consumes a stack. So you need a skill slot for a generator, only for that. It's just bad. Maybe they thought u6 was supposed to be main season 4 build and because of static charge breakthrough it was not , so its like "play it now"
The reason most of the monk set's aren't doing so hot is because not enough people are testing them with ladder attempts on PTR so they don't have enough data. They keep nerfing static based builds for that reason. People keep theorycrafting the different sets but not putting them through it's paces. The very few that are just aren't enough to merit any changes. If you want something that sucks to get better then start testing the stuff that sucks.
The sanwuko set is terrible... I saw in Quins video how much it sucked... The go and make a belt which makes LOSE stacks of sweeping wind(the same stacks you need in order to deal dmg from the set bonus) when in melee range, not to mention the belt comes with sweeping wind dmg so in order for it to deal dmg you need to be in melee range(epic fail). So what? Are we supposed to kite endlessly in order to deal dmg?
Also innas is just a general buff, so you cant pair it with anything from the new items. Monk also has few legendary items(class specific) in order to use LON. I dont want to play the same build (u6) for the second time ....
The belt doesn't make you lose stacks. The belt helps you to gain stacks when traveling between mobs. The only reason you should lose stacks is low crit, not hitting something when it's in melee range or using something in the set bonus that consumes a stack to do more damage.
U6 is pretty good. Was able to clear 78 with all ancients, no augments and ~800 paragon. That's probably your best bet.
I don't agree with the map editing idea. However the PTR definitely needs a custom item maker that would allows us to make items and spawn them into our inventory. So much time is spent farming for specific items with the right stats still and very little of it is actual testing (even with the 2000% buff to legendary drops).
This is actually reverse of what happens. You're right to a certain extent but that's not how the events play out. And it's also where the problem lies. With using wow as an example it wasn't just hybrid builds in the same sense of your previous example of frost-fire mage. It was a matter of choosing anything other than layout X makes you an idiot and every other choice can't come to raid with us. The same thing happened in season 4. Talent choices however should be on a situational basis and that will never change as long as new encounter mechanics come out (same with D3(new bosses, mobs, enemy abilities etc). I think where we are mis communicating is your stating the problem lies with one result instead of the problem being the system that caused several results that lead to one state of a game. The problem was that the talent trees made it impossible to balance the abilities themselves which lead the developers playing a constant battle of nerfing and buffing skills until they decided to just deal away with the system that caused half of the specs within a game to be very poorly represented simply because it didn't do the most damage.
Which leads us to the changes to the items we've been seeing. Diablo since day one has always tried to enforce a sense of diversity in builds as far as the skills and classes used. So you can see why there is no similar option to what happened in WoW (changing talent trees altogether). SO that leaves them with two options. They can keep repeating the same mistake they made in another game that caused a very similar problem by nerfing and buffing skills or they can change the items themselves and allow more class and set representation. The latter is the better option for everyone even though it destroys something that the top performers do on a regular basis: find the top build. In the end Quin and other builders will still be competitive with better representation of all of the classes and set. Because your skill, time and dedication as well as your build should decide who's the better player. Not whether you are playing "the right build" or not.
The issue is the latter seems to be removing 90% of items/abilities from the game and have only leave the obvious choices. Then have everyone compete in Grifts because any sort of play outside of Grifts is irreverent. Might as go to the extreme and don't even have random loot just rewards at completion of grift levels (make it more like wow). Once we have stripped down to bare bones gear and abilities it will then only be about skill to compete in Grifts... wait where are we going with this, I thought this was supposed to be a fun game to kill monsters by various methods and modes... nope Diablo is and should now be an epeen competitive PvE. As a vet of the series I think this strays away from what this series has always been about; however you see a lot of these millennials talking about what the game should be and change to "get with the times". There are plenty of other games that allow you to compete in a balanced setting, the fact that Grifts were provided for some sort of measuring stick is a nice feature. Perhaps ladders should be adjusted for ranking so instead of solo wizard, how about solo channeling wizard or solo arcane orb wizard rankings.
Really this game needs PvP just add a player vs player damage/CC reduction of 90% or something absurd since were hitting for billions and let the players dictate/police standards and rules (Like D2). No balancing needed. Considering the effort going to try and balance PvE this simple little feature would add more replay value than any patch could.
