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Follow Up on Retroactive Changes

As a follow-up to Wyatt Cheng's recent post on retroactive changes to items, Lylirra compiled a few questions from forum users in the thread, and their respective answers from Wyatt. Check them out below!

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Here are a few quick Q/A follow-ups from Wyatt. Italicized questions are from players, quoted answers are from Wyatt. (link)

Q. Is it likely that the Shadow's Mantle set will continue to be a Shadow Power modifying set? (link)

The Nat's set is a great example of looking for alternative ways to make a set better. In my original post I said "We could also introduce a new Legendary item that offers a cool interaction or synergy with the "weak" one, and makes it better."

So in the case of Nat's, one thing Travis (Day) has been advocating internally is that instead of changing the Nat's set directly (which, as I've mentioned, we prefer to keep retroactive changes to a minimum), we could look at finding cool synergies with Rain of Vegenance. I don't want to put out any specifics, but in the same way Quetzalcoatl makes Jades Harvester better, or you can imagine that any legendary item that makes Rain of Vengeance better, makes the set better.

Q. Why is Helltooth not getting touched when firebirds got redesigned? (link)

Because at the moment we're not completely happy with Wall of Zombies. We'd like to get Wall of Zombies to a place we're happy with first, and then we can properly evaluate Helltooth within that context.

Q. I'm sure there's a huge list of items tht you want to look at along with abilities, but I'm just wondering if you have any plans at evaluating the chantodos set at some point in the near future? (link)

As I mentioned in the post, after 2.1 we're trying to shift away from revising old sets and more towards introducing new legendary items that introduce new play styles. Rather than just have an existing set be more powerful - let's find ways to promote skills by introducing brand new Legendary effects.

This is not to say buffing existing sets is out of the question, but 2.1 was about hitting things of the highest priority.

Q. What about enchanting? You guys basically turned the high end weapon enchanting game on its head with Ramaldni's Gift. I've personally found two or three incredibly rare, well rolled (native socket) weapons that I assumed I'd never replace... but that's not the case anymore. I know these weapons are by no means useless in the new patch, but had I known of Ramaldni's Gift at the time, I would not have enchanted them the way I did. (link)

Yes - this is non-ideal. The things I've described are ideals, not absolutes. We can't improve the game without being able to change it, and sometimes change has a few negative consequences. Overall we try to keep the negative consequences to a minimum while maximizing the positive effects. In the case of the Gift we feel that the benefit was worth it.

Blizzard Career Website

Blizzard's careers site has been recently revamped to add all the internships and full-time jobs available all over the world. They have thus published a very inspiring video for those aspiring to work with them.

Monk's Spirit Generators APS

Official Forums MVP Druin, a Monk dedicated player, made an interesting thread explaining how the class' Spirit Generators work in terms of attack speed, and how the recent changes made in the latest Public Test Realm affect those skills' damage and attackspeed "scalars". Check some of his more meaningful posts on the thread, or the original thread here.

Hey guys!

I did the framerate testing that I promised I would last night and here is a list of our current APS mods for all skills that have attack animations that can be counted --
FoT ----- 1.31
DR ------ 1.29
CW ------ 1.26
WotHF --- 1.26
LTK ----- 1.00
WoL ----- 1.00
EP ------ 1.00
CS ------ 1.00

Notes --
This means the following skills APS mods were buffed
FoT 1.16 -> 1.31 = ~13.0% buff
CW 1.13 -> 1.3 = ~11.6% buff
WotHF 1.16 -> 1.30 = ~8.7% buff
WoL 0.75 -> 1.00 = ~33.3% buff (Official Forums)
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One of you two is smoking weed.

whos right?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/2cqi8v/ptr_monk_generator_changes/

I actually did my math flatly wrong but the numbers listed in that thread are also incorrect.

I will explain --
Each generator has three unique attack animations with unique frames/attack associated with them.

At 60FPS and 1APS, FoT, for example, takes 39 frames 39 frames and 60 frames for its 3 attacks.
That comes out to 1.55 1.55 and 1.00 APS mods.

I averaged out those numbers which is where I went wrong.

The actual math would be APS_mod = 1 / average([1/1.55], [1/1.55], [1/1.00]) = 1.31.

I will update my OP with correct math.

As for as the single-part APS mods listed in that Reddit thread, they match my findings exactly with the sole exception of WotHF which they have as being FAR slower than me.

My FoT comes out to 1.31, my DR comes out to 1.29, my CW comes out to 1.26 and my WotHF comes out to 1.26.

Their FoT, DR and CW are the same as mine, their WotHF comes out to 1.14 which is just obviously false. (Official Forums)
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So... basically what you're saying is.... the buff to our APS on our generators doesn't at all make up for the increased cost of LTK?

Because.. from my current testing in my LTK/ GNK fire build.. that's what I'm feeling. No matter which generator I use.. spirit generation without perma-epiphany is as craptastic as always.

I mean ... unless you think like 13% more spir/sec from Gen APS makes up for 67% more cost on LTK then no, I don't think it made up for it.

The new Epiphany certainly did but perma-epiph was already pretty much required and my friends tell me that in GR 30+ you can't even use the new epiph rune because you die instantly to everything without perma-shroud ...

<sigh> (Official Forums)