I'm unsure if it got posted here or not but a few days ago I made this spreadsheet surrounding all the Kanai Cube hype. My hope is people will find it useful.
It displays all the affixes in 3 separate tabs, also displaying class restrictions to help you with your choices.
If you guys find any errors feel free to let me know. I'll be trying to keep this updated for PTR when it goes live and hopefully throughout until live.
Official Post - Figured I'd post on DiabloFans to expand the conversation and hope to get more attention on this.
So after a long commitment to being super shy and procrastinating about writing something like this up. I decided it’s finally time and I've had enough. In this write up I've decided to mention and explain as well as hopefully give some adequate examples of combating these flaws/ideas. I'm fully aware that some if not most of these idea’s have and are being worked on currently. Note that most of these are coming from a competitive player bias so keep that in mind.
Also I apologize for the huge wall of text.
ITEMISATION
Experience Gear
People who play non leech classes are forced into other classes to compete otherwise they have a disadvantage in highly competitive play. One tier can mean the difference between paragon 800-900, or 1100-1200. So if you only want to play DH you’re forced into a position to either leech or fall behind the pure leechers that are 100-200 or more paragon ahead of you.
Ancient Weapons
I’m still unsure if ancient weapons were actually a good idea or not. The power behind just a single slot giving that much more dps than the rest of your gear hinges on how lucky you are. When you spend over 1.3million shards and not see a SINGLE ancient item that you’re looking for, it’s depressing. Using Kridershots as an example, the chance of you getting the just the correct affixes is an 8.88% chance. Then an ancient item which I think is 10% chance, you’re looking at 0.888% chance, then you have to consider all of those rolls have to be average or above average and you’re looking at an extremely low chance of getting the krider you’re looking for. Things like discipline should always be rolled on weapons, also things like primary stat (Fist of Azz, Blade of Prophecy). Maybe even increase the percentage chance for weapons to be ancient or reduce the cost to gamble, it’s outrageous to spend so much and get nothing in return.
Old Sets
I know they’re being worked on over time but like this video mikhail had posted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQEFMle-I3U), equalizing the power of each set each season will lead to much more enjoyable competitive scene.
Unused Legendaries
There needs to be legendary affixes for every single legendary there is so that every item can be looked at rather than just thrown away immediately. It will open up build diversity and create more unique builds rather than forced into mainstream items.
New Hellfire Items
In this video Alkaizer talks about some idea’s for a new hellfire item (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAgTbejzxCg). The idea was that maybe you do some sort of hellfire quest where you are rewarded with an enchantment that gets applied to some pants. And what it does is gives you a random rune to a random skill of your class giving you some awesome combinations. Anything like this will help improve the game even though you’d be forced to get the perfect rune for the perfect skill. At least it’d give you more options.
Legendaries OP
Allow some certain legendaries to be OP. A good example was Mortiks Bracers, it was going to shake the standard 4player meta a crazy amount then they were removed thinking they were too strong. Ok they were strong yes but it would of made things very interesting. If every class had an item like this to combat a standard setup it would give more options. The changes to Focus/Restraint were a great example.
UI ADJUSTMENTS
Buff/Debuff Slots
More buff slots. It’s getting more of a reactionary game with convention of elements being one of the main items to prove how silly this issue is. With the recent anniversary buff telling you a cow can spawn leading you to the ‘secret’ cow lvl was a complete joke. If anything it was a nerf during the event because you had 1 less buff slot you could use to visually see. If you ‘don’t have the technology yet’ to deal with this issue. Then give us the ability to filter only the important ones.
Stash Space / Microtransactions
Any ETA on when this will arrive in NA? Stash space is a huge issue especially as every season ends. Also character slots for the ability to keep your old characters rather than deleting them every season.
Chat Improvements
Timestamps.
Ability to copy links(maybe only in clan chat and private channels).
Ability to resize the window
Visible GR timer/progression%
No real need to even detail why this is needed. It just is.
COMPETITION
Trials
Obviously removed. Already worked on. Doesn’t stop it from being super lame during S3. Complete road block for progression not to mention a huge time sink.
Avoidable Affixes
Currently unavoidable affixes are the god damn worse. Thunderstorm, Jailer, Vortex, Frozen, Orbiter, Reflect damage. These all have 0 buildup time, you can predict the range to outrange these affixes but there’s very little room for error. In my opinion there NEEDS to be a way to avoid it, whether it be giving monsters a cast time + castbar or changing the abilities to be avoidable in someway. Give them a visual to show where they will appear otherwise it’s a stupid mechanic.
Crowd Controls
From my understanding this will be changed already next patch but it’s a delicate situation. If you completely remove it:
Do you do it by giving immunity after enough diminishing returns?
Do they cover all types of ccs at the same time?
My hope is that there still is a way to ‘perma cc’ at least the trash and elites. But it should be an extremely hard 4player rotation, either that or the affixes need to be balanced in such a way that if you’re letting them roam free you can’t just instantly be dead the higher you go. Make skills do percentages of your health rather than static infinitely growing modifiers.
