Hi everyone, I just posted some stuff on the official PTR forums and decided to share it here as well, in case you don't frequent those and want to get a little overview of what things will look like in the next patch. It's mostly aimed at the devs, but for the curious, it will certainly be good enough I assume. Feel free to comment and add anything I might have forgotten, or ask me about anything that's currently going on on the PTR. I'm trying to stream here and there but generally I'm really busy IRL so I just quickly typed some things and left it like that. Also, I have recorded and cut a short overview and two high GR runs with both UE and Natalya if you want to check those out.
Copy&Pasting from the US forums:
Short introduction:
This post consists of two main parts, general feedback and Demon Hunter feedback specifically. In the latter part, I will comment on the skill changes, new and old items and in the end I will conclude with a short overall impression of the patch. So far on the PTR, I have played on Torment 8 and above and have pushed 2 and 3 player rankings alongside Crusaders and Barbarians, up to tier 66. I have cubed about 35 items and tested most of them, and generally I have high end gear, gems, paragon as well as rank 1 experience in all brackets and seasons.
General Part
Kanai's Cube:
Amazing addition to the game, exactly what was needed. It elegantly solves many problems (such as the mandatory power creep, making unused items useful, stash space) and sparks new theorycrafting ideas. It also evens out the odds for finding the much needed ancient weapons, perfect ring slots etc., and generally helps to equip your character. All in all a pretty neat feature, only thing I'd like to change is the visibility of cubed legendary powers. Currently, if someone asks me to show my build, I press one button and they can see everything. For the cube, I need to open the inventory, then click details, then scroll down, and it's not even showing the icons but only the text of the legendaries in use. I'd like to see it in another spot, maybe add it to the bottom or right of the skill window, or to the bottom of the inventory.
Hellfire Amulets:
Perfect change. I have calculated that in 2.3, Hellfire farming efficiency will more or less increase tenfold, which is more or less what I think it should be. Out of my experience, I have crafted about 700 Hellfire amulets since RoS release, about 20% of those had a socket, and 2 rolled with elemental damage + double crit + good passive, and maybe 15 with mainstat + double crit + good passive. However, it's just not worth it to do that because the amount of paragons you could farm in that time would be much stronger, on top of you getting other perks like crafting mats, items, and generally having more fun, all of which created the huge problem we had with uber bosses in the past. With the current system on live, you should expect to craft ~1000 amulets in order to have a reasonable chance to get one with the elemental bonus and passive you need, which means approximately 150-160 hours with a high end setup (10h keywardens, 5-6h ubers per 100 amulets). With the socket change alone, you would be expected to craft approximately 150-250 amulets for that. This seems about what players experience when crafting Hellfires on the PTR (sample size ~400).
Here are some calculations I did before the PTR was up: http://puu.sh/iM1Ix/75c6e2dd28.png. I don't know the exact drop rates, but I will go with the last column here (100% KW, 150% Uber drop rates), where you would spend ~50 minutes farming KWs and ~200 minutes farming ubers per 100 amulets, netting 2,5 minutes per socketed Hellfire (compared to ~400 minutes KWs, ~300 minutes ubers, 35 minutes per socketed Hellfire on live). On T10 the bosses might not die instantly like on T6 but it will be very close to that, for Magdha and Uber Diablo it won't matter much because most time is spent on the shield / sequences, so 2.5 minutes might seem a little optimistic, but optimized parties will get close to that. With some slacking involved, 3.5 min seems reasonable, and that's exactly the tenfold increase in efficiency I was mentioning. In any case it's pretty cool that the focus has shifted away from the keywardens, am I'm really looking forward to crafting Hellfires in 2.3. If you only want to have one with mainstat instead of elemental damage, you should be good to go with 10-20 crafts, which means 1-2 hours. Other than that, spending 20-50 hours for a perfect gg amulet per season sounds exactly like what it should be. Getting an elemental Hellfire is not based purely on luck anymore, thus closing the gap between lucky and unlucky people a little, and generally evening out RNG in this game a little, which is always a good thing.
Trials removal:
Almost uniformly applauded by everyone, including myself. Very good to finally see them go, better late than never. However, in addition to the other changes made to greater rifts, it creates a couple of new problems:
Greater Rift gem upgrading:
I don't really see a reason why failed rifts should not reward gem upgrades. It will make running high tiers even less rewarding (in addition to the XP / loot problems), and more or less remove 1% runs from the game. Other than T6, bounties and speedfarming lower tiers, running higher tiers for 1% gem upgrades is a lot of fun and resembles high GR pushing on live the most, and I'd be sad to see them go. It's a nice change in the activities you do ingame, and is at least close to mindless XP farming in efficiency (in terms of expected damage gains per time invested). Other than that, it feels really weird to finish a rift and have no options to select. Since higher greater rifts are a lot less rewarding (per time spent) in general, gem upgrades should really stay. In the end, you still need to complete the tier you want to run -1 at least once anyway, so paragon 100 people running around with rank 60 gems or the like is not going to happen.
