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Wyatt Cheng on Conduit Changes

Wyatt Cheng took some time to explain the changes to Conduit Pylons on the PTR in a Reddit thread. He also goes over why even have Pylons, a luck factor, in Greater Rifts, which are meant to be competitive dungeons. Read below.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Reddit)

i can imagine the conduit buff was not intended and will not make it to live as it is

Changing conduit is intentional but the current PTR does not reflect it's final form.

There were a number of design goals with the change to conduit pylon

• Move it back to 30 seconds, because 15 just felt like a big letdown compared to the normal amount - picking up a conduit pylon in greater rifts was no longer a moment of elation as you zappity zap monsters as you run by.
• Make it NOT interact with Power pylon so you aren't trying to fish for power/conduit back to back
• Make it roughly equivalent in raw efficiency but in a different way than power pylon
• To allow conduit pylon to scale consistently across different grift levels.
• To have safeguards in place so conduit pylons aren't ever "required" to beat a rift guardian.

To have safeguards in place so conduit pylons aren't ever "required" to beat a rift guardian.

Could you elaborate on that?

One of the tricky things with the conduit pylon is that the damage required to create the zoom-zoom fantasy of running down a hall killing normal monsters also melts Rift Guardians. Our initial version of the updated Grift Conduit killed Rift Guardians without any help from the player (Reduced RG health + 30 second duration + adjusted damage calculations, etc.)

 

So internally Rift Guardians take 75% reduced damage from Conduit in greater rifts. I honestly don't remember if that change is on the current PTR, I just know that other than the 30-second duration the current PTR does not reflect how conduit will work in the next PTR patch.

I know this has been suggested before (even in this thread, and I'm guessing a million other times as well) but why not just remove pylons from GR's? I cant seem to find any argument for keeping them.
It seems to me you guys are going through a lot of trouble trying to balance pylons, why not just keep them as something cool in normal rifts remove them from GR's?

Some RNG (including pylons) gives a player a fighting chance to beat a Grift if they're a little behind.

This is very accurate.

We tried rifts without pylons and with greatly reduced RNG - it was not good. We added pylons and branches in the dungeon because without it the rifts are incredibly dull. More accurate and competitive at the very high end? Sure - maybe. But Greater Rifts are designed as highly replayable dungeons and without the randomness from sources like Pylons they lose a lot of their replayability.

I talked about why the randomness is an important design element of Greater Rifts on the Westmarch Workshop back in April. Here's a link at the 1:23:55 mark: https://youtu.be/VQY7uCToGtY?t=1h23m55s

The UI makes it really clear whether you're ahead or behind the timer, and the more randomness that's removed the more clearly you know whether you're going to succeed or fail very early on, which can make the entire duration of the rift feel miserable.

No Season 4 Date

Nevalistis replied to a tweet today confirming there's still no date confirmed for the beginning of Season 4. Once they reveal it we will let you know!

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Twitter)

when does season 4 come out live

We have not announced a date for Season 4 yet.

Changes to Rifts and GRs

MHM has made a video going over the changes to Rifts and Greater Rifts on the current PTR builds, including tweaked density, changes to Guardians, the Conduit buff, and Rift duration. Check it out!