Mob Normalization
This is probably one of the most hated aspects of Greater Rifts right now and NEEDS to be addressed immediately. The difference in progression between Unburied/Goats and Accursed/Bees is a complete joke. There are so many bad mob combinations that if you were allowed to ‘fish’(when you just leave until you find a good mob type/map type) for the rift you wanted, you’d only be actually playing a small percentile of them. Some monsters are just annoying to play against like grotesques, bee’s, accursed, ghosts, enslaved nightmares. Mobs like these need to be changed to make it worthwhile to kill. Also I must note that in 4player GR competition, yellow elite mob health pools are getting insanely absurd. Compare a 5 pack Blue Unburied to a yellow Bee. Unburied will net you something like 8 or 9% total whereas that yellow will have almost like 20% of the rift guardian for a total of like 4%. It’s actually stupid.
Another thing is remove stupid affixes from certain mob types, so for example Armaddons have the biggest hitboxes, so when a yellow pack comes with horde, it’s basically the worst thing in the world.
Normalized RG’s
RG’s right now are completely imbalanced. Certain builds like bosses with adds, in most cases people like stonesinger (less than 50% of the health of every other boss). I’ve heard rumors that RGs will now all have HP pools similar to stonesinger which is a great change. I actually can’t believe it’s been in the game for 3 whole seasons. There’s no real enjoyment out of fighting these RGs, they all do something special but there are others that are much much harder than others. For example choker’s poison pools are unavoidable, no warning whatsoever.
Pylons
They’re in a better spot that they were previously by a long shot. Personally I like the spot they’re in right now but I know people who still have a hard time wanting them in greater rifts. Removing them will create a less RNG fest. Less likely you’ll need to fish for the perfect conditions.
Map Tileset Normalization
Again balancing in this competitive scene is a must to make it less miserable. You shouldn’t have to go into a map knowing you’ve lost. Places like sewers are just not comparable to open maps such as Spires or Core of Arreat. The lack of density in some maps are just atrocious and then you have maps like Keep Depths and Ruins of Corvus which are bugged to hell. When you go up to a closed door and monsters aggro you and throw all their affixes out before you even get close to them is retarded. Then when you have classes like sader or the old raekor charge barb (GRRR) then you’re going to realize how bad the hitboxes versus door space really is. It’s something that needs to get worked on if you intend on keeping the drag/pull mechanic still viable. Not saying it’s impossible but it’s a huge headache.
Class Balancing
Personally the ONLY reason to have class balancing is to make sure each class has the ability to be useful in 2s/3s/4s. If you’re not giving every class the option of having an optimal build for group play then there’s no reason to balance. You can have DH’s clear 10 tiers higher than other classes and it shouldn’t actually matter as solo boards for different classes shouldn’t matter.
Head to head GR with some sort of wager (ty sman711 and/or Joebo444 and/or imcute7 <3)
So the idea is simple. Head to head GRs for all categories solo/2s/3s/4s where you compete against other groups for rewards. Of course the rifts themselves will have to be identical to one another to ensure balance.
CHEATING
Botters
Do something about botters. PLEASE. Don’t let this idle threat stay here. As a competitive player it’s utterly atrocious that actions have not been taken. There has to be multiple ways to deal with it. Lets assume its ‘untrackable’, at the very least you can approach and track people with an insane amount of game time 16+ hours a day over the course of months. I know as a legit player I have 13 almost 14 hours a day playtime which would probably seem fairly suspicious but when you see people with over 1k hours played on a class in S2. You just have to question this. Others may ask, how does this affect you at all? You don’t interact with these people anyway, so who cares? When you’re in a competitive setting and someone can do things while they sleep, it seems extremely unfair. Others may say, just stop crying and do it yourself. No, there’s no reason I should have to resort to 3rd party programs and stupid gimmicks in order to be on the same playing field as these abusers.
TurboHud
TurboHUD. It has to be mentioned. I’ll be entirely honest, I’ve been so tempted to try this out just because of the insane amount of UI features and functions it has, but my moral compass has stopped me from getting sucked in. It’s getting extremely mainstream and I know a stupid amount of people using it though I’ll be a gentleman and not name any names. As far as I’m aware the features I’ve been hearing about mostly is essentially a map hack of sorts giving you the directions to next floors. Also exp calculators that can calculate how much experience you’re getting per hour which is more of a helpful visual tool rather than a game breaking bug. Personally I feel like the UI improves such as cooldowns, skill damage on tooltips, things like this should be included in the default UI. Though because they’re attached to a HUD that also shows you visuals that can undeservedly give you incredible advantages over people who don’t use it.
Macros
Macros are even less impactful in terms of cheating. I feel like if you use one purely to reduce any RSI inducing properties then I believe thats fine. But when it starts automating gameplay and starts actually playing the game for you then it’s of course out of bounds. This is just a personal opinion of mine and should be I guess frowned upon outside of those rules? Feel free to comment on what other people think.