Rift fishing:
Without trials, fishing for rifts will rise to new dimensions. Even with the current system on live, people are fishing 100-300+ rifts for solo clears, and this problem will become even worse. It's not fun to open and close rifts after 1 minute (as soon as you can see it's bad), or leaving the game immediately after encountering a reflect pack. Certain builds or very skillful players can save their run through situations like this sometimes, but in general, that's how it works and it's not very engaging, be it for the player of for those watching. Actually completing rifts has to be rewarded in one way or another, or people will just fish all day. The same holds true even more for groups, which previously haven't really been fishing at all (due to lack of keys caused by huge trial RNG), and pushing groups was a lot of fun because every key was precious (even failed ones for gem upgrades), and as a streamer even more so (since people like to watch that stuff and see if you can make it). With the system on PTR, group gameplay will become much like solo gameplay in terms of fishing if there are no incentives to not leave the game immediately. This has to change, otherwise we will spend more time in the menus than anywhere else.
Leaderboard profile snapshotting:
Honestly, I don't see many good reasons behind this change, and so far I haven't gotten an answer or seen any blue comments on this. While it may seem good at a first glance, it's likely to spawn an even more secretive behavior when it comes to new builds. People that theorycraft new things and manage to get a top ranking because of that will be completely ripped off, since now anyone can just go and take a look, fish a couple dozen rifts and beat it. Before, a lot of guessing and testing was involved for those who wanted to reach the same rankings, giving away the group / class setup usually was good enough to get people thinking. Also, it is very likely that high end solo and group players will just start failing their rifts on purpose to keep new builds hidden from the public until the last couple of days of the season. Other than that, the culture in random groups might evolve into something like "go copy r1 dude or you won't get invited", and additionally it will keep many casual players from testing their own things with the cube, because everyone will tell them "it doesn't work, look what top players use", effectively decreasing build variety and theorycrafting efforts across the board. It's not like top players generally don't share their builds, but sometimes they decide not to, or to wait a little, to actually get something out of their efforts. It also leads to the next point:
Greater Rift reward structure:
Through all of the seasons, there have never been strong incentives to run high greater rifts. While it's certainly fun to push oneself to the limits in solo or groups, it's usually the worst you can do in terms of farming efficiency. Even if you can consistently clear very high end tiers, the loot and bloodshards you're getting are almost worthless in comparison, and even XP is dragging behind. After a couple of test runs in a 2 or 3-man groups with highly unoptimized setups it seems like the new XP / speedfarm meta will shift to more or less tier 55, which means another ~10 tiers increase over last season. On the other side, it seems like the highest potential rift clears will be more or less what they are like on live for groups, meaning that the gap between farming and pushing has become significantly smaller, yet completing farm runs is several times quicker. At the very least, blood shards should scale indefinitely the higher you go, and the 1% gem upgrading should be put back in place.
Other than that, I'd also like to see season ending rewards for everyone on the leaderboards. It doesn't need to be a big thing, maybe a banner reward, or a new / recolored frame, or just some other minor vanity item that sets them apart, and then have it scale up a little bit (like top 1, top 10, top 100, top 1000). People shouldn’t become obsessed with the leaderboards, but just a small recognition would be nice to see. Like, anything.
Paragons:
Somewhat in relation to the last point, something needs to be done about the Paragon problem. It's fun to level up and know that your character has become just a little bit stronger, and people that play more should get something out of it. However, in the long run, it's not fun to compete with people that have 20-30% more dps with equal gear just from having more mainstat. This easily amounts to an advantage of 2-3 tiers (+1 tier is +17% monster hp, however you don't need 17% to go higher because of walking, setting fights up, pylons etc. From my experience, having about 10% more dps is enough to be the exact same rift on the next tier). In the end, the reward of playing more is also more and better loot drops, and generally becoming better at playing the game, which are factors that the paragon count alone doesn't reflect. It's probably a difficult issue to solve, since general changes to XP farming will apply to everyone, so if anything, this will change in the next expansion rather than a simple patch. Nevertheless, I think it should be addressed at some point, maybe by capping the mainstat gain (not paragons themselves) after a certain point, so that people wouldn't constantly feel bad when not farming XP like crazy (since it's the most rewarding way of progression, and with the changing speedfarm meta, even more so).
