Hey everyone,
in the recent weeks I've been testing the new DH builds made possible by the reworked Hellcat Waistguard and also dived a little bit more into the belt's mechanics as well. I did some tests on the PTR to find out more about how everything works, which is probably worth knowing for everyone who wants to take his grenade builds seriously. Since we are quite late in the PTR cycle and DH seems to be in a okay spot, I doubt we will see many, if any, changes here anymore.
I did a total of 5 different tests. First, nailing down the damage behavior of the procs, second, recording the average hit chances of bouncing grenades on a stationary target, third, validating proc chances by skill, fourth, counting some kill times with different belt rolls, and fifth, exploring the Buriza mechanics with grenades and the belt.
Here is a screenshot of my sheet for the first test:
My base damage is 56 without the belt equipped, using Grenade - Tinkerer. If I equip the belt, my "base" attacks will go up by 50% to 84 already, meaning the initial attack aready counts as a bounce. The following bounces each add 50%, and the last one will deal 800% total, not 100% + 800% = 900% as the wording on the belt could suggest ("... dealing an additional 50% damage on each bounce / This bonus is increased to 800% on the final bounce"). This means the total damage with all grenades hitting are 1700% (5 affix), 1400% (4 affix) and 1150% (3 affix), respectively.
On my next test, I took a stationary target (Hellbringers in A3) and did 200 casts with each possible belt affix, counting the procs as well as how many times each separate bounce would hit the target. This test was done with the Grenadier passive equipped. Here is a screenshot:
It seems likely that the differences in proc chances are only due to statistical errors, and the real proc chance is probably precisely 50% (also tested more thoroughly below).
It is worth noting that Hellbringers have a rather large hitbox, which rivals that of only the biggest monsters (not counting RGs). Interestingly, the damage share of the initial attack is rather high, around 20-27%. But as you can see on the numbers, especially for the belts with 4 and 5 affix, hitting a target more than twice is rather uncommon. The third, fourth and fifth hits all have average hit chances of below 50%, going as low as 28%. Obviously the numbers go down as the count in bounces increases, as the grenades have a higher chance of jumping somewhere outside of the initial attack area.
Looking at the numbers for only the last and most important bounce for each affix, you can see that the "big" explosion at the end doesn't even do that much for the 5-belt, with only 32% of the total damage done (as opposed to the possible 47% if we had 100% hit chance). Same for the 4-belt, where it is 40% (possible 57%), and only for the 3-belt we have some good numbers here, with 59% of the total damage (69% if we had 100% hit chance).
This result is very interesting because it suggests that the "bad" rolls on the bad are actually not that bad, and might in fact be better than a good roll in some cases. Of course the potential is much higher with a 5-belt, however the average chances of hitting the right targets (or anything at all) are very low for the strong, late explosions, while you get those much more consistently with a low affix. More importantly, bouncing grenades disappear as soon as they hit an obstacle or a wall. This test was done in an open area with no obstacles around, however in a GR, even in good map layouts (excluding most of arreat crater, perhaps), we have walls and obstacles everywhere, and grenades will disappear often before they can fully finish their bounces, favoring a lower affix on the belt. On top of that, you have to consider that for high GR pushing, the ideal playstyle is to surround elites with a lot of trash in order to nuke them down with area damage. With the high-affix belts, the grenades can be expected to do the opposite, i.e. jumping out of the center and killing all the small targets outside, leaving you with nothing but the high hp targets and no area damage to kill them. Based on my limited GR testing on the PTR it seems like there is a chance that people will prioritize lower rolls on their belts for certain builds. For speed farm (torment) builds specifically, you might want to run with a low belt anyway, simply because it takes a long time for all the bounces to happen in the first place.
This incosistent bouncing behavior is generally not so bad for skills like Cluster Arrow - Cluster Bombs or Grenade - Cluster Grenades, because those don't jump so far or just hit a large area in general. However, for Rain of Vengeance - Anathema, Strafe - Demolition or Grenade - Grenade Cache the difference is definitely noticeable and you can see that very often you won't hit your targets with your last explosions. I think overall higher belt affixes will still win out (especially when we consider GR fishing for big density), however probably not by as much as one could think without looking more closely.
