The first small batch of hotfixes have been applied to the Friends & Family Beta!
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(Below you will find a list of hotfixes recently implemented in our Friends & Family Betathat address various bugs and mechanic tweaks. These have been implemented to encourage experimenting with other items, skills, or mechanics while we revisit them for the next patch.
These hotfixes should not require you to download a new patch for the Friends & Family Beta. Some of the hotfixes below will go live the moment they are implemented while others may require a restart of the game to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch. Also note that changes to certain abilities will not be reflected in its tooltip until a patch is issued.
Adventure Mode
Classes
Crusader
Wizard
These hotfixes should not require you to download a new patch for the Friends & Family Beta. Some of the hotfixes below will go live the moment they are implemented while others may require a restart of the game to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch. Also note that changes to certain abilities will not be reflected in its tooltip until a patch is issued.
Adventure Mode
- Completing individual bounties will no longer reward a Horadric Cache.
- Completing all five Bounties in an Act now also provides Blood Shards.
- Completing a Nephalem Rift now also rewards a Greater Horadric Cache.
- The XP and Gold rewards from completing Bounties have been reduced; the new values at level 70 are 85,000 XP and 11,800 gold.
- The following immunity Rings will no longer drop and have had their unique power disabled. Please note that immunity powers will be revisited in a later patch.
- Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac
- The Tall Man's Finger
- Wyrdward
- Rogar's Huge Stone
- Rechel's Ring of Larceny
- Solanium will now produce Health Globes on Crushing Blow less frequently.
- Pride of Cassius has had its unique power disabled. Please note that this item's power will be revisited in a later patch.
- Removing and re-socketing a Helm or Sword with a Diamond gem no longer continuously increases the CDR and Elite Damage bonus
Classes
Crusader
- Active Skills
- Heaven's Fury
- Bug: Now properly deals 1500% weapon damage over 5 seconds.
Wizard
- Active Skills
- Shock Pulse
- Skill Rune - Living Lightning
- Proc coefficient has been lowered from 0.2 to 0.042.
- Passive Skills
- Dominance
- Duration increase amount reduced from 1 second to 0.5 seconds per stack.
- Shield amount reduced from 27,323 to 16,394 (at level 70).
- Paralysis
- Stun chance reduced from 20% to 15%.
- Bug: Fixed an issue where Electrocute was generating too many procs from Paralysis.
It's a shame the immunity rings were removed, I rather liked the idea of them, hopefully they'll be added back in at a later date (maybe in a Hellfire Ring style quest)
I will say, seeing as how I have not PLAYED the beta RoS and am merely going by watching several days worth of multiple streamers, I could be completely wrong. I know they gave good exp and gold, but with all the paragon levels and all the gold sinks they are throwing in I truly think it would even itself out in the end.
Except the entire point was that they are REMOVING the loot reward by taking away the Horadric Cache drop. That along with the nerf to XP / Gold really removes any incentive. They took only a few minutes because most players who were able to speed them in minutes were using a Crusader with Heavens Fury (broken skill which did insane amounts of damage). Without that skill, the time involved would increase by a large amount. Increase in time to claim the bounty coupled with severely diminished rewards for that time do not exactly equal a selling point for them. If anything it will remove peoples interest in them completely when they get virtually no XP/ Gold or loot bags (besides the one for completing all bounties in a given act). 5 bounties for one bag of loot which MAY contain something good along with a few hundred thousand gold and XP really doesn't seem worth hopping all over the map.
It's good for the game if Bounties are just rewarding enough to be worth doing, and no more. If the Bounty reward is too much then killing monsters feels bad in comparison - you're encouraged to do the absolute minimum completion goal of each Bounty and then get out of there as fast as possible to speedrun the next one. Bounties are ultimately just an excuse to get people into new zones doing new things, there's no need for them to be the primary source of all exp and loot.
I see where you are coming from, and I partially agree with you.
The other side of the coin however is that if you remove almost all of the reward from Bounties, wouldn't you simply avoid them altogether ? If you can simply stay where you are killing mobs in Act 5 lets say, or just farm bosses for 10-15 minutes, why would you decide to go after the bounty if you have to keep wasting time going back and forth between different areas, then back to town 5 times before collecting a reward that MAY give you a few more pieces of vendor trash. After all, I guess it is merely speculation at this point, but Iit just seems like too great of a nerf right off the bat.