Greater Rift balancing:
The usual suspects (unburieds, zombies, etc.) are still too rewarding. With the changes to crowd control, everyone will just fish for easy melee rifts when pushing. Fishing is okay to a certain degree, but it shouldn't be the main part of getting a ranking, so better balancing is still required. Some map types are still very bad (biggest offenders are Westmarch Heights and Repository of Bones) and could need density buffs or reworks. In addition, it would be great to see more "environment effects", like those zombies coming out of the walls in Halls of Agony, or the return of at least a few destructible objects in greater rifts which could be used as a tactical advantage. Playing around these kinds of things while still dealing with all the monsters and elites running around would make for even more engaging gameplay. Also, pylon spawns need to be fixed. It's good that the pylon mechanics / exploits I explained in season 2 got fixed, however the new mechanic is clunky and feels very frustrating sometimes. Some map layouts just don't have enough pylon spawn locations to actually let you spawn at least 2 pylons, and even when you get a decent map you never know if you lost pylon no. 3 or 4 due to the "fix", or if they just didn't spawn. Adding more spawn locations to "bad pylon maps" should be an easy solution to truly fix the problem in 99% of the cases.
On another note, I think the unavoidable damage route is just fine, but reflect damage has become an even worse problem. It was bad before already since many builds had to chance to deal with it at all (due to delayed damage output, like Ball Lightning and Rain of Vengeance), now you never have a chance to actually shoot at reflect packs because there's always one monster which has the buff. The reflect damage needs to be heavily nerfed, or entirely removed. This affix has been causing issues and requiring reworks since vanilla, and it's just a very unpleasant mechanic in the game which should just not exist. I'm not entirely sure what we are intended to do against it after patch 2.3, I was running 300 million toughness in tier 60-65 and got totally obliterated within one or two attacks whenever a reflect popped up. At some point I was even running the new leech passive in addition to that but it barely made a difference. I'm not sure how this is going to work in tier 70+ (which is probably what the end of season rankings are going to look like for most solo leaderboards, and close to 80 for groups). My toughness was overkill for the tiers we were running, most of the time I was even surviving several hits without proccing Awareness, but reflect still remains an instakill. The same goes for the Crusader (Alkaizer) and the Barbarian (Empyrian) I was running with, both of which had even more toughness than me, and they could barely touch reflect either. Link to VoD: https://youtu.be/0Ru8j1YfnSo [Note to Diablofans: Same as above]
Rift guardian rebalancing:
It was about time.
Elite affixes:
I think reflect damage is considered a "known issue" already, so I'll focus on other affixes here. The nerf to Jailer makes survivability a lot easier, paired with a little tankiness to survive Thunderstorm it seems like it's in a good spot, however I'm unsure about very high tiers (75+). So far I didn't have a chance to test those, but it should be good enough to survive at least one hit even on high tiers. The changes to the Waller affix were much needed, I haven't really had a situation where I was getting completely stuck so far. Also, I noticed a lot of Missile Dampening packs, it seems like their prevalence got increased, which is a good thing. It's one of the more interesting affixes that you really need to play around.
Other than that, I'm sad to not see any new affixes in this patch. With the CC changes, I was hoping that this opportunity would not go unused. Just adding 2-4 new affixes would definitely keep things fresh a little in the greater rifts. Things like Arcane Enchanted and Poison Enchanted are perfect affixes that make fights interesting, give us more of those!
New Torments:
From my experience on the PTR, the new Torments are too unrewarding to compare to the lowers. You are significantly slower in T9 and T10 because you have to trade movement for dps, and so far the x2 experience multiplier compared to T6 doesn't really bring it anywhere close to greater rift farming. Same goes for the bounty caches, they should award a little more on T10, considering that splitfarming will be a lot less efficient and it will be very difficult to find people who can do that efficiently.
Demon Hunter Part
Skill changes
Spike Traps:
Reading this in the patch notes, I was really excited about this change. Playing Spike Traps was a lot of fun back in vanilla, but the skill has been completely forgotten after the heavy (unnecessary) nerfs in 2.0. It would be even better if we had a set dedicated to this skill, the items to work with it are already there. So far, it seems like the developers' intention is to use Spike Traps with Natalya, as it is the only set that buffs all of your damage. The flexibility of Natalya is remarkable and helps a lot with creative builds, however the Crashing Rain (~8000% wpn dmg every ~1.5-2s) affix just outshines anything you could potentially come up with, including the Spike Traps. The damage on the runes is a joke, and the effect of the cold rune is worthless with the CC changes. At least the lightning rune looks cool (both aesthetically and tactically) but it seems even weaker than the rest. So far, it seems like only the new seasonal weapon can save the Spike Traps.