Well, the problem isn't just the competitive gameplay. It's also public games, playing with friends, clan members and community members in D3. No one will play with you or want to invite you if you aren't playing spec X, and that's bad for the game as a whole. Sorry, I neglected to mention that the problem also affected casual and non competitive play modes.
I actually thought of that for PVP. I wanted to play it with my brothers but It was so unfair. One cluster arrow and my brother was toast lol. However, I don't want PVP for the game because I've seen what it's like trying to balance a game based on two different play modes of PVP and PVE, it will never be balanced and the story of nurfing and buffing skills just starts all over again.
That's one way they did it but not the biggest impact. The major impact came from the talent tree changes near the tail end of cataclysm. This allowed them to actually balance out all of the classes so that any spec was viable for competitive play. Cookie cutter builds by definition was not necessarily the hybrid builds. It was the talent system that allowed you to do that. Cookie cutter builds were called cookie cutter because (for example) one person on elitist jerks would post it and then everyone would use the same build because it was posted by someone in a top world guild. lol get it? Same shape every time? Cookie cutter? Nobody want's to play a game that has so many choices but you can only play one and be competitive. That's not very fun competition. But that is only my personal opinion. Some people like simple competition, but I don't. My view on it is that when the leader board for solo is filled with all one spec and one spec only that's simple competition versus what the leaderboards for most of the classes look like now on the ptr.
I'm not implying anything. Only stating what I already did in response to something someone else said about WoW not being a good comparison. Do you think I'm trying to imply something?
That's exactly what I said. They took out the possibility for builds by removing talent trees which made it possible to go hybrid ways. And the best way was always the hybrid way because there were some very powerful talents in the beginning of a tree, so you basically always went through your main tree until you have the last talent and then went on a 2nd path. And while it's true that the cookie cutter is the most used build, it's usually also the best build. There might be some hidden better way to build it and that's very likely in D3, since it has sooooo many possible builds, but it was very unlikely for WoW, since the choices there were very limited and easy to calculate.
Ironically, there is still a bit of cookie cutter left in WoW, even with the new talent system. Just today, I've read an article about how it reduces player experimentation in WoW. But the issue is very minor, since the amount of choices is small and the balance is pretty good, which again is not that hard, since they only have to balance 3 talents against each other. It's usually a 1% better/worse kind of balance.
@banishedbr
What is your problem? Troll?
This is actually reverse of what happens. You're right to a certain extent but that's not how the events play out. And it's also where the problem lies. With using wow as an example it wasn't just hybrid builds in the same sense of your previous example of frost-fire mage. It was a matter of choosing anything other than layout X makes you an idiot and every other choice can't come to raid with us. The same thing happened in season 4. Talent choices however should be on a situational basis and that will never change as long as new encounter mechanics come out (same with D3(new bosses, mobs, enemy abilities etc). I think where we are mis communicating is your stating the problem lies with one result instead of the problem being the system that caused several results that lead to one state of a game. The problem was that the talent trees made it impossible to balance the abilities themselves which lead the developers playing a constant battle of nerfing and buffing skills until they decided to just deal away with the system that caused half of the specs within a game to be very poorly represented simply because it didn't do the most damage.
Which leads us to the changes to the items we've been seeing. Diablo since day one has always tried to enforce a sense of diversity in builds as far as the skills and classes used. So you can see why there is no similar option to what happened in WoW (changing talent trees altogether). SO that leaves them with two options. They can keep repeating the same mistake they made in another game that caused a very similar problem by nerfing and buffing skills or they can change the items themselves and allow more class and set representation. The latter is the better option for everyone even though it destroys something that the top performers do on a regular basis: find the top build. In the end Quin and other builders will still be competitive with better representation of all of the classes and set. Because your skill, time and dedication as well as your build should decide who's the better player. Not whether you are playing "the right build" or not.
