theyve all been totally stupid. who comes up with those gearsets?? no synergy, skills missing for the build, skills that shouldnt be in the build, holy fuck.
they should be picking clears of a gr 60 that do it in around 10 minutes. easy enough for most people and doesnt leave players with a brain scratching their heads on gear/skill choices
First, as some of you have noticed, the leaderboards currently track two sets of records: previous and current. We agree that it would be nice to have a place to celebrate the champions of previous Challenge Rifts, so we will be starting a regular, weekly blog that highlights the top 50 solo players each week.
Second, as the beginning of Season 11 is just around the corner, we wanted to clarify something about Challenge Rift caches. Only caches that are earned during an active Season are able to be claimed by Seasonal characters. This is so that the optimal play of Seasons does not include stocking up on Challenge Rift caches during the non-Season to claim on your Seasonal character for a "head start."
We're looking forward to seeing continued experimentation, discussion, and feedback on Challenge Rifts in the coming weeks.
This week's Challenge Rift in Europe was sort of "meh". A standard whirlwind build with some items lacking. I love spin to win, so at least it was fun to do it a few times.
Then I tested the CRs in Asia and NA. Holy crap, we should consider ourselves lucky in EU. In both other regions they picked a Frenzy LoN thorns barb. The rifts are really bad and boring, lots of useless small mobs that just block you (really bad for thorns) and a Shield Pylon (which you better not take). But the worst thing is... the LoN builds are basically non-ancient (I think 2 ancients in Asia, 1 ancient in NA IIRC). And some rather unfortunate skill choices.
I wish they would pick builds for CRs that are interesting and fun, but less well-known. For example, there's so many fun wizard builds, like with Death Wish or a Manald Heal Electrocute build or a Wand of Woh build. That would actually provoke people's thinking and maybe urge them to try other stuff than just the cookie cutter builds. But the current CR builds were just either someone really low paragon not having the desired items for the cookie cutter build (e.g., first week's UE) or just someone not understanding the game (LoN with 1 ancient). So currently, the CR selection is worse than "play your way": it makes you cringe, feel bad, and facepalm rather than go "that was fun, let me try that build myself".
Then I tested the CRs in Asia and NA. Holy crap, we should consider ourselves lucky in EU. In both other regions they picked a Frenzy LoN thorns barb. The rifts are really bad and boring, lots of useless small mobs that just block you (really bad for thorns) and a Shield Pylon (which you better not take). But the worst thing is... the LoN builds are basically non-ancient (I think 2 ancients in Asia, 1 ancient in NA IIRC). And some rather unfortunate skill choices.
Yeah, the thorns LON build only had 2 ancients on the NA region too... just the main hand weapon and one of the armour pieces. It looked like a build a player was still working on heaps and the skills weren't the best choices as you said. CRs definitely a very disappointing experience atm. Makes me wonder if the devs actually play this game at all.
EDIT: It would be nice to see some mature builds plucked from HC players. Since HC players tend to modify their builds to be tougher, it would be nice to run some HC CRs with mature builds. For example, this is a modification of Anthony Evans' Trillion crit garg build that I use on my HC account:
Modified it to be ranged to help minimise melee range encounters as I don't have an ancient Sacred Harvester to boost my toughness as yet and keeping it ranged with an ancient weapon allows me to go higher than a normal sacred harvester does.
I do them once to get the mats, and that's it. But I have enjoyed it so far.
Personally I am glad that the builds aren't representative of the top leader-boards, because that's what most are playing anyway.
Interesting to me at least, to see what weird shit people have come up with - even if it doesn't really work all that well.
I wish they would pick builds for CRs that are interesting and fun, but less well-known.
How do you identify such builds with an algorithm? I mean we can easily browse the LBs and spot fun builds, but how to program the selection system to do it? It is not that trivial.
I think they should put some authority coefficient at each player. For example one that played little with a certain class should have low authority and thus no chance his GR to be picked up as a snapshot. Then they should remove meta builds and obviously bad builds with useless skills and shuffle the rest. But then a problem appears - what if we have a fun build at high GR - their system is tweaked in such a way atm in order to pick low tier GRs and such fun high GR build won't be picked, while the low ones will usually be from players with low authority.
Maybe they should select the build independently of the GR tier and after that re-scale the GR tier to be doable by casual players. For example: The algo picks high authority GR 90 snapshot. They use the build and the map, but re-scale the tier to GR 70. What I mean is that there are probably very few fun builds done at low GRs thus the chance a fun build to be picked is really low and because of that they should include all top 1k builds in their selection pool and spot the most fun one independently of the tier.