Numbing Traps:
Well okay. Didn't seem like much of a problem to keep it up permanently anyway, but it might help a little. Numbing Traps also seems like a very strong passive to use in group play, but we just don't have reliable ways of proccing it currently. If the new Spike Trap weapon is not going to work for high end groups, we would have to settle with cubing the Helltrapper to make the passive work, or take something like Sentry on one of our precious active skill slots, both of which are very unreliable mechanics, which is especially bad for defensive skills like this. Maybe it's time for the Guardian Turret again.
New Leech Passive:
With all the incoming damage in greater rifts now, a healing passive sounds pretty good. It's scaling well, and the choice of making it scale off life per kill fits the theme. Nevertheless, if we consider the slots with can roll life per kill, we can see that its power is very limited: Jewelry, weapons, chest, belt, pants. The last three might be the best candidates to get the stat. No one is going to reroll a secondary on a Hellfire amulet, so getting it there is almost out of the question, same for weapon slots (UE needs discipline, Natalya likes it too, and rings are incredibly difficult to get right on the primaries alone, rolling the secondary like that on top of it is incredibly RNG as well. Assuming a high end main DH, it seems likely that it's going to be the 3 armor pieces and one lucky roll on the jewelry, which would make for ~26,000-31,000 life per kill, subsequently scaling the passive to ~37,000-41,000 life per hit (including the 18,700 baseline). Since we want to run a lot of toughness, and the best way for DHs to get toughness is ancient vitality on a couple of slots, we will probably be sitting at 700-1000k life, which means we would need 20-25 attacks to refill our life, or ~6-8 seconds. That sounds fairly decent and in line with other classes' healing capabilities. If we could outheal reflect with it, I'd take it, but it's nowhere close to that. With ~200m toughness I was hitting myself for 100-150k per reflect of Multishot, which has a proc coefficient of mere 0.18, procs again from the rocket, and in case of Dead Man's Legacy even four times per attack, effectively twoshotting me in tier 60+. In any case, it feels weird to craft a Hellfire amulet just to get the Leech passive, when instead I could get something like Single Out or Ambush, but generally it seems like something I would consider using, depending on how necessary recovery will be at the high end. It would be great if good players could set themselves apart by lowering toughness and recovery to push their dps without being forced into heavy tanking builds due to reflect.
Other Skills
Shadow Power:
Since we focus on surviving incoming damage now, Shadow Power becomes an interesting choice again, but it's not quite there yet. Night Bane and Shadow Glide have sufficient utility for low end content, Blood Moon and Well of Darkness could need slight buffs. In the end, most will probably go with Gloom anyway, like always. I think it would be a good idea to give the skill a baseline Illusionary Boots effect. Even with Shadow Glide, we are significantly slower than Smoke Screen – Displacement, and definitely slower than any Vault rune, and taking two defensive skills doesn't really fit into many builds right now. It would fit the theme and would not be too overpowered, but it would let us skip a monster here and there if we really need to. On top of that, adding in a small baseline effect of the Gloom rune (or maybe even all runes, which could then be heavily improved by the corresponding choice) like 15% damage reduction would probably good enough to make other runes interesting for high tiers.
Vengeance:
Seethe should be baseline. It's the only rune that is ever used, and even then it's very little return on investment with the incredibly long cooldown. In case we don't get a set to go with this (really cool) skill, a couple of buffs certainly won't hurt.
Multishot:
Honestly, I don't know why the runes didn't get a proper rework when UE was introduced. The only viable choice for basically anything is Arsenal. Cold is used here and there for Iceblink synergy (e.g. Ball Lightning builds), but in general all of the other runes are trash. Now that UE and especially Multishot are going to be used so much, I'm really disappointed to see no changes at all to this skill. Maybe even rework Arsenal a little and make the skill deal more damage to 1-3 targets, or make an item like that (like Nilfur's). Right now, Arsenal is doing 360% + 600% weapon damage against 1-3 targets, which is just miles ahead of any other rune with their 360% / 460% only. Arsenal is a really cool and balanced rune, but I'd like to be able to choose the other ones to if I decide to go for some utility, or make them have some other effects. There's much being done about the single target problem, but without a rework, we will always use Arsenal and only Arsenal, all of the other choices are pretty much worthless (apart from maybe Torments where you could oneshot stuff with Full Broadside or something). Anything that alleviates the single-target problem would certainly help, and maybe let us take a look at the other runes. Nevertheless, a rework / buff to all of them (minus Arsenal) would certainly help.