My next test was just a confirmation of proc chances by skill. I equipped all the relevant grenade skills and counted how many times I saw a proc. It was rather difficult to do for RoV, so I only did 5 casts, watching them in ultra slow motion a couple times and counting the hits / nonhits until I felt I caught most of them. It seems like the belt has 50% proc chance across the board, independent of skill and belt affix roll:
Based on my findings about the low affix rolls, I went on to a field-test killing a big target in a rather open area (Ghom) and a small target in a very confined area (skinny a1 zombie near Adria's hut), counting the seconds for a kill.
It's only a small sample size, but it indicates that indeed the lower belts might not be so bad, especially on small targets and in areas where grenades tend to bounce against obstacles. Note that this test was done with Grenade - Grenade Cache, which probably has the highest bounciness of all grenades. It's also interesting that despite the highest average kill time, the fastest kill by far was done with the lower belt, too (on zombie target).
Right now I would say that the (5) belt is probably going to be the best on average if you intend to use it for fishing good maps and big density, and a (3) belt is probably best used for fast farm runs (torments and low GRs), where we have to fight in all kinds of small corridors and also want to deal the big damage as fast as possible (however only if you intend to basically oneshot stuff with a proc). Unfortunately it is rather difficult to acquire reliable data on this, so I can only go with my gut feeling here.
My last test was done with Buriza cubed, to see its behavior with grenades:
This screenshot doesn't show much more than that the extra grenades are also working with the belt, as expected. What it doesn't show is that the Buriza is actually quite difficult to proc, and it has something to do with how many targets are present and how they are distributed locally. It seems you need at least two targets and get the best results if you have a second (or more) target in a straight line right behind the first mob you hit with your grenades, which will make Buriza proc for additional damage.
Here is a little indication of what I mean:
This is only really relevant for the UE generator build, though, and keep in mind that Buriza still has an ICD of ~33 frames (so you can only get a proc on every second attack).
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TL;DR: Hellcat Waistguard gives us many new builds, especially for solo DH. The proc chance seems to be 50% across the board. Some of the grenade skills we have are quite bouncy, making the juicy late bounces more difficult to unfold their potential when they jump out of a pull or against an obstacle and disappear. A low roll on the belt does not necessarily mean it's bad, especially for RoV - Anathema, Strafe - Demolition or Grenade - Grenade Cache and speedfarm builds in general. Buriza works for grenades but is difficult to proc, because it depends on your and your target's positioning.
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Now that we're through with all of this, I also want to present you my guides for next patch. They are all aimed at pushing solo, and with this new belt we actually have a couple very competitive builds now. Personally, I will probably play Marauder's for pushing next season. *I will add some numbers to each build to give you an idea of what I would expect this to clear with ~1000-1400 paragon, good item rolls, augments and maybe 100-300 keys.*
UE generator (video / D3planner / D3planner torment version) [GR 92-95]
Fire Natalya with Shi Mizu (video / D3planner) [GR 95-97, builds without Shi Mizu or including FoK are also 90+]
Cluster Bombs Marauder (video / D3planner) [GR 96-97]
New concise version of my LoN FoK + Shi Mizu guide (video / D3planner) [GR 96-98]
LoN Strafe for T11-13 (video / D3planner)
I also plan on adding short written versions when Diablofans resets its build section with the new patch.
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I hope you enjoyed the read and / or one of my guides, and maybe you're also looking forward to pushing solo with a different build next season.
wudijo
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That's not necessary, you don't need to create a character. See here, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW96_m6lABM
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Heya! Always nice to see oldschool people. I've not been around as long as you, but quite a while at this point. But I love delving in history, so together with Aerisot - who, based on his account date, has even been around for longer - we went through the timeline of Dfans a while ago. Here's the crude picture:
I personally joined in September 2012. I'm not gonna re-tell the story of why I joined, because I've written about it here when DiabloFans closed. I also don't remember when I became a mod, but I can tell you that the peak of DiabloFans wasn't shortly after release, but it was around 2015/2016. That is because we often forget that Reaper of Souls really "fixed" Diablo 3 and turned it into the game we all wanted, and the Diablo 3 that we got to enjoy shortly after RoS release was probably the most pure and true successor to Diablo 2 that we always wanted. The game now is in a good state, it's just that many of us have "over-played" it at thousands of hours in, and a stupidly amount of power creep has made the game evolve into an endgame where people can't even comprehend the numbers anymore, and Blizzard recently openly admitted that they now take "paragon 5000" as the average competitive power level. Long before anyone cared, I warned about the destructive impact of paragon power creep, and in 2018 I concluded that for me, the Blizzard I grew up with ceased to exist.