GENERAL FLAWS
Season Length
I know everybody has their own thoughts on what the seasonal length should be. Firstly I’d like to say that Blizzard do tune the length alongside development time for each patch giving us a new meta for each class and small game improvements for each season. As for what I’ve been hearing, the majority of people have been generally asking for much shorter seasons. Personally I’d like to see 1 week for initial setup, 6 weeks for paragon grinding and gearing, 2 weeks for gem leveling and 2 weeks for pushing. Total of 11 weeks, just under or around 3 months. Another important aspect is to announce not just the start, but also the end date so people know exactly what they’re walking into. I know there will be development periods which will be hard to meet requirements but I feel like you can just extend the in-between seasons period to compensate.
Patches/Content
I feel like the patches right now aren’t entirely content patches, but rather power creeping into a new tier. Not that I’m complaining I love how they’re at least somewhat consistent now but they aren’t exactly huge content patches. And I have to add I know you(Blizzard) likely don’t have many developers available on working on real content rather than just new/adjusting old sets.
Solo Gameplay
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epTxuEs4KgE) Basically sums it all up. I personally love soloing, if I could do everything I do in groups as solo I’d quite likely enjoy the game much more.
Fix Cutscenes
Very unimportant change, but cut scenes starting at all is a complete joke. Skipping cutscenes shouldn’t take 5 seconds.
Hitboxes/Doorways
Discussed a bit in the Map Tileset Normalization. Trying to drag monsters through doorways in Keep Depths and Ruins of Corvus is a complete joke. Especially mobs with huge hitboxes such as oppressors or death maidens. Idk if anything can actually be done to fix this issue but oh well.
Build Diversity
I always loved d2 in the sense that you had skill tree’s and skill synergies that actually buffed your damage. In d3 you’re forced into only 6 skills, with a small pool of runes that can be applied to each skill. The only thing that’s making it interesting is the sets which are getting better the more that are being made.
MISC IDEAS
Non Adventure Mode
In one of the video’s posted earlier (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQEFMle-I3U). Mikhail mentioned an issue with adventure mode. There’s literally no reason to play campaign at all. Which is ashame, It’d be nice to have a reward for completing an act and getting rewarded with a cache full of legendaries or something. Maybe have rewards for speed running through the campaign. Or have days where you get an insane bonus to exp in campaign mode making it actually worthwhile to play there. Comparable to GR speed runs.
Multi-Regional games
It’s a tough time connecting with people who stream only to find out they’re on EU, or vice versa. It’d be really really cool to be able to play with them, but I do understand the logistical nightmare it must be to make it work. If you can find a way I think it’d make the game feel much more populated and enjoyable. Sure there will likely be some language barriers but it’s a small price to pay for a great feature.
Mystic Unrolling
So this has been on my mind for a while now. If you could have the ability to unroll an item but to unlock that you had to reroll it to within 10% of the original roll on the item. Either that or just pay a cost to remove the reroll to its original state.
Blacksmith Unsalvage
Having the ability to ‘buyback’ or more appropriately ‘unsalvage’ with a history of 1-3 items so that if you do mess up a salvage you have a recovery option. We all know you can say “Oh but there was this warning popup every time” but at this point I don’t think that’s enough safety measures. In any case the implementation of this would just be a new tab on the blacksmith which suggests a buy back feature where you pay either gold and/or crafting materials to put it back together.
Reintroduce Item Trading
Trading was a fairly crappy concept when AH was around, but now that it’s gone I feel like it’s important to bring it back. Maybe even just let it be clan tradable for 2 hours or something of the sorts so that your friends that can’t be in your game at the time can still be eligible for loot. It may seem kind of silly maybe but it may reduce the RNG of how stupid weapons are.
Mystic Legendary Affix Rerolling
So this would obviously have to be an expensive or semi time consuming option but I feel it would also help reduce the crazy RNG required in order to make the perfect item. Whether you have to go out into the world, maybe even campaign mode to find a certain dude, NPC, or rare drop item that, just a stupid amount of gold in order to reroll it.
Separate Daily or Weekly Set Grift
So I’ve heard this idea a few times from multiple people and I think it’d add just a bit more excitement to the game. The idea is this, every day and/or week there is a set greater rift, which has the exact same map layout, monster layout, elite affixes, and RGs. I’m unsure whether or not you should be allowed to run it multiple times but you could set your own times to gain either temporary or permanent reward. Maybe gives you an extended bloodshard max for a week or month. Or new portrait for winning, or top 3-5 placement for a certain day/week.
Ability to Turn Experience Off
A lot of people like the idea of twinking characters. For those that don’t know what that means, it’s when you allow your character to stop gaining experience so you can cap your character at certain levels and gear it out like you would at 70.