New Items
New Multishot Bow:
Really well-crafted addition to the set because it solves many problems at the same time. Perfect! Vaulting is sufficiently cheap to be able to keep up with the group and retain enough mobility in T6-10, so Danetta's are not required, and it lets you dodge many things in high greater rifts without losing too much damage as well. Spamming low-cost Multishot is fun, with the added attack speed bonus you feel like a machine gun. With its high RCR and legendary effect, it will obviously become the go-to choice for Multishot, but overall the power level feels adequate. Nevertheless, I was expecting to see a weapon like this for Cluster Arrow, not for Multishot. A weapon tailored for Cluster Arrow that is good enough to bring M6 back to the table would be a nice addition, as right now it seems like the Multishot bow will also be the best weapon to use if you intend to run M6. I'd like to see M6 being viable, and after a full season of not playing the set, it's definitely time to bring it back, maybe in S5.
New Generator Belt:
Works well for Multishot / Cluster Arrow builds, the 3:1 RoV Natalya cycle and whenever you run a resource-heavy build in general. Refilling hatred becomes a lot of fun with the added attack speed, and the bonus damage might spark some new build ideas (like the Buriza + Hungering Arrow build in 2.2). However, so far it doesn't work with Kridershot. This is probably intended, as lightning UE is a very strong build, but without perma CC and the new reflect damage in place, it's seriously falling behind compared to other options, and Blizzard should consider making it work in synergy with the bow. Other than that, it feels weird to use it in conjunction with the Multishot bow, which adds 40% attack speed for that skill, but when switching back to a generator you only get a 30% boost. The numerical dps difference wouldn't be too huge if the belt was set to 40% as well, or at least able to roll that high, and it would definitely smooth out the Multishot playstyle a lot. Maybe set both items to 35%?
While we're at it, I'd really like to see generators being useful besides "regenerate most hatred possible", which is also the reason why so many people run Evasive Fire – Focus. With the new cc changes, we have the perfect opportunity to bring more utility to some of the generators, and maybe keep only 1-2 pure dps runes on each. Most Hungering Arrow runes could need a rework, and if all the generators would be buffed to 5 hatred baseline, people might consider running utility runes over pure 6-7 hatred runes. At the very least, buffing the proc chance on Bola Shot – Bitter Pill is in order, given that the reason for its weakness is long gone. Also, I don't understand why Bola Shot – Freezing Strike scatters in such a huge cone, it was perfectly fine back when it was still a poison skill. Skills like these or Cold Grenade or Evasive Fire – Hardened are exactly what we need, if they weren't regenerating so little hatred.
New Generator Bracers:
Much needed item with the new changes to perma CC and the focus on survivability / tankability. It really helps to keep the DH alive, and combined with the new belt, options like Reaper's Wraps become less required anyway. Currently the bracers feel a little too mandatory, but if there are no plans to further increase DH survivability in any meaningful way, they seem to do the job well. Nevertheless, again it doesn't work with Kridershot so far. Even if the Ball Lightning builds shouldn't become mandatory for pushing (which I hope they won't), it should work with the Krider effect, otherwise this bow will probably be completely forgotten, and most build opportunities made possible by the cube will go to waste.
New Spike Trap Hand-Crossbow:
While we don't have access to this yet, I'm not sure what to think about this new crossbow. Of all the sets we would have to go with Natalya to actually get anything out of Spike Traps, and Natalya heavily relies on smooth RoV cycling (which also does crazy amounts of damage). I'm not sure how the Sticky Traps will behave in the end, numbers-wise it seems at least worth trying depending on exact mechanics (e.g. will the Sticky Traps jump back and forth indefinitely between two targets? I can't imagine that, but it's more or less the kind of power level we would need), but I have a feeling we are going to be disappointed.
Old Items
Embodiment of the Marauder:
This set could need a couple of buffs. In the end, it will all come down to Cluster Arrow anyway, since there is not really a point in running Multishot or Elemental Arrow with it. It just feels and looks so cool when you have 5 sentries shooting Cluster Arrows at your enemies from all directions. In any case, it's far too weak. We need one extra passive and the quiver effect, and then also the Ballistics or Grenadier depending on rune choice. Also, the Boar Companion doesn't even come close to the UE or Natalya damage reductions, but considering the pets can tank for us a little bit, that should be fine. Seeing one or two new items that go along with it would be awesome (maybe a Tall Man's Finger like item which lets us build one monstrous sentry that follows us around like a tank?)
The Shadow's Mantle:
I'm disappointed that we have seen no rework of this set. Patch 2.2 brought sweeping changes for basically any class because of the new set, instead Demon Hunters get basically nothing. While it's true that we have been blessed in the past, seeing that this one is not getting reworked honestly surprised me. The legendary items we're getting are cool and feel well balanced already, however they don't offer entirely new playstyles, they rather just fix things (like hatred and survivability). After seeing the changes to Spike Trap, I was hoping that the Shadow's Mantle would go along with it. Or, given the name of the set, I was hoping to finally see a melee / knives / ninja oriented set for the DH (maybe even let us wield a special dagger in the offhand with it). Or maybe a reworked Shadow Power + Vengeance set similar to Akkhan's.