But alas, I disgress. As I said, the "peak" of Diablofans was absolutely in 2015/2016. The site saw an incredible surge of users after RoS release as all of the sudden the removal of the AH and the more balanced approach of RoS, thanks to Josh Mosqueira, brought more opportunity for discussions and debate to the game, and the playerbase exploded. We had tons of build discussions, and as a result there was need to create better ways to share builds. As Molster had developed a deck sharing system for Hearthpwn, it was later on adapted into the build tool for DiabloFans. I don't know when exactly it launched, but it was the prime contributor to the spike in users throughout 2015/2016, as there was very little patch activity (cf. seasons overview), but the competitive playerbase was interested in exploring the development of the "meta", and casual players were constantly on the lookout for those juicy cookie cutter builds. The forums were also insanely active, and members like Jaetch and Loroese (wizard theorycrafting masters) are among those who I personally miss the most, among with many many others who just disappeared.
At the same time of the peak of these forums, in 2015/2016 Blizzard also had scaled down the Diablo development team - as we know now, it was when they scrapped the second expansion and instead decided to create DLCs (and later on decided to even release only one DLC, the Necro in summer 2017, and the rest as content patches). The result was that communication died off completely; from regular developer interaction across all media, including "play your way" panels with the devs, we went to a total silence. The paragon power creep then saw the potential for botters to exploit this, starting in season 4, and Blizzard never really stepped in; every few months there's a few banwaves, but they really only ever catch a fraction of botters, at most. To this day there are people openly mocking Blizzard, having bot references in clan names and character names while occupying top spots on the leaderboards. The silence of Blizzard is deafening, and every year or so we get an apology with "we will improve our communication"... and then again vanishing into the nether for a year. It'd be comical if it wasn't so sad. But in the end, this caused the playerbase to decline steadily, to a bare skeleton. Every so often players come back for a new season, a new patch, or an announcement - like Diablo 4 - but it's never for more than a few days at most.
DiabloFans specifically got hit hard by this lack of communication because Blizzard also stopped engaging with and promoting fan sites (with the exception of Reddit, where they became actually more active than on their own forums). So everyone moved over to Reddit and our forums became a bit barren. There were times where I was the only active mod checking in for weeks, and mostly looking at bot posts ;-)
DiabloFans changed owners at their peak, so I can't blame the new owners for shutting it down in 2019, as from their point of view it was in a steady decline, and there was no signs of Diablo 4 at that point (keep in mind, this was half a year after Blizzard literally gave the finger to all Diablo fans with their Diablo: Immortal announcement disaster). But the damage of said closure was probably more than we imagined: the build tool not being available for one season meant that people went elsewhere and removed their bookmarks. Another reason why everything here is quite empty is that when Fandom bought DiabloFans in 2019, they wiped every post and user who didn't explicitly consent to transferring their data (I guess to comply with GDPR).
The combination of all those factors make it quite difficult to get DiabloFans back on their feet. In the end there's only so much we can do; there needs to be a constantly engaging game that a lot of people play and want to discuss to even give us enough meat to revive the forums back to their old life. And then we need to acknowledge that Reddit, because it is graced by the presence of the developers, is favored so much more by the playerbase these days. But... we are trying, and we aren't giving up.
Here's to hoping that Diablo 4 will help return DiabloFans to its old glory!
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https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/turbohud-bannable-or-not/8943/13
Originally Posted by (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
No idea what exactly is coming, could just be a smokescreen, but I hope this is true.
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Yeah, I agree with Mob Dylan. To be honest, in that video I hear no real arguments, it's just "MTX are just bad" and then goes on in circular arguments.
D3 sold extremely well, like millions of copies, but now we're in a situation where we have free transmogs and almost no updates. I'd much rather have more in-depth patches and smaller content updates (like trying to fix paragon or balance faster+more frequently) than what we see right now, about one real meta shake up per year at most. PoE is a good example for MTX that do not affect the game's power at all, and I'm sure D4 is going the same route.