PvP
It was a huge shame to know that they ditched the idea of arena style before the initial release and it was almost soul crushing. Looking back on it now I can understand the thought process behind it. It was simply too hard to balance a game for both PvP and PvE. One idea that’s been used before is have a separate balanced versions of skills. So for example if I have Multishot, in pve it may hit for 2.3mil. Instead it could only hit for 23k making it a much more balanced version for PvP. The ability to scale for pvp without messing around with the PvE numbers would get rid of the huge problem that surrounds it. It of course will require a crazy amount of balancing in order to make it fun gameplay.
Blizzard’s way of Finding Info
This is more of a rant from multiple highly competitive players more than it’s a suggestion. For the most part it seems like all the feedback and information blizzard gets is from the forums where only a very small margin of players actually visit, reads and contributes. Then they base their findings to the dev team which then use that (likely inaccurate) knowledge to the higher up’s. This maybe a silly idea but have a forum label to show that a blizzard employee has at least viewed and/or read the post to know we’re not being ignored. That would motivate me to even visit the forums let alone never touch it. Would motivate me to contribute to the community and give suggestions rather than just have it disappear into page 52 and never seen or touched again.
Runewords
Huge d2 favorite for a lot of people. Maybe it’s more of an expansion feature but it’d still be a wonderful improvement to the game. Gives it everybody more build diversity and gear opportunities. Don’t really need to say much more, it was a fantastic system in d2, why can’t it work now?
Items that Gain Experience
So I had this idea after the frustration of ancient weapons this season. If you could have your follower equip a weapon, or use it yourself to level a weapon up to eventually hit a certain amount of exp or level, it could turn into an ancient with the same rolls. That way you can still put value on non ancient weapons and gear.
Gem Experience
This is more of a pet peeve hating against the current gem system. Right now you’re forced into doing the highest GR you can do with a group. Then once you’re down to 8% or 15% per attempt then you start doing 1% runs which is -15 your gem lvl. I propose you make a gem leveling system where each gem gets experience and just from playing the game you get rewarded with your lvls rather than forced into 1% runs which will make your life hell. This will create other issues such as what will be your reward for completing a greater rift? Well you can have extra bloodshards/gold/gem experience/loot.
Lack of Game Mysteries
One thing I absolutely loved about D2 is it had a ton of hidden gems inside the game. For example in D2 there was a super small chance that inside a game you could see a message appear that said something along the lines of “7197 SoJ sold to a merchant”, and this would continue till eventually you’d get a message in chat that would say “Diablo walks the earth”. So the next dungeon you find would spawn an Uber Diablo which is fairly tedious to kill and gives you a super unique and fairly rare charm. This gave your character +1 to all skills, 10-20 attributes, 10-20 resists, 5-10% exp. Not to mention Uber Tristram was an extremely fun and challenging version of getting charms which gave your character +3 random class skills, 10-20 attributes, 10-20 all resists, +8 light radius and a chance on attack to cast a fire spell.
Charms
Charms were a way to minmax your character by having these in your inventory to gain certain bonuses like resistance, or extra poison damage, or more magic find. If you were to implement these I’d strongly advise having a separate bag for only charms so that you don’t get an insane wave of complaints about how there’s no inventory room.
Horadric Cube
Formula's to randomize certain items again. Convert normal to ancient items.
RANDOM BUGS
Witch Doctors not taking damage from RG tornados.
Vault/Teleport Rubberbanding
EDIT: Holy crap how could I forget about anarch charges. LOL
As an end note, I know I missed a ton of things that are a huge pain. If I find more stuff I’ll edit it in and record what’s been added below. Again sorry for the huge walls of text and I hope some of it at least makes it to blizzards hands.
With all the conduit or bust hate going out there, I thought I'd show some light at the end of the tunnel.
First ever try with a Tier 43 and I managed to pull out a win.
There's so many FC guides and builds out there with many many variations it's hard to generalize them all. So all I'd like to suggest as far as advice is really learn to abuse vile wards the best you can. Always always always make dragging packs into other packs a priority. Hitting the critical mass of mobs is really exciting to see them all explode. I know certain mobs have terrible hit boxes and certain tile sets can be a nightmare to travel. But learn the angles and learn to adjust. Don't be afraid to skip champ packs or bad affixes. The more distance you travel, the higher chance you'll hit the end of the rift, the higher chance you'll end up getting a pylon. Though in this case it didn't seem to require it.
Give yourself as much time for bosses as possible and never give up. Don't go in with the expectation of losing, even if the time runs out, think of all the gem upgrades you could get! All that aside I doubt you'll be able to get higher than 45 without conduit. But who knows with how much changes on a day to day basis.
The deaths at the end were pure inexperience with the difficulty as I didn't expect to be 1 shot. Learned my lesson fairly quickly and made it a very very close race.
1
"omg, actually, holy shit, I just realized I'm playing without turboHud. Let me go turn it on now."
tsk tsk
4
I'm unsure if it got posted here or not but a few days ago I made this spreadsheet surrounding all the Kanai Cube hype. My hope is people will find it useful.