2-piece weapon set reworks:
While many other classes have seen their weapon sets reworked, Demon Hunters have not been touched, but that's fine. Danetta's has its uses and should not be changed. It's not top tier GR stuff, but it's used for everything that requires you to be quick, and is generally good utility, especially now that we have the cube. However, seeing new weapon sets in the future would be amazing: Why not Bow + Quiver for example?
Chanon Bolter:
I haven't tested it specifically, but I was told it does work even after full DR on crowd control. Not sure if this is intended, but since it has its own cooldown, it makes sense, and actually the diminishing return affect it would make it completely useless anyway. Since the game has become very fast-paced, especially in groups, the cooldown on the taunt could be reduced a little to bring more group utility to the table.
Wojahnni Assaulter:
Neat idea, but there's nothing to support the item. It could work just fine with Natalya, at least in the old perma CC meta, if it could produce some kind of overlap between the attacks. Maybe increase the maximum stack size slightly and let them drop off by 1 per second instead of removing it all after moving. This would let us cast RoV and dodge things here and there while keeping the damage high. Other than that, the Rapid Fire skill could need some baseline AoE effects (maybe make the pierce baseline), but the Bombardment rune should do fine if there should ever be a buff to this weapon.
Omryn's Chain:
I really like this build since it has been introduced, but it's just plain useless. High greater rift pushing is the only sufficiently slow-paced environment it would work in, but it needs some offensive capabilities for that. I think adding a random rune effect either on the affix or on every proc would make for a good idea. Or, what I like best, is having it cycle through all the runes: We would get the 80% slow, followed by the 2sec immobilize, followed by two pretty much worthless runes, and in the end we get the precious 10% crit chance. After that, it starts anew. Since Natalya doesn't really want to use Vault and UE loses damage doing so, it seems like a balanced choice that would make for interesting itemization and gameplay decisions.
Envious Blade:
It's a really fun item to use (cube) and could potentially spark many cool speedbuild ideas, if it only wasn't that clunky to use. The fantasy of having a really strong first strike against an unwary enemy has something to it, but in actual gameplay, it's just not really working out. Especially in parties you always have someone damaging the enemy, like a support running in front of the group, and then it's at 98% and the effect won't work anymore, or you have a random environment effect damaging the monster, or you wolf companion hits it once, or it gets damaged by a random tick of Wreath of Lightning etc. If the threshold was set to 90% hp, it would definitely increase the viability of the weapon / cube effect.
Shi Mizu's Haori:
We have seen a full season of exploiting this item (100% crit Monk in trials) already, and before that it has never been and after that probably never will be used again. The mechanic is very cool but far too clunky to use, I suggest to change it to directly scale with hp, e.g. starting at 100% hp you gain 5% crit chance (so that actually dodging and surviving doesn't feel incredibly unrewarding), and then scale up to +50-70% the closer you get to zero hp. I'm sure a change like this would open up a lot of interesting build choices for basically all classes, and breathe some fresh air into the armor slots department, which usually is dominated by Cindercoat, Hexing Pants and the like.
Odyssey's End:
With a free Calamity for everyone (thanks to the cube), the 20-25% damage boost is far too low. I think changing it to 30-35% would make using the Entangling Shot sufficiently rewarding and at least make people consider it over Calamity. It only works on 2-4 targets for a very small time frame with only one specific skill, while Calamity is applied on everything on the first hit with any ability and lasts for basically the entire fight without needing you to think about it. Buffing the bow is definitely justified.
Rimeheart:
This weapon needs to be reworked. Freeze is basically banished from the game now, and even considering a permanently frozen target the damage is atrociously low. I suggest to make it work with chilled targets, or tie it to casting a cold spell instead.
2h Crossbows:
All of the special crossbows could need a buff, especially the Hellrack. It's a very exciting effect, and with the CC changes, things like this should be promoted a little by bypassing the crowd control resistance, and maybe adding a useful damage effect on top of that.
Reworked Izzucob:
Well, it's better than nothing, and at least adds something to a previously worthless weapon, which is always a gain. It might fuel some knive-heavy build fantasies along with the Sash of Knives, so I guess it has its uses, and might be a cool item to find in low end content.
Oculus Ring:
Other than on followers and some support classes I have never seen this item in use. If anything, it should proc on hit, not on kill, and then have a sufficient uptime. For solo, it's just too weak, even if we could have it for 100% of the time, however for groups it might become viable, and would enable semi support / semi dps roles.
St. Archew's Gage:
I was toying around with this item a little bit, thanks to the cube. I'd really like to make use of it, however its one-time-only mechanic is super clunky and just plain terrible. We need a way to reset the effect in long fights, similar to the Molten Wildebeest gem, I wouldn't mind seeing a nerf on the amount absorbed to compensate.
