Looking at the other stuff, it looks like they are removing the stack dependency, so as long as SW is active, you get a flat 50% DR.
- P4_ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_044 Your damage taken is reduced by [{VALUE1}*100]%
for each stack ofwhile Sweeping Windyou haveis active.
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I believe for punish and sycophants, they were referring to buffing the skills themselves, and not via items. I could be wrong, but that seemed to be what they were saying. There were going to be some slight changes to skills to complement the sets and new items, like buffs to punish and sycophants, but that most changes would just be number tweaks.
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It's 100% bannable in the sense that they reserve the right to ban you for anything they want (like aura switch spamming in D2, which would get you temp banned). But that isn't helpful, since it's true of any action you take in the game.
As far as what they've ever said or done with bans, it's always the use of a third party application, which if you are using num lock, isn't the case. As I said above, the inputs they see on the server side will look exactly the same whether you use num lock or hold the button down manually. It's as simple as that.
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1) If bliz dislikes the use of innas and SW to proc taeguk, they could just make the innas bonus remove the spirit cost completely. 5 spirit is basically negligible anyway.
2) They cannot prove that a player is not just holding down a key to keep SW casting. It requires no other program to do, and the "trick" is basically to lock a numpad key to simulate holding it down.
Thus, even if they were looking for something to ban, it'd be a rather large stretch to ban people for this. The onus is on them to remove the synergy with Inna's and Taeguk if they consider it an exploit.
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Personally, I'm hoping they open up the PTR sometime during the second month of S2, and just add stuff as they think it's test ready, that way we both know what some of the content of the patch is going to be, and they give adequate time for testing.
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The combat in D3 is, in my opinion, vastly superior to any of the other ARPG's I've played recently (Path of Exile being the most recent). That said, if you prefer strong character progression and permanence in the choices you make, Diablo may not be the game for you, and you may not enjoy it as much.
As of now, there are plenty of T6 viable (where viable means relatively efficient) builds for most of the classes, and more become possible after every patch (or at least more variants). Unfortunately that's not true for greater rifts, but in an infinite scaling game mode, builds will always gravitate to one or 2 that are just better at dealing damage and surviving.
Overall, ROS was a big leap forward for D3, but it didn't change some of the core design decisions that may have caused you to leave. If you enjoy crushing monsters for loot though, I'd say it's probably worth another shot, especially in a week or so, when patch 2.1.2 comes out, and changes up a few things.
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For something like Spirit walk though, having Jaunt on an item would be pretty awesome.
In most cases, there are just too many skills where one rune is really good, and the others aren't really that attractive even when the really good one is given to you for free.
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In this way, it's less powerful than "WOTB gains the effect of all runes", while still giving the player control over the item bonus. I'd love this for COTA personally, as choosing between the fury on hit, 50% damage reduction, and the extra damage of the ancients can be rather annoying.
Were you suggesting allowing 2 runes for be chosen for each of a players 6 skills, or just as an item bonus for some skills? Given the direction of the game, I'd say that if something like this were to make it into the game, it'd probably be as item bonuses.
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It would also make damage skills interesting to balance, since they have elements attached to them. Does you Arcane Orb with obliteration/FO do cold or arcane? Does it do whichever of those 2 is your highest +ele?
If this were to become a thing, I think that yet another pass at all of the unused or under used rune effects would need to be redone first.
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Obtain rift key(s) from bounties in any difficulty
Complete rifts in T1+ until you get a greater rift trial key
Complete a trial to obtain a greater rift key
So they are gated by difficulty and by an already gated system (regular rifts), and then they are gated by a trail time sink.
Proposal:
My proposal is to remove the trials as a gating mechanism for Greater Rifts, and make them their own separate system. To do this, the entry system for Greater Rifts would need to be modified, so I’ll discuss that first. This fits with something Travis Day said on a live stream prior to ROS, where he discussed a player asking “what do I want to do today?” rather than “Let’s go do this one thing”.
Greater Rift Adjustments:
Since trials would no longer be a method for determining where you can start on a Greater Rift, a new method is needed.
My suggestion is to create a drop down in the obelisk menu for Greater Rifts. The drop down menu will start at 1 for a new character. After completing a level 1 rift, the drop down will contain 1 and 2. Thus, you can choose to open any rift up through your highest completed + 1.
This could possibly be exploitable, since you can always spam the highest level you’ve been able to complete, and thus upgrade gems at a very rapid pace. To combat that, requiring more Greater Rift tokens for higher levels may be necessary as a gating mechanism. Personally, I think the current system is pretty exploitable already, and if you spam your highest + 1, it will take you longer to complete, so you lose the ability to get items as fast, for the ability to upgrade gems. This seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me.