I wish they would pick builds for CRs that are interesting and fun, but less well-known.
How do you identify such builds with an algorithm? I mean we can easily browse the LBs and spot fun builds, but how to program the selection system to do it? It is not that trivial.
They can simply hire someone to pick the builds. There is no reason for them to be using an algorithm to pick builds on such a new system. Even if they wanted an automated process it should be done much later, like at least like 3-4 months down the line.
I faild this necro build cos of bad rift levels and i am not use to play someone other build. Yet that barbarian build was pretty fun. Never tought of playstyle like this.
Honestly i had envisioned this situation before they wen live.
A random low-level GR with an incomplete/bad designed build is crap. Anyone can clear it, no thinking required, and rewards are pretty MEH. Competition wise, they suck because clears are so fast and anyone can luck their clear out.
Challenge rifts should be about a 55-65 clear with a thought out build. It doesn't need to be higher so you have a lot more leeway into building, plus it represents a decent entertainment since the run isn't done in 2 minutes. Also, builds should be validated fisrt to avoid stuff like the NA/KR LoN with no ancients build crap.
There are a lot of fun builds possible in game that just get rekt because GR simply suck ass as endgame promoting the "one and only" mentality for each class. There are synergies working that aren't played just because some others deal 10x damage. While these builds are not feasible for Ladders and GR pushing, they're still a nice change from meta and deserve more visibility.
To start from a 55 - 65 gr and fight your way towards 70 - 75+ would be much more entertaining.
Yep, the gameplay experience will be different on each tier, optimal mobs priorities and skill choices will change while you climb and at the end everyone will push that final tier and try to perfect their gameplay in order to have the fastest time OR even to beat everyone else in the top with a whole tier. It's a whole new world, where the skill of the player is not artificially simplified by their hero's enormous EHP and damage output relative to the tier.
The dev's had to communicate more with their player base in order to release a better feature for everyone. It seems that the whole GR150 exploit fiasco finally enlighten them that the communication should be a top priority for them. Let's see where this goes.
CR 4 seems a bit better. At least it had a complete 6 piece set this time and it had at least 4 different elements to take use of the 6 piece set.
Are you talking about EU or NA? NA is okay. EU is horrible this week. It's the MH build but with no MH (and no Fazula, no Swami). Also no Obsidian. Outside of Archon you can only build up 3 stacks and only damage with Arcane Torrent - but only for a few seconds because you have no APoC and no way to generate AP. It's just an absolutely unfinished MH build. I just want to throw out a spell for a generator with a fourth element. Or throw in an Obsidian. Or throw everything away. Terrible build.
By the way, folks: DON'T complete the Challenge Rift before Thursday! Otherwise you won't be able to claim the reward in the season.
I enjoy the challenge and i like the reward for beating the original players time. After that initial run where i beat the time and collect my reward, i have no incentive to keep advancing on the leaderboard. There is no reward for climbing the leaderboard :/
Maybe a temporary upgrade for more challenge and keep players trying:
1 - pick the snapshot (doesn't matter is meh, for now) and the original time;
2 - put some player to get the 'best clear time' in a reasonable fashion (yep, now they need a human or a very well designed algorhitm);
3 - define a considerable reward for that best time, lets say, 20x each material;
4 - define tiers between 'original' (8x reward) and 'optimal', with intermediate rewards (+4x) 'till the max;
This kind of game loves tiered levels and rewards, so why not add a new one?
Doesn't have to be always mats. Maybe experience in a week? Socket a random jewlery? Uh? Uh?
(yeah, something entirely new across the game mechanics? now we are talking efforts on challenges)
For the first 3 weeks in CRs, I just keep a blindly spamming of skills for 1 - 3 runs, beat the minimum time needed, get materials and leave.
I would come back if better results awarded some extra items. I'm not interested in leader boards. I'm sure a lot of people would get some fun looking for actual rewards for the character progress.
Just as I will spend some weeks in the new season (beat the booooring set dungeons, ykes) for the extra tab, which is a real usable reward (IMHO)
I hope that some of the winners share videos (and/or some of the thought process) that got them to the top spot
You can check Zen's youtube. He also shared some interesting info how he captured the wizard top places in both EU and US last week here.
An interesting blue post appeared yesterday pretty much confirming their main priority in the Challenge Rift mode will stay the casuals and they are not interested in offering hard to master snapshots. Well, nothing new that wasn't commented by us, but it was interesting to read it from a blue:
Hey all, we’ve been seeing some great feedback on this week’s Challenge Rift build and the featured builds in general. There’s also been some confusion about how builds are chosen each week, so I wanted to offer some clarity on that.