My overall impression of patch 2.3 so far
I think the game is heading into a good direction. Farming content is going to become a lot more fun with Kanai's Cube and more class diversity, and high end greater rift pushing is a lot more engaging and challenging than before, especially in groups. Removing RNG from item drops is also a very good idea to even out the competition and prevent frustration from unlucky players. The crowd control changes will shake up group play and will require further rebalancing of the rifts and especially the reflect affix. In any case, high end content should be more rewarding to narrow the gap between speedfarming and pushing, and rift fishing needs to be addressed.
Demon Hunters specifically seem to be in a fairly good spot right now, but will probably be a lot more difficult to play than most other classes. As such, they should be rewarded for doing well by being able to dish out good dps and bringing sufficient party buffs. Depending on what the devs want the solo and group end-of-season clears to be like, I think DH is neither undertuned nor overtuned right now. Natalya seems to fall behind UE a little bit with the new Multishot bow, but it will likely remain a viable endgame choice competing with the set, we'll have to wait for a fix to Leoric's Crown and the new Spike Trap weapon. Depending on changes to the new generator items, we might also see lightning again, and M6 is still far behind. In any case, group play has a much higher skill cap, both in terms of survival and dps. For the latter, cycling Focus and Restraint, Taeguk, Convention of Elements and possibly even Hexing Pants all at once is lots of fun and really requires you to be on your toes, I'm looking forward to doing that on live.
As usually, I'm not going to bother with farming too much on the PTR, since it just takes too long and takes away from other things I could to on live or IRL. It would be much easier if we could just get all the items from Kadala with a 100% legendary rate and infinite blood shards or something. Still, I want to push solo and groups a little more (which is difficult enough at 250ms latency), and I will report back again at a later point, probably after we have seen the next iteration of greater rift changes and the new S4 items.
1
If it wasn't clear from my previous post or people just didn't read it because it was a bit lengthy; The main benefits of botting right now are the materials and rift keys that you gain and not the plvls because as mentioned, farming paragon in a 4p group is about 10 times more efficient. Still though, that does not mean that you won't gain some paragons while botting (allegedly around 20-50b xp ph) but that's just not the main thing.
As Hoschi mentioned, today withe the ability to cube items, having so many materials from botting basically means that you can upgrade rares into legendaries at an insane rate which allows you to perfect your gear in no time and obviously give you the option to attempt about 20-30 weapon upgrades per day which pretty much almost guarantees a perfect ancient weapon for your build in a relatively short period of time.
1
Actually you are both wrong. One of the main reasons why Avoid was able to perform so well while still being under-leveled was the fact that he had access to D3Helper which was not available to the public at the time.
On topic: Yeah, farming paragon sucks. The game is basically only fun in the first week or two of the season, then it devolves into constant paragon grind which is just mind numbing.
2
It's good that you added the "for now" part but seriously, are we going to get a useless thread posted every time someone gets a high rank? Those ranks are extremely temporary anyway...
At least provide us with some insights or some information about the run. Some people are not willing to click on a random youtube link just because "rank 1" is written next to it.
Please put in some more effort in your video postings and threads in the future so we could all enjoy those if they are actually entertaining and or beneficial.
Also, i'm pretty sure that it's against the rules to just post a video on these forums... Would be wise to read the forum rules and specifically the videos and streams posting section before making such threads - And this goes out to whoever reads this and is planning on posting a video at some point.
1
Hey dude, there's this thread on the official forums by Nubtro and here he recently explained what's going on with quite a bit of details.
Basically, AD is not working with hota bracers and the focus ring so it's dealing a lot less damage than it's supposed to. Whether it is worth it to still go for it or not, i don't know but having that extra toughness could certainly help you go for higher GR.
There's also this thread by Page for more general info about AD.
2
Updates:
#1:
Yeah i probably should have worded the OP differently but whatever.
So these are the several possible actions that could help reduce the lag (Ordered by their likelihood to happen in my opinion):
1. Reduce the number of monsters spawned in greater rifts and increase the progress you gain for every monster killed.
2. Remove area damage from the game or replace it with something that is less intensive to constantly calculate.
3. Somehow make sure that damage numbers do not get bigger than uint.max.
4. Change D3 to run in 64 bit.
I personally think that they could provide a fix with relative ease if they just tune the GR numbers as point #1 suggests. Sure, the game might become a bit less exciting because you won't have crazy density maps in GR anymore, but the pros would certainly outweigh the cons if it would mean that you can play a GR 65+ with 4 people or solo with no lag at all.
After this "fix" is deployed, they could investigate more complex solutions that would enable them to bring back the density - without the lag.