Well, it still works. Just not as optimally as it was before.
I have a bad feeling whenever proc coefficients get nerfed. Players just look for the next best thing to trigger whatever they're looking to triggering. Then that might get nerfed. And the next. Then the next. There has to be a better way to curb some of the overplayed tactics. But this cycle (or potential cycle) has to stop first.
In my humble opinion, it seems unnecessary to nerf bounty exp and prizes, since they were no big deal even before the hot fix.
In other words, gentlemen and ladies...much like everything else going on the beta testing...these things aren't final. In another thread, it was even confirmed by another CM that drop rates are particularly high JUST to give the testers access to more of the new legendaries to test out.
Thus...many of these things can and SHOULD change before it finally goes live and the testing finishes....
For instance, the Horadric Caches. That should absolutely go back in. Even if what each one drops is reduced, or fine tuned to be certain things and not others. Granted, I realize each Bounty was giving out gigantic rewards, like the quotes said, to give the testers more access to better items to test, but Bounties should be a rewarding thing item-wise.
Related note, the XP and gold rewards of Bounties. Unless they give us some idea of what crafting costs will be finally, we may not know if 11k gold is good enough for each one, or if it's not enough. Hopefully they plan on bringing the XP reward back up, though. The amount of Paragon XP to get from level 199 to 200, for example, is almost 300 million XP, at least in the chart see on this site. Even if the XP reward for a Bounty is 300k XP, that's about a thousand Bounties alone to get that one level. Which I imagine could go fast, but if it's reduced to 80-something-k, it'd take twice as long.
Thing is, I'm not worried about it. Given many of the changes coming, I have a lot more confidence in what they're working on. They know just how crucial this expansion/update is. They know how important it is to get it right...part of the reason they're letting us in on the process.
And actually, no. The thing with those rings is that they may mitigate ONE type of damage, but they often leave out things like All Res, which can mitigate ALL damage. The Wyrdward pictured in the news section...Strength, Vitality, Crushing Blow, Cooldown Reduction, +XP, and Fire Immunity...no All Res. The Tall Man's Finger...Black Damage, Dex, Life Per Hit, Crowd Control Reduction, Cold Immunity...no All Res. You could equip BOTH of those, and you know what? You get a Thunderstorm Plagued elite pack? You're pretty screwed.
That's the idea behind those rings. You find one of those rings with the right mainstat, with some extra damage stats, and the one element protection that fumbles you the most? It'd be perfect. But if you have on two rings with All Res, you may take damage, but you're reducing it from all sources. Choosing one of these immunities isn't OP. Hell, choosing TWO isn't even OP. The amount of All Res you're sacrificing, especially with Loot 2.0 numbers, is pretty significant.
All in all, it's a tradeoff. I have NO problem with items THAT powerful being in the game...maybe they should just be really hard to get. Drop from only some extremely rare monsters that are buffed considerably in the power department so they're not easy to kill. But I really don't think things of that particular nature make the game trivial.
I don't know much about proc coefficients, but am I wrong to think .2 is a bit high? I remember reading some of the proc coefficient nerfs a handful of patches ago, and I don't remember them being as high as .2. I mean, people thought lowering the procs on Wicked Wind would destroy the CM builds, but they hung around for a long time.
You do make a good point that nerfing things tends to be a habit of theirs, but I really feel like their philosophy is a bit different, to the point where they realize that it's okay to have a few things be in the game that are a teeny bit OP, but not over the top. I'm pretty sure they addressed Crushing Blow over in the official forums for that exact reason. They wanted to add something competitive with Crits, and CB is a great idea! They just have to implement in the right way in order for it to be good, but not game-breaking.
All in all, guys...relax. Some of this stuff will probably be back in another patch. They got great feedback (at least for a little while) over some of this stuff. They're just trying to tailor what gets tested, rather than keep everything in the game and have people ONLY test legendary drop rates (which were specifically boosted to be high), bugged skills (like the Crusader's beam), and the same legendary items as every other tester.
This is almost the problem with letting people see the innerworkings of their tests. Every little change becomes a crisis. Some of these worry me as well, I'd hate to see Horadric Caches be removed. But I really just think they want to tweak it and not kill it.