The build chosen is actually picked by an algorithm, which we’re continuing to refine as time goes on. Each week, it picks a new build used by a player in the past week and makes that the new build for the next week’s Challenge Rift.
We’re aiming for every build to offer variety and accessibility. This is partly why you won’t often see top-performing Greater Rift builds in this mode of play; while they’re a lot of fun in Adventure Mode, the long learning curve they require to master isn’t as good a fit for a short-lived weekly challenge. For the same reason, we also reviewed this week’s Monk build and decided it was not as accessible as we would like our builds to be, so we’re tweaking the algorithm further to discourage it from selecting similar builds in the future.
While everyone will have a different take on what kinds of builds are fun, any build that’s picked should at least incorporate ways for you to survive while using it. We’ll keep working to refine which builds the algorithm picks, and as always, we appreciate the feedback we’re getting from all of you in this process!
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theyve all been totally stupid. who comes up with those gearsets?? no synergy, skills missing for the build, skills that shouldnt be in the build, holy fuck.
they should be picking clears of a gr 60 that do it in around 10 minutes. easy enough for most people and doesnt leave players with a brain scratching their heads on gear/skill choices
@Rugraa: There is a blue post about this from 6 hours ago:
Yeah it's wonder why they prefer 35 over 60.
And it is very dumb that we can success these crifts simply hitting all the buttons without any skill.
i completed one under 6 mins, first i misread lol that it was 6 secs
btw i prefer they were repeatable or daily
This week's Challenge Rift in Europe was sort of "meh". A standard whirlwind build with some items lacking. I love spin to win, so at least it was fun to do it a few times.
Then I tested the CRs in Asia and NA. Holy crap, we should consider ourselves lucky in EU. In both other regions they picked a Frenzy LoN thorns barb. The rifts are really bad and boring, lots of useless small mobs that just block you (really bad for thorns) and a Shield Pylon (which you better not take). But the worst thing is... the LoN builds are basically non-ancient (I think 2 ancients in Asia, 1 ancient in NA IIRC). And some rather unfortunate skill choices.
I wish they would pick builds for CRs that are interesting and fun, but less well-known. For example, there's so many fun wizard builds, like with Death Wish or a Manald Heal Electrocute build or a Wand of Woh build. That would actually provoke people's thinking and maybe urge them to try other stuff than just the cookie cutter builds. But the current CR builds were just either someone really low paragon not having the desired items for the cookie cutter build (e.g., first week's UE) or just someone not understanding the game (LoN with 1 ancient). So currently, the CR selection is worse than "play your way": it makes you cringe, feel bad, and facepalm rather than go "that was fun, let me try that build myself".
Such a missed opportunity.
EDIT: It would be nice to see some mature builds plucked from HC players. Since HC players tend to modify their builds to be tougher, it would be nice to run some HC CRs with mature builds. For example, this is a modification of Anthony Evans' Trillion crit garg build that I use on my HC account:
https://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/SwankyDevil-1805/hero/88243057
Modified it to be ranged to help minimise melee range encounters as I don't have an ancient Sacred Harvester to boost my toughness as yet and keeping it ranged with an ancient weapon allows me to go higher than a normal sacred harvester does.
I do them once to get the mats, and that's it. But I have enjoyed it so far.
Personally I am glad that the builds aren't representative of the top leader-boards, because that's what most are playing anyway.
Interesting to me at least, to see what weird shit people have come up with - even if it doesn't really work all that well.
How do you identify such builds with an algorithm? I mean we can easily browse the LBs and spot fun builds, but how to program the selection system to do it? It is not that trivial.
I think they should put some authority coefficient at each player. For example one that played little with a certain class should have low authority and thus no chance his GR to be picked up as a snapshot. Then they should remove meta builds and obviously bad builds with useless skills and shuffle the rest. But then a problem appears - what if we have a fun build at high GR - their system is tweaked in such a way atm in order to pick low tier GRs and such fun high GR build won't be picked, while the low ones will usually be from players with low authority.
Maybe they should select the build independently of the GR tier and after that re-scale the GR tier to be doable by casual players. For example: The algo picks high authority GR 90 snapshot. They use the build and the map, but re-scale the tier to GR 70. What I mean is that there are probably very few fun builds done at low GRs thus the chance a fun build to be picked is really low and because of that they should include all top 1k builds in their selection pool and spot the most fun one independently of the tier.