That's one way they did it but not the biggest impact. The major impact came from the talent tree changes near the tail end of cataclysm. This allowed them to actually balance out all of the classes so that any spec was viable for competitive play. Cookie cutter builds by definition was not necessarily the hybrid builds. It was the talent system that allowed you to do that. Cookie cutter builds were called cookie cutter because (for example) one person on elitist jerks would post it and then everyone would use the same build because it was posted by someone in a top world guild. lol get it? Same shape every time? Cookie cutter? Nobody want's to play a game that has so many choices but you can only play one and be competitive. That's not very fun competition. But that is only my personal opinion. Some people like simple competition, but I don't. My view on it is that when the leader board for solo is filled with all one spec and one spec only that's simple competition versus what the leaderboards for most of the classes look like now on the ptr.
I'm not implying anything. Only stating what I already did in response to something someone else said about WoW not being a good comparison. Do you think I'm trying to imply something?
Also, if 4 DPS is so much better to get higher in GR's why are people not already running 4 DPS and pushing higher for more XP to begin with? Answer, because it isn't better, the heals and support are essential, and those are all but gone in 2.4!
It's now expected that each individual class should rely on their own recovery or support type mechanics. Some classes already had the recovery potential (barb, monk) while other classes needed some buffs (Demon hunter buffs to Shadow power to synergize with leech).
This along with the changes to monster health depending on group size, is actually leveling out the playing field. The leaderboards on PTR so far are actually very close to each other.
We got your point Shurgosa. It's just not interesting in the present discussion, as you are asking for a different game entirely. Here, we are talking about a new type of affix and its immediate consequence on diablo 3's current iteration of patch 2.4. We are not talking about what Diablo 3 could have been, or failed to be.
Don't get me (us) wrong, we would like to make Diablo 3 as exciting as it could be, and we all have wild ideas on how to achieve that. But this is beyond the point here. And definitely comparing Diablo 3 to Wow is off-topic. Feel free to create your own topic on these lines, but I think we should not discuss these further here.
Whatever the itemization problems that diablo may have, the new type of affix seems to go into the right direction (assuming proper balancing). Quinn says it is not. Wyatt, and most of us here, after thinking it through, think that it is. That is all there is to it.
I don't mean to advocate what's going on this topic but WoW is actually the best example for comparison that you can make because the game went through something similar when they shut down cookie cutter builds which is one of the reasons mentioned by Mr Cheng.
Having leveled in both season and non season on the PTR and last season I can tell you that doing XP farming runs without the XP gear feels much the same as it did last patch with XP gear. How you farm won't change except you won't run with XP gear, and you will see a substantial increase to XP gain during your other tasks (tasks other than XP GR runs). Play however you like with the gear that you want!
Putting everything together, time played does not = paragon lvl X in relations to Season 4 and Season 5. I would say that all things considered, XP gains are around 20% slower during that initial phase of para 1-500. However, at that point, you likely have several legendary items that you want, having augmented your main stat onto these items, and if you for instance augment 200 Str into that item, we are talking about 40 paragon levels in relation to para 801-840 that you now have around para 500.
The new formula then becomes:
Level 1-70, farm for crafting mats, DB, greater keys and legendary items to cube through bounties and rifts, run greaters to augment gear, progress through GR levels with augmented gear.
Nowhere in this process are we going to see a phase "Farm Paragon Levels" because it is innate to the process instead of being a separate step of the process.
So no, the process is not the same.
You pretty much just supported what I said, even though I didn't go into details. So yes, the process is unchanged. If your objective is farming xp you'll just do it through GRs, But doing so comes with the additional bonus of empowering the rift for another shot at a 1% gem upgrade or just upgrading your other gems for augments. The changes don't change the way you do things. The changes they made make the way you do things more useful. What you outlined is exactly what happened in season 4(aside from augments since they weren't available). Also, the paragon leveling from 1-800 is significantly increased because the XP granted from monsters is increased and you can feel it. The process of leveling from 1-70 is also cut down dramatically. I did a test leveling run without using any legendary itmes and you can level from 1-70 doing just bounties in a few hours without breaking a sweat (in comparison to trying every trick in the book to level as fast as possible).