It displays all the affixes in 3 separate tabs, also displaying class restrictions to help you with your choices.
Google Docs
If you guys find any errors feel free to let me know. I'll be trying to keep this updated for PTR when it goes live and hopefully throughout until live.
3
Official Post - Figured I'd post on DiabloFans to expand the conversation and hope to get more attention on this.
So after a long commitment to being super shy and procrastinating about writing something like this up. I decided it’s finally time and I've had enough. In this write up I've decided to mention and explain as well as hopefully give some adequate examples of combating these flaws/ideas. I'm fully aware that some if not most of these idea’s have and are being worked on currently. Note that most of these are coming from a competitive player bias so keep that in mind.
Also I apologize for the huge wall of text.
ITEMISATION
Experience Gear
People who play non leech classes are forced into other classes to compete otherwise they have a disadvantage in highly competitive play. One tier can mean the difference between paragon 800-900, or 1100-1200. So if you only want to play DH you’re forced into a position to either leech or fall behind the pure leechers that are 100-200 or more paragon ahead of you.
Ancient Weapons
I’m still unsure if ancient weapons were actually a good idea or not. The power behind just a single slot giving that much more dps than the rest of your gear hinges on how lucky you are. When you spend over 1.3million shards and not see a SINGLE ancient item that you’re looking for, it’s depressing. Using Kridershots as an example, the chance of you getting the just the correct affixes is an 8.88% chance. Then an ancient item which I think is 10% chance, you’re looking at 0.888% chance, then you have to consider all of those rolls have to be average or above average and you’re looking at an extremely low chance of getting the krider you’re looking for. Things like discipline should always be rolled on weapons, also things like primary stat (Fist of Azz, Blade of Prophecy). Maybe even increase the percentage chance for weapons to be ancient or reduce the cost to gamble, it’s outrageous to spend so much and get nothing in return.
Old Sets
I know they’re being worked on over time but like this video mikhail had posted (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQEFMle-I3U), equalizing the power of each set each season will lead to much more enjoyable competitive scene.
Unused Legendaries
There needs to be legendary affixes for every single legendary there is so that every item can be looked at rather than just thrown away immediately. It will open up build diversity and create more unique builds rather than forced into mainstream items.
New Hellfire Items
In this video Alkaizer talks about some idea’s for a new hellfire item (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAgTbejzxCg). The idea was that maybe you do some sort of hellfire quest where you are rewarded with an enchantment that gets applied to some pants. And what it does is gives you a random rune to a random skill of your class giving you some awesome combinations. Anything like this will help improve the game even though you’d be forced to get the perfect rune for the perfect skill. At least it’d give you more options.
Legendaries OP
Allow some certain legendaries to be OP. A good example was Mortiks Bracers, it was going to shake the standard 4player meta a crazy amount then they were removed thinking they were too strong. Ok they were strong yes but it would of made things very interesting. If every class had an item like this to combat a standard setup it would give more options. The changes to Focus/Restraint were a great example.
UI ADJUSTMENTS
Buff/Debuff Slots
More buff slots. It’s getting more of a reactionary game with convention of elements being one of the main items to prove how silly this issue is. With the recent anniversary buff telling you a cow can spawn leading you to the ‘secret’ cow lvl was a complete joke. If anything it was a nerf during the event because you had 1 less buff slot you could use to visually see. If you ‘don’t have the technology yet’ to deal with this issue. Then give us the ability to filter only the important ones.
Stash Space / Microtransactions
Any ETA on when this will arrive in NA? Stash space is a huge issue especially as every season ends. Also character slots for the ability to keep your old characters rather than deleting them every season.
Chat Improvements
Timestamps.
Ability to copy links(maybe only in clan chat and private channels).
Ability to resize the window
Visible GR timer/progression%
No real need to even detail why this is needed. It just is.
COMPETITION
Trials
Obviously removed. Already worked on. Doesn’t stop it from being super lame during S3. Complete road block for progression not to mention a huge time sink.
Avoidable Affixes
Currently unavoidable affixes are the god damn worse. Thunderstorm, Jailer, Vortex, Frozen, Orbiter, Reflect damage. These all have 0 buildup time, you can predict the range to outrange these affixes but there’s very little room for error. In my opinion there NEEDS to be a way to avoid it, whether it be giving monsters a cast time + castbar or changing the abilities to be avoidable in someway. Give them a visual to show where they will appear otherwise it’s a stupid mechanic.
Crowd Controls
From my understanding this will be changed already next patch but it’s a delicate situation. If you completely remove it:
Do you do it by giving immunity after enough diminishing returns?
Do they cover all types of ccs at the same time?
My hope is that there still is a way to ‘perma cc’ at least the trash and elites. But it should be an extremely hard 4player rotation, either that or the affixes need to be balanced in such a way that if you’re letting them roam free you can’t just instantly be dead the higher you go. Make skills do percentages of your health rather than static infinitely growing modifiers.