The reward from Urshi would also need to be changed. Instead of a n+1 key, you would have an option to have your greater rift token returned, but after tier 20, it isn’t 100% guaranteed. This way, there’s a chance you lose the token and can’t always just get it back.
Each player has a “solo” and “group” highest allowed tier. In solo, you can always just go to your highest + 1. For groups, some formula would need to be devised to take each members “group tier allowed”, and come up with a group tier to start with.
This allows Greater Rifts to stand on their own, and eliminates the “need” to have one of a few classes/builds explicitly for Trials.
Note that this is only a single suggestion. There are probably many better ways to handle Greater Rift entry with Trials removed.
Expanding Trials to their own system: Last Stand Mode
Now, onto taking trials and making them a separate stand-alone system. The purpose of this system is to create a different meta than greater rifts, and thus give players something different to do, and possibly make some different kinds of builds viable.
The basic premise is that there are waves of monsters that spawn and grow stronger, and the monsters are trying to destroy some object (or objects). To keep it in lore, the objects could be gates to a city, or defense turrets to a city. The number of gates/turrets would be dependent on the number of players defending. Some waves would just be randomly spawned white mobs (like trials now), others might be an elite pack and a few whites, others might be a random boss and some whites. The AI of the monsters would be to attack players first within a certain range, and to head toward turrets/gates otherwise (positioning will be important). In multiplayer games, the aggro range will be such that one player cannot have all of the monsters aggro’d. This way, everyone has to chip in to keep the monsters off of the turrets.
A wave ends when the player has killed all of the monsters from that wave. In later waves, more and more enemies will be spawned, with more life and damage (though the scaling of the damage will need to taper off at some point).
Safe Zone/Penalty Box
In order to be hardcore friendly, I decided that there would be a safe zone to fall back into (akin to the starting zone in LOL/DOTA). If you enter this area, you cannot attack monsters and they cannot attack you. The penalty though, is that if you enter this zone, you cannot leave for some amount of time. If you die, you are placed in this box. The drawback is that if you are not on the battlefield, enemies will attack your gates/turrets, and when they fall, you lose. Much like hockey, the monsters get a “power play” in group games when a player enters the safe zone, giving them a buff. This is to help keep people from abusing the safe zone, and to create a challenge. This buff can even increase during higher waves, to make things more interesting.
Part of the goal of the penalty box (and the “power play” buff) is to put an emphasis on balancing offense and defense. If dying (or having to retreat to the safe zone) has enough of a negative impact, players will be forced to sacrifice offense to stay alive longer, which should change gearing some, and also allow some of the lesser used skills/runes with utility or defense to used.
More on Wave progression
Using the penalty box (and power play concept) to help strike a balance of offense and defense, I also wanted to make things ramp up quickly for well geared players, so that the time sink for the “Last Stand Mode” isn’t too large. To accomplish this, wave skipping (like the current trials) will happen if you complete a wave quickly enough. This isn’t to punish defensive builds, but to help players get to the more “Challenging waves” more quickly. The idea is that if a player goes all offense to blast through the early waves, they will probably not make it very far once it gets challenging. A more defensive build may not ramp up as fast, but can sustain in the higher waves, allowing them to progress further, since they aren’t up against a timer.
Additional Thoughts
My one major concern with a mode like this is that there are a few perma-CC type builds out there. My hope is that if the map layout and gate/turret placement is designed properly, those builds won’t be able to CC all of the enemies all the time. This way, they can be useful in holding off part of the oncoming horde, but won’t be able to just CC everything so DPS cannons can stay alive and do damage from afar. If this were to become a hurdle, some waves could spawn with a buff to the monsters (cannot be feared, cannot be frozen, etc) so that cheese mechanics aren’t allowed.
Rewards
This is where I always struggle, as rewards are so hard to balance. My initial thoughts are that this could be a game mode that doesn’t drop items outright, but instead drops bloodshards, based on how far you get. This way, you could end up with a ton of shards to gamble at the end, and maybe they could either increase the shard cap, or give a temporary overage allowance, so you can run to Kadala (or have her like, appear after your done, like Urshi). That may be too good, or not good enough though.
The rewards would also need to justify the time sink, as this mode could potentially take a while. The idea though, is to make the rewards different than Rifts, bounties, and Greater rifts so that doing this game mode is better for something than those, and worse at other things.
Thoughts? Feedback is welcome.
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I think the idea is pretty solid, as it at least has a use for a particular type of farming.
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