0
Doing a regular ping test isn't normally enough data. Try this command in windows:
ping -n 200 12.129.222.10
(12.129.222.10 is the diablo 3 server for north america)
More pings means it will give a bigger time frame where you will get a better idea of any packet loss and latency spikes. Packet loss and latency spikes tend to be the cause of a lot of the rubber banding. A tracer route can show you what hops are causing the problem but if it's intermittent and you don't catch it during the specific trace you are doing it won't be much good to you. You're best bet is to run them manually in windows or mac and to run the trace right when you see the packet loss/latency spike during the ping test. With that you can at least get some sort of idea where to go from there and you should have enough info to narrow down the interval and send it to your ISP. Hope this helps.
0
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.
0
It's about even. You should be able to clear a solo GR faster than a 4man of the same level but you'll get more XP from the strength in numbers buff (not sure if it's still called that). Take your pick really.
0
Took your survey and felt a small pinch at your age drop down. 25+ only. Ouch man. Very ouch.
0
Season will still be the only way to stay competitive because of paragon. Everything resets.
0
0
U6 is pretty good. Was able to clear 78 with all ancients, no augments and ~800 paragon. That's probably your best bet.
0
I don't agree with the map editing idea. However the PTR definitely needs a custom item maker that would allows us to make items and spawn them into our inventory. So much time is spent farming for specific items with the right stats still and very little of it is actual testing (even with the 2000% buff to legendary drops).
1
I actually thought of that for PVP. I wanted to play it with my brothers but It was so unfair. One cluster arrow and my brother was toast lol. However, I don't want PVP for the game because I've seen what it's like trying to balance a game based on two different play modes of PVP and PVE, it will never be balanced and the story of nurfing and buffing skills just starts all over again.
1
This is actually reverse of what happens. You're right to a certain extent but that's not how the events play out. And it's also where the problem lies. With using wow as an example it wasn't just hybrid builds in the same sense of your previous example of frost-fire mage. It was a matter of choosing anything other than layout X makes you an idiot and every other choice can't come to raid with us. The same thing happened in season 4. Talent choices however should be on a situational basis and that will never change as long as new encounter mechanics come out (same with D3(new bosses, mobs, enemy abilities etc). I think where we are mis communicating is your stating the problem lies with one result instead of the problem being the system that caused several results that lead to one state of a game. The problem was that the talent trees made it impossible to balance the abilities themselves which lead the developers playing a constant battle of nerfing and buffing skills until they decided to just deal away with the system that caused half of the specs within a game to be very poorly represented simply because it didn't do the most damage.
Which leads us to the changes to the items we've been seeing. Diablo since day one has always tried to enforce a sense of diversity in builds as far as the skills and classes used. So you can see why there is no similar option to what happened in WoW (changing talent trees altogether). SO that leaves them with two options. They can keep repeating the same mistake they made in another game that caused a very similar problem by nerfing and buffing skills or they can change the items themselves and allow more class and set representation. The latter is the better option for everyone even though it destroys something that the top performers do on a regular basis: find the top build. In the end Quin and other builders will still be competitive with better representation of all of the classes and set. Because your skill, time and dedication as well as your build should decide who's the better player. Not whether you are playing "the right build" or not.
1
@Shapookya
That's one way they did it but not the biggest impact. The major impact came from the talent tree changes near the tail end of cataclysm. This allowed them to actually balance out all of the classes so that any spec was viable for competitive play. Cookie cutter builds by definition was not necessarily the hybrid builds. It was the talent system that allowed you to do that. Cookie cutter builds were called cookie cutter because (for example) one person on elitist jerks would post it and then everyone would use the same build because it was posted by someone in a top world guild. lol get it? Same shape every time? Cookie cutter? Nobody want's to play a game that has so many choices but you can only play one and be competitive. That's not very fun competition. But that is only my personal opinion. Some people like simple competition, but I don't. My view on it is that when the leader board for solo is filled with all one spec and one spec only that's simple competition versus what the leaderboards for most of the classes look like now on the ptr.
I'm not implying anything. Only stating what I already did in response to something someone else said about WoW not being a good comparison. Do you think I'm trying to imply something?
0
Do a ping and a tracert. Use at least 50 echoes for a good sample.
1
This along with the changes to monster health depending on group size, is actually leveling out the playing field. The leaderboards on PTR so far are actually very close to each other.
0
0