I know a lot of people are vigorously unequivocally against MTX in any way, form, or shape - but then you also will have a game that after release will only see very infrequent minor patches and nothing else, which makes seasons very quickly very boring. You can't have it all. Imho, not introducing MTX into RoS was D3's downfall. Just let me pay for stash tab, wings, pets, portrait frames; or even new stuff like character looks or so.
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Official Blizzard stuff
Streamers/Youtubers
(some with dev interviews and additional Youtube content/mirrors):
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I think they might be aware of it, they also mentioned how they don't want too colorful spell effects - and then the gameplay had lots of visuals going on, in a full party it might be like PoE (which sometimes becomes a crazy clusterfuck with a million colors and effects). I hope they turn it down. It might also have something to do with console compatibility, highlighting selected monsters.
Whatever it is, I agree with you that it should be turned down, in general - less is more. Even in this demo of one players vs a few monsters it was sometimes a lot of visual clutter. Diablo I, admittedly in a different era of PC gaming, had almost none of that.
You also mention sound which I've stressed in multiple places today is really important. I have no idea what the sound in D4 is gonna be like though, haven't really paid attention to the demo sound and it's only one zone anyways.
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Didn't see a thread yet
For now people probably have enough hype threads and obviously the front page is going to cover everything for this weekend. But over time, we'll have a long time ahead of us, so I'll (infrequently) update this with links to major content (maybe for now just add a lot of different stuff and sort it out later). Feel free to post any links and we'll sort it out.
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Yeah, this was posted elsewhere earlier, but thanks for the picture. It's an ad in Gamestar, right?
For those who can't read German and want to know - it's a full-page ad in a German monthly game magazine (most likely Gamestar) for the post-Blizzcon release of a Diablo artwork book. The part in red simply says "With over 500 artworks from Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo III, and Diablo IV this book presents various remarkable pieces of art that were created for the iconic ARPG of Blizzard Entertainment."
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Maybe some of you fellow HC players have noticed that the servers have been acting up lately, as also reported by others. Combined with the mixed reception of the seasonal theme (some people saying they don't like it; some clearly enjoying it), I was wondering how popular this season is. Of course we don't know any player numbers, as Blizzard isn't sharing them. So I thought: why not use the stats from a D3-related website that has been up and running for several seasons with no major changes nor announcements to compare the different seasons? I went ahead and did some very basic plotting of D3Resource.com. Here's what it looks like, annotated (click here or on the pic for higher resolution):
I thought it provided some interesting insights (obviously this is just me guessing based on crude, superficial data analysis):
Ending on the obvious caveat - this graph represents visitors on my personal website. It's from the entire domain of D3Resource, but the bulk by far (>80%) comes from the Season Journey Tracker, and the graph looks the same if I sample only for that. Also, I did not account for anomalies (e.g., a sudden increase from some random website that shared any of my links prominently).
TL;DR: I looked at some graphs and determined that if Blizzard gives us a reason for a prolonged/new loot hunt, or shakes up some set damage numbers, more people play Diablo 3. #shocking!
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Enjoy playing solo? Looking for a challenge? Bored of meta and rat runs? Or just looking for something "a bit different" this season?
Join the Season 18 Solo Self-Found League!
The SSF League is a community-organized effort to shake things up a bit and give those who prefer playing solo new goals to strive for. Participating is very simple, as there is no sign-up or registration. All you have to do is submit your highest GR clears - and of course to play solo. The SSF League ends after 30 days, so once the "meta is settled" and the S18 alternative to rat runs has been found, you can join groups for the last two months of the season and push for that GR150 clear!
For more details, main organizer Garfm has put together a comprehensive Google Doc with rules and frequently asked questions. He also said up SSF channels on his Discord!
This season we are lucky to have some well-known community members joining us in the SSF (in addition to aforementioned organizer and accomplished speed runner Garfm who will be streaming as well):
More to come! Planning to join as well? While there is no registration requirement, it is fun to know who you'll be racing against - so post a reply if you're up for it and want to join the fray! You can also join our clans (purely optional, not at all required) - | Solo Self Found | and SSFTW on NA, and SSFEU on EU!