Mob Normalization
This is probably one of the most hated aspects of Greater Rifts right now and NEEDS to be addressed immediately. The difference in progression between Unburied/Goats and Accursed/Bees is a complete joke. There are so many bad mob combinations that if you were allowed to ‘fish’(when you just leave until you find a good mob type/map type) for the rift you wanted, you’d only be actually playing a small percentile of them. Some monsters are just annoying to play against like grotesques, bee’s, accursed, ghosts, enslaved nightmares. Mobs like these need to be changed to make it worthwhile to kill. Also I must note that in 4player GR competition, yellow elite mob health pools are getting insanely absurd. Compare a 5 pack Blue Unburied to a yellow Bee. Unburied will net you something like 8 or 9% total whereas that yellow will have almost like 20% of the rift guardian for a total of like 4%. It’s actually stupid.
Another thing is remove stupid affixes from certain mob types, so for example Armaddons have the biggest hitboxes, so when a yellow pack comes with horde, it’s basically the worst thing in the world.
Normalized RG’s
RG’s right now are completely imbalanced. Certain builds like bosses with adds, in most cases people like stonesinger (less than 50% of the health of every other boss). I’ve heard rumors that RGs will now all have HP pools similar to stonesinger which is a great change. I actually can’t believe it’s been in the game for 3 whole seasons. There’s no real enjoyment out of fighting these RGs, they all do something special but there are others that are much much harder than others. For example choker’s poison pools are unavoidable, no warning whatsoever.
Pylons
They’re in a better spot that they were previously by a long shot. Personally I like the spot they’re in right now but I know people who still have a hard time wanting them in greater rifts. Removing them will create a less RNG fest. Less likely you’ll need to fish for the perfect conditions.
Map Tileset Normalization
Again balancing in this competitive scene is a must to make it less miserable. You shouldn’t have to go into a map knowing you’ve lost. Places like sewers are just not comparable to open maps such as Spires or Core of Arreat. The lack of density in some maps are just atrocious and then you have maps like Keep Depths and Ruins of Corvus which are bugged to hell. When you go up to a closed door and monsters aggro you and throw all their affixes out before you even get close to them is retarded. Then when you have classes like sader or the old raekor charge barb (GRRR) then you’re going to realize how bad the hitboxes versus door space really is. It’s something that needs to get worked on if you intend on keeping the drag/pull mechanic still viable. Not saying it’s impossible but it’s a huge headache.
Class Balancing
Personally the ONLY reason to have class balancing is to make sure each class has the ability to be useful in 2s/3s/4s. If you’re not giving every class the option of having an optimal build for group play then there’s no reason to balance. You can have DH’s clear 10 tiers higher than other classes and it shouldn’t actually matter as solo boards for different classes shouldn’t matter.
Head to head GR with some sort of wager (ty sman711 and/or Joebo444 and/or imcute7 <3)
So the idea is simple. Head to head GRs for all categories solo/2s/3s/4s where you compete against other groups for rewards. Of course the rifts themselves will have to be identical to one another to ensure balance.
CHEATING
Botters
Do something about botters. PLEASE. Don’t let this idle threat stay here. As a competitive player it’s utterly atrocious that actions have not been taken. There has to be multiple ways to deal with it. Lets assume its ‘untrackable’, at the very least you can approach and track people with an insane amount of game time 16+ hours a day over the course of months. I know as a legit player I have 13 almost 14 hours a day playtime which would probably seem fairly suspicious but when you see people with over 1k hours played on a class in S2. You just have to question this. Others may ask, how does this affect you at all? You don’t interact with these people anyway, so who cares? When you’re in a competitive setting and someone can do things while they sleep, it seems extremely unfair. Others may say, just stop crying and do it yourself. No, there’s no reason I should have to resort to 3rd party programs and stupid gimmicks in order to be on the same playing field as these abusers.
TurboHud
TurboHUD. It has to be mentioned. I’ll be entirely honest, I’ve been so tempted to try this out just because of the insane amount of UI features and functions it has, but my moral compass has stopped me from getting sucked in. It’s getting extremely mainstream and I know a stupid amount of people using it though I’ll be a gentleman and not name any names. As far as I’m aware the features I’ve been hearing about mostly is essentially a map hack of sorts giving you the directions to next floors. Also exp calculators that can calculate how much experience you’re getting per hour which is more of a helpful visual tool rather than a game breaking bug. Personally I feel like the UI improves such as cooldowns, skill damage on tooltips, things like this should be included in the default UI. Though because they’re attached to a HUD that also shows you visuals that can undeservedly give you incredible advantages over people who don’t use it.
Macros
Macros are even less impactful in terms of cheating. I feel like if you use one purely to reduce any RSI inducing properties then I believe thats fine. But when it starts automating gameplay and starts actually playing the game for you then it’s of course out of bounds. This is just a personal opinion of mine and should be I guess frowned upon outside of those rules? Feel free to comment on what other people think.