I faild this necro build cos of bad rift levels and i am not use to play someone other build. Yet that barbarian build was pretty fun. Never tought of playstyle like this.
Good thing I've been ignoring this junk.
I wonder when we are going to see a build where is two sets with 3/6 items and not having RoRG.
Honestly i had envisioned this situation before they wen live.
A random low-level GR with an incomplete/bad designed build is crap. Anyone can clear it, no thinking required, and rewards are pretty MEH. Competition wise, they suck because clears are so fast and anyone can luck their clear out.
Challenge rifts should be about a 55-65 clear with a thought out build. It doesn't need to be higher so you have a lot more leeway into building, plus it represents a decent entertainment since the run isn't done in 2 minutes. Also, builds should be validated fisrt to avoid stuff like the NA/KR LoN with no ancients build crap.
There are a lot of fun builds possible in game that just get rekt because GR simply suck ass as endgame promoting the "one and only" mentality for each class. There are synergies working that aren't played just because some others deal 10x damage. While these builds are not feasible for Ladders and GR pushing, they're still a nice change from meta and deserve more visibility.
Yep, the gameplay experience will be different on each tier, optimal mobs priorities and skill choices will change while you climb and at the end everyone will push that final tier and try to perfect their gameplay in order to have the fastest time OR even to beat everyone else in the top with a whole tier. It's a whole new world, where the skill of the player is not artificially simplified by their hero's enormous EHP and damage output relative to the tier.
The dev's had to communicate more with their player base in order to release a better feature for everyone. It seems that the whole GR150 exploit fiasco finally enlighten them that the communication should be a top priority for them. Let's see where this goes.
CR 4 seems a bit better. At least it had a complete 6 piece set this time and it had at least 4 different elements to take use of the 6 piece set.
By the way, folks: DON'T complete the Challenge Rift before Thursday! Otherwise you won't be able to claim the reward in the season.
NA on Consoles.
It was just a 6 piece Tal Rasha set.
I enjoy the challenge and i like the reward for beating the original players time. After that initial run where i beat the time and collect my reward, i have no incentive to keep advancing on the leaderboard. There is no reward for climbing the leaderboard :/
Maybe a temporary upgrade for more challenge and keep players trying:
1 - pick the snapshot (doesn't matter is meh, for now) and the original time;
2 - put some player to get the 'best clear time' in a reasonable fashion (yep, now they need a human or a very well designed algorhitm);
3 - define a considerable reward for that best time, lets say, 20x each material;
4 - define tiers between 'original' (8x reward) and 'optimal', with intermediate rewards (+4x) 'till the max;
This kind of game loves tiered levels and rewards, so why not add a new one?
Doesn't have to be always mats. Maybe experience in a week? Socket a random jewlery? Uh? Uh?
(yeah, something entirely new across the game mechanics? now we are talking efforts on challenges)
For the first 3 weeks in CRs, I just keep a blindly spamming of skills for 1 - 3 runs, beat the minimum time needed, get materials and leave.
I would come back if better results awarded some extra items. I'm not interested in leader boards. I'm sure a lot of people would get some fun looking for actual rewards for the character progress.
Just as I will spend some weeks in the new season (beat the booooring set dungeons, ykes) for the extra tab, which is a real usable reward (IMHO)
An interesting blue post appeared yesterday pretty much confirming their main priority in the Challenge Rift mode will stay the casuals and they are not interested in offering hard to master snapshots. Well, nothing new that wasn't commented by us, but it was interesting to read it from a blue:
Hey all, we’ve been seeing some great feedback on this week’s Challenge Rift build and the featured builds in general. There’s also been some confusion about how builds are chosen each week, so I wanted to offer some clarity on that.
The build chosen is actually picked by an algorithm, which we’re continuing to refine as time goes on. Each week, it picks a new build used by a player in the past week and makes that the new build for the next week’s Challenge Rift.
We’re aiming for every build to offer variety and accessibility. This is partly why you won’t often see top-performing Greater Rift builds in this mode of play; while they’re a lot of fun in Adventure Mode, the long learning curve they require to master isn’t as good a fit for a short-lived weekly challenge. For the same reason, we also reviewed this week’s Monk build and decided it was not as accessible as we would like our builds to be, so we’re tweaking the algorithm further to discourage it from selecting similar builds in the future.
While everyone will have a different take on what kinds of builds are fun, any build that’s picked should at least incorporate ways for you to survive while using it. We’ll keep working to refine which builds the algorithm picks, and as always, we appreciate the feedback we’re getting from all of you in this process!