#2:
So more players hitting more mobs with many different types of attacks that have procs like area damage, along with constant damage over time ticking, all of that creates insane lag. It looks like their only chance to fix this shit would be to actually design the game mechanics differently from now on i.e get rid of most DOTs and limit procs to once per x amount of time etc...
I just wish they address this problem as a whole and not just provide small fixes that are usually addressing only certain a build.
Original post:
*TL:DR at the bottom*
The game is currently almost unplayable in high greater rifts like 60+ or so and especially in groups of 4 players. I’m not sure if this is the case on all realms but at least on EU it is.
Some builds suffer very badly from this even in solo like the Helltooth WD for an example. Some people claim that if you have 0% area damage then you won't lag in solo but that's just a workaround and not a fix.
In the past, the argument against investing time into fixing this issue was the fact that only a very small percentage of the player base experienced it because it was only evident on high end greater rifts. But today, the lag starts occurring even on 60+ which is not considered that high anymore and i'm pretty sure that more and more people will get to that level and experience the horrible lag.
To the people that are rushing to post things like "no lag here lol noob", please understand that this issue is not always reproducible as it really depends on several factors like the time you play at, what build(s) you are running, the map layout / type you're at and the mob type you are facing. A possible solution to this problem would be to divide all the numbers in game by 100 and display them in the client as strings with added 0's just to keep the consistency.
TL:DR - The game lags horribly on high gr and a possible fix would be to simply divide all the damage and health points numbers in game by 100 so the server calculations, database queries and server-client traffic won’t be as heavy anymore.
Posted also on:
Official forums (US): http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/18695103869#1
Official forums (EU): http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/15162513563#1
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/3j368b/fix_the_lag/
1
Gratz on R1, good job on the clears and thanks for sharing.
1
They *fixed* conduit pylons.
And no, barbs on 2.2 can't go further than on 2.3, that's just wrong.
3
1. Lag sucks on PTR because the PTR server(s) suck and are not meant to stress test or reflect the live servers in any way related to performance.
2. "Kunai sucks" - It's called Kanai's cube and it doesn't really suck. It provides the players with more customization and options that were not available before. the fact that there are items that are used more often in the cube than others, does not mean that the system itself is inherently flawed, it just means that Blizzard has more work to do in regards to itemization.
3. GRs are getting changed with every patch. New challenges have been added in the previous expansion and patches and i suspect more will come in the future patches and possible expansion.
4. True, there's not that much to do in the new patch other than farm the new gear sets on all classes, try out the new builds, play around with the new cube feature and basically continue farming and progressing through greater rift levels... there's no way you can do all of that in 1 hour though so no.
5. Ranks on PTR mean almost nothing... Ranked 50 on PTR definitely means nothing. The only thing retarded here is your post to be honest... Oh that, and also the fact that the paragon system is still garbage. Oh well.
1
I still have my hopes up for a pvp expansion. One that would include solo / team arenas, pvpve events and matches like dota style maps or whatever.
If done right, this would surely increase the active player base by a lot. It could be a lot of fun to have something to do other than farm for gear to be able to farm more gear (or paragon...).
I know people say that Diablo is not a pvp game but in D2 we had an awesome pvp community with endless innovative builds and ideas - if you were into it, you'd know that it was nothing less than crazy and fucking awesome. To a lot of people, including me to some extent, pvp was the real true end game of D2. I hope the D3 dev team could pull off something like that in the next expansion, just a lot better than what D2 pvp was since it was heavily limited by its simplicity in terms of settings and options.
2
Top paragon level players are not botters. If you play legit in a group of 4 and farm speed GR you will get 5 times more xp than what the best bots can do. Whole arguement is pointless.
People express their dissatisfaction with the system because it's flawed. It forces people to farm the same content 24/7... If there was a balance between the different types of content in the game in terms of xp gained, then people would be able to farm different types of content without feeling forced to farm just this ONE THING. That's the main problem that many people seem to be missing. Botting has nothing to do with this.
Also, if someone bots and gets really high plvl, he will get banned. In EU for an example, there aren't more than a few thousands of people who are close to or are above plvl 1k... Botters can be spotted quite easily if they go overboard (and sometimes even if they don't).
Oh and you are wrong... paragon > skill is actually true. Please tell me more about how you can skillfully beat a plvl 2k player when you are plvl 800... yeah good luck. And you might not know, but it's not mainly about solo... In a group where the average plvl is 1.5k, this group can beat the shit out of trials or GR levels that a plvl 800 group will never be able to - or only be able to with extreme fishing and luck.
There's nothing wrong with a system that rewards players for playing the game more... The problem is that this specific system completely overshadows any other sort of character progression i nthe game and it has become the only way to actually play while being effecient once you have the gear.