GENERAL FLAWS
Season Length
I know everybody has their own thoughts on what the seasonal length should be. Firstly I’d like to say that Blizzard do tune the length alongside development time for each patch giving us a new meta for each class and small game improvements for each season. As for what I’ve been hearing, the majority of people have been generally asking for much shorter seasons. Personally I’d like to see 1 week for initial setup, 6 weeks for paragon grinding and gearing, 2 weeks for gem leveling and 2 weeks for pushing. Total of 11 weeks, just under or around 3 months. Another important aspect is to announce not just the start, but also the end date so people know exactly what they’re walking into. I know there will be development periods which will be hard to meet requirements but I feel like you can just extend the in-between seasons period to compensate.
Patches/Content
I feel like the patches right now aren’t entirely content patches, but rather power creeping into a new tier. Not that I’m complaining I love how they’re at least somewhat consistent now but they aren’t exactly huge content patches. And I have to add I know you(Blizzard) likely don’t have many developers available on working on real content rather than just new/adjusting old sets.
Solo Gameplay
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epTxuEs4KgE) Basically sums it all up. I personally love soloing, if I could do everything I do in groups as solo I’d quite likely enjoy the game much more.
Fix Cutscenes
Very unimportant change, but cut scenes starting at all is a complete joke. Skipping cutscenes shouldn’t take 5 seconds.
Hitboxes/Doorways
Discussed a bit in the Map Tileset Normalization. Trying to drag monsters through doorways in Keep Depths and Ruins of Corvus is a complete joke. Especially mobs with huge hitboxes such as oppressors or death maidens. Idk if anything can actually be done to fix this issue but oh well.
Build Diversity
I always loved d2 in the sense that you had skill tree’s and skill synergies that actually buffed your damage. In d3 you’re forced into only 6 skills, with a small pool of runes that can be applied to each skill. The only thing that’s making it interesting is the sets which are getting better the more that are being made.
MISC IDEAS
Non Adventure Mode
In one of the video’s posted earlier (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQEFMle-I3U). Mikhail mentioned an issue with adventure mode. There’s literally no reason to play campaign at all. Which is ashame, It’d be nice to have a reward for completing an act and getting rewarded with a cache full of legendaries or something. Maybe have rewards for speed running through the campaign. Or have days where you get an insane bonus to exp in campaign mode making it actually worthwhile to play there. Comparable to GR speed runs.
Multi-Regional games
It’s a tough time connecting with people who stream only to find out they’re on EU, or vice versa. It’d be really really cool to be able to play with them, but I do understand the logistical nightmare it must be to make it work. If you can find a way I think it’d make the game feel much more populated and enjoyable. Sure there will likely be some language barriers but it’s a small price to pay for a great feature.
Mystic Unrolling
So this has been on my mind for a while now. If you could have the ability to unroll an item but to unlock that you had to reroll it to within 10% of the original roll on the item. Either that or just pay a cost to remove the reroll to its original state.
Blacksmith Unsalvage
Having the ability to ‘buyback’ or more appropriately ‘unsalvage’ with a history of 1-3 items so that if you do mess up a salvage you have a recovery option. We all know you can say “Oh but there was this warning popup every time” but at this point I don’t think that’s enough safety measures. In any case the implementation of this would just be a new tab on the blacksmith which suggests a buy back feature where you pay either gold and/or crafting materials to put it back together.
Reintroduce Item Trading
Trading was a fairly crappy concept when AH was around, but now that it’s gone I feel like it’s important to bring it back. Maybe even just let it be clan tradable for 2 hours or something of the sorts so that your friends that can’t be in your game at the time can still be eligible for loot. It may seem kind of silly maybe but it may reduce the RNG of how stupid weapons are.
Mystic Legendary Affix Rerolling
So this would obviously have to be an expensive or semi time consuming option but I feel it would also help reduce the crazy RNG required in order to make the perfect item. Whether you have to go out into the world, maybe even campaign mode to find a certain dude, NPC, or rare drop item that, just a stupid amount of gold in order to reroll it.
Separate Daily or Weekly Set Grift
So I’ve heard this idea a few times from multiple people and I think it’d add just a bit more excitement to the game. The idea is this, every day and/or week there is a set greater rift, which has the exact same map layout, monster layout, elite affixes, and RGs. I’m unsure whether or not you should be allowed to run it multiple times but you could set your own times to gain either temporary or permanent reward. Maybe gives you an extended bloodshard max for a week or month. Or new portrait for winning, or top 3-5 placement for a certain day/week.
Ability to Turn Experience Off
A lot of people like the idea of twinking characters. For those that don’t know what that means, it’s when you allow your character to stop gaining experience so you can cap your character at certain levels and gear it out like you would at 70.
