2 Legendary Card Reveals, Hearthstone Patch 9554 Now Live, Brawl: Too Many Portals
Free Stimpack for New Players, Leoric and Zeratul Bugs Hotfixed
New World of Warcraft Expansion Unveiling at Gamescom 2015 – Live Stream August 6
Diablo at Gamescom
Grimiku recently tweeted that Diablo unfortunately won't be present at the upcoming Gamescom. Looks like we'll have to wait for Blizzcon for big Diablo news.
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Twitter)
@theangzt @cm_nevalistis @tyvalir D3 won't have a presence at gamescom, and none of us are going. WoW is gonna rock, though!
Carnevil Lag Future Fix
It seems the lag caused by the Carnevil item will be fixed in a future update, as John Yang explained in a post today. Read below.
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
We've made a design change to Carnevil with the goal of reducing lag caused by the build without changing the overall power level. To clarify, the lag is primarily caused by the high number of Poison Darts being fired (20+ piercing projectiles) at a high attack speed (2+ times per second) with the build. The change is as follows:
Carnevil
Instead of "Every one of your up to 23 Fetishes shoot a Poison Dart every time you do", Carnevil is now "The 5 Fetishes closest to you will shoot a powerful Poison Dart when you do."
"Powerful" in this case means those 5 Poison Darts deal 3.8x the damage that a single Fetish Poison Dart used to do. In other words, those 5 Fetishes will deal 19 previous Poison Darts' worth of damage, with the expectation that the remaining 4 piercing Poison Darts' worth of damage will be made up for by the other ~18 Fetishes who are now using basic attacks.
Our internal testing showed performance improvements while maintaining the general feel and playstyle, and we hope you all will feel the same when you see the changes next PTR patch.
Guys, keep in mind this proposed change is coming first to the next PTR build before going live. So if you really want to point out a potential issue with the change, play testing it on real situations on the PTR, and then comparing results (like actual performance results rather than "feelings" which may be misleading) is the best way to reason with the devs - and maybe get things going for improvements, if they are necessary.
It's actually great that some players have the necessary passion and knowledge to not only be interested in this, but also be willing to point out potential issues with this change (that may end up weakening the build).
But again, the best way of making sure the feedback is heard is testing the changes when they go live and then forwarding your thoughts to the devs through focused feedback threads (or just generally the PTR forums).
Just something to keep in mind when coming across these kinds of posts.
Screw WoW, i want more D3 stuff!
@s7ein I believe you can log into the Public Test Realm on your PC and help with testing even if you don't own the game there.
Not 100% sure, but if I recall correctly it worked on an alternate account that I have (without any games). That is, if you really want to help testing (despite the awful queues) and don't mind playing from scratch (without a profile to copy over which makes testing easier).
Guys, this is a buff to Carnevil. I'll explain why later (once I can actually show it), but stop and think for about 2 minutes. I can give you 5 reasons right now why this is much better than the current Carnevil, but I I'll wait for the obvious to show itself!
Hopefully we gonna get diablo news at blizzcon instead then. I kinda get why they aren't going to gamescom,. They are kinda busy with 2.3 and wow need all the help it can get. The game is ruined so hard now and now they rush another expansion to squeeze out the remaining money they can. Diablo expansion news would ruin that. I get it. Still disappointed.
If they're not showing D3 at Gamescom to focus on the WoW expac...
Then I'm REALLY hoping it's because they want to focus on D3 and a possible new Expac for Blizzcon. If they're debuting the new Expac at Gamescon, then going into detail at Blizzcon... I'll be pretty pissed.
I actually think this is going to be a big plus, especially in maps with lots of corridors. Previously, you'd have to get all your fetishes in position. Now, you only need the closest 5! That also leaves potential to exploit Kukri so that your heavy hitters will always be positioned where you are. It's a nice change. The only thing better would've been an option to disable melee attack from fetishes all together so that they will always try to be close to you rather than running around when using the poison dart build.
My fiancee plays the carnevil build and she was quite upset. So I had to do a bunch of unplanned thinking (i know... ugh... thinking) about the changes and how they compare to the old ways.
The only aspect that has me unsure about this new change being able to keep up with the time to kill performance of the old system, is when you concider the darts piercing ability.
When you have 23 fetishes shooting darts, each dart can pierce, allowing it to hit many more than just one target. Blizzard states that 18 of your fetishes wont be shooting darts anymore, and thus, will be attacking normally. Thats fine, however the normal fetish attack DOESNT pierce, limiting it to only doing damage to a max of ONE enemy.
Effectively, this has the potential to be a pretty big nerf to the Witch Doctors AOE damage output. 5 darts that pierce will hit significantly less enemies than a full 23 dart spread of darts. The bad thing is that crunching these numbers for aoe will be tough, because aoe damage is often more based on chance, than the 100% certaintity of single target DPS. You might shoot 23 darts that fan across the entire screen only hitting 3 targets, and other times you might hit 25 targets.
The other aspect to concider is that to give your pets the 275% damage bonuses, you have to hit the targets with a mana spending attack. This was easy to do when they would all focus fire on your target, but since you cant control where the fetishes attack on their own, their is a good chance they will be off attacking something without the 275% zuni bonus.
Im hoping that the PTR tests show these issues clearly, so that blizzard can do the smart thing and come up with another solution.