PvP
It was a huge shame to know that they ditched the idea of arena style before the initial release and it was almost soul crushing. Looking back on it now I can understand the thought process behind it. It was simply too hard to balance a game for both PvP and PvE. One idea that’s been used before is have a separate balanced versions of skills. So for example if I have Multishot, in pve it may hit for 2.3mil. Instead it could only hit for 23k making it a much more balanced version for PvP. The ability to scale for pvp without messing around with the PvE numbers would get rid of the huge problem that surrounds it. It of course will require a crazy amount of balancing in order to make it fun gameplay.
Blizzard’s way of Finding Info
This is more of a rant from multiple highly competitive players more than it’s a suggestion. For the most part it seems like all the feedback and information blizzard gets is from the forums where only a very small margin of players actually visit, reads and contributes. Then they base their findings to the dev team which then use that (likely inaccurate) knowledge to the higher up’s. This maybe a silly idea but have a forum label to show that a blizzard employee has at least viewed and/or read the post to know we’re not being ignored. That would motivate me to even visit the forums let alone never touch it. Would motivate me to contribute to the community and give suggestions rather than just have it disappear into page 52 and never seen or touched again.
Runewords
Huge d2 favorite for a lot of people. Maybe it’s more of an expansion feature but it’d still be a wonderful improvement to the game. Gives it everybody more build diversity and gear opportunities. Don’t really need to say much more, it was a fantastic system in d2, why can’t it work now?
Items that Gain Experience
So I had this idea after the frustration of ancient weapons this season. If you could have your follower equip a weapon, or use it yourself to level a weapon up to eventually hit a certain amount of exp or level, it could turn into an ancient with the same rolls. That way you can still put value on non ancient weapons and gear.
Gem Experience
This is more of a pet peeve hating against the current gem system. Right now you’re forced into doing the highest GR you can do with a group. Then once you’re down to 8% or 15% per attempt then you start doing 1% runs which is -15 your gem lvl. I propose you make a gem leveling system where each gem gets experience and just from playing the game you get rewarded with your lvls rather than forced into 1% runs which will make your life hell. This will create other issues such as what will be your reward for completing a greater rift? Well you can have extra bloodshards/gold/gem experience/loot.
Lack of Game Mysteries
One thing I absolutely loved about D2 is it had a ton of hidden gems inside the game. For example in D2 there was a super small chance that inside a game you could see a message appear that said something along the lines of “7197 SoJ sold to a merchant”, and this would continue till eventually you’d get a message in chat that would say “Diablo walks the earth”. So the next dungeon you find would spawn an Uber Diablo which is fairly tedious to kill and gives you a super unique and fairly rare charm. This gave your character +1 to all skills, 10-20 attributes, 10-20 resists, 5-10% exp. Not to mention Uber Tristram was an extremely fun and challenging version of getting charms which gave your character +3 random class skills, 10-20 attributes, 10-20 all resists, +8 light radius and a chance on attack to cast a fire spell.
Charms
Charms were a way to minmax your character by having these in your inventory to gain certain bonuses like resistance, or extra poison damage, or more magic find. If you were to implement these I’d strongly advise having a separate bag for only charms so that you don’t get an insane wave of complaints about how there’s no inventory room.
Horadric Cube
Formula's to randomize certain items again. Convert normal to ancient items.
RANDOM BUGS
Witch Doctors not taking damage from RG tornados.
Vault/Teleport Rubberbanding
EDIT: Holy crap how could I forget about anarch charges. LOL
As an end note, I know I missed a ton of things that are a huge pain. If I find more stuff I’ll edit it in and record what’s been added below. Again sorry for the huge walls of text and I hope some of it at least makes it to blizzards hands.
1
First ever try with a Tier 43 and I managed to pull out a win.
There's so many FC guides and builds out there with many many variations it's hard to generalize them all. So all I'd like to suggest as far as advice is really learn to abuse vile wards the best you can. Always always always make dragging packs into other packs a priority. Hitting the critical mass of mobs is really exciting to see them all explode. I know certain mobs have terrible hit boxes and certain tile sets can be a nightmare to travel. But learn the angles and learn to adjust. Don't be afraid to skip champ packs or bad affixes. The more distance you travel, the higher chance you'll hit the end of the rift, the higher chance you'll end up getting a pylon. Though in this case it didn't seem to require it.
Give yourself as much time for bosses as possible and never give up. Don't go in with the expectation of losing, even if the time runs out, think of all the gem upgrades you could get! All that aside I doubt you'll be able to get higher than 45 without conduit. But who knows with how much changes on a day to day basis.
The deaths at the end were pure inexperience with the difficulty as I didn't expect to be 1 shot. Learned my lesson fairly quickly and made it a very very close race.
EDIT:
43 vod: http://youtu.be/S7Bs3VriiD4
44 attempt vod: http://youtu.be/sk-jhAdCJ_I
44 binder kill vod: http://youtu.be/LDUOnxZpFjY
Profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Freezy3-1374/hero/51711286
Twitch(Been streaming all my 43+ attempts, only do 5 or so each day): http://www.twitch.tv/freezythree