I'd really fancy they cleared all of our follower's gear, mailed it to us, and made them share! So you don't have to take off your best weapons/gems for followers, or reequip them for every character. Ability choices could still be remembered per-char. basis, though.
One other idea I had would be to cause strength, dexterity, and intelligence to all equally benefit followers, by converting it at a 1:1 ratio to another stat, follower-exclusive, which behaves in the same manner.
Would certainly make it a lot easier to gear followers since they all use essentially the same non-weapon items.
Autocthon: A 20% paragon level difference in two seasons is the exact same level of competitive fairness no matter the absolute level differences.
No, it is not.
It is if you make a few assumptions regarding relative statistical weightings of paragon stats vs gear stats.
After a certain point 20% paragon = 20% mainstat = 20% faster kill speed
The lower paragon levels will have the most statistical discrepancy because 1 paragon point means more relative to total stats. Currently maximum main stat on items is about 10k. Assuming we ignore the first 800 points of paragon in order for paragon to be 50% of main stat you need 2800. At which point a 20% difference in paragon level (another 20% main stat paragon) equates to 10% more DPS. By the time you've reached 10k paragon you have 84% of main stat from paragon levels and another 20% paragon level equates to ~17% more DPS.
Eventually any given relative paragon level difference becomes essentially a relative DPS difference. Which is really what my statement is about. Until that point there will be some competitive drift but we're already well beyond the point where we will be seeing exceptionally significant drift.
Archon spells do not count as resource spenders/generators, the buffs only last 5 secs meaning you would have at least 15 sec downtime if you chose to use it (15 sec downtime on a 2.25 separate multiplier is already a huge loss). Archon stacks are generated upon attack and does not correlate to the amount of enemies attacked, and let's be honest: this is where you'll gain most of your stacks. This means you IAS will set upper limit to how many stacks you can get, with the nerfs to the belt we already lost 30% of that initial IAS. IAS is only for building stacks and afaik useless damage wise since your WoD won't scale with it (and your archon skills won't even come close to the WoD damage).
Ah. Forgot about that wonderful clause. I suppose we have to start considering an alternative damage bonus source from rings at that point.
Considering a perfect scenario without downtime on your attacks and with optimal Swami usage you would be able to build up stacks indefinitely. However I doubt this would ever be the case since even a fraction of second would harm your stacks considerably, not to mention the worst case scenario where you die.
Mmmm... Depends on how close you cut it with the Swami and CDR I suppose?
Now for the last part (and do correct me if I'm wrong) each Archon stack will give you +6% in the "Damage increased by Skills" catagory, so 100 stacks would give you +600%. This is additive with your increased elemental damage and other skill/passive bonuses (i.e. Glass Cannon) whereas TR is a +600% multiplicative damage will give you a clean 7x multiplier. Considering a case where we only use +40% elemental dmg on our gear the calculations would be following:
Vyr's:
100 * (1.4 + 6) = 740
TR:
100 * 1.4 * 7 = 980
To figure out how many stacks you'd need to compete with TR you'd have you solve this equation:
solve(100*(1.4+x)=980,x)
But this is assuming the TR wizard isn't running F&R or MW/GC (in this case the required stacks would be even higher, IDK what the highest amount of stacks on PTR are but with the belt nerf I doubt it's close).
TR can also fully utilize Zei's Stone which is yet again another separate multiplier. I was personally looking forward to Vyr since the TR playstyle is very tedious but in the end, only results matter.
TD;DR: Vyr can't compete with TR
You don't really have to solve an equation. TR is (Damage)*(1+6) archon stacks are +6%. If we assume Elemental + Skill + Global are all additive with each other (and I've seen a half dozen conflicting accounts of additivity between the three) then TR = Vyr's when Total Stacks = (Total Damage bonuses +100).
EG If you have +200% additive damage you need 300 stacks to multiply your damage by 7.
The tipping points are basically the performance of the new damage gem and whether WoD is affected by +Damage% from archon stacks. That raw base damage value combined with better single element scaling means as a pure DPS bonus it's quite a bit ahead of meteors if it's going off 1/second. Archon Beam + massive IAS boosts from stacks will result in a rather significant multplier to damage. As long as we can abstract out Fazula's as ~1/2stack/s gains in rifts since you'll never be more than 20s between archons if you're trying to maintain the stacks.
If we make the HORRIBLE assumption that archon will be able to finish rifts without dying and that they retain full stacks we're talking 300 stacks against the RG in a ten minute rift off a perfect nerfed chain.
So it all boils down to whether Archon can manage 100% stack maintenance. In which case you're looking at a 1800% damage bonus by ten minutes into a rift and a 300% Armour/Resist bonus. Doesn't matter what you have for additive bonuses at that point you're doing approximately all the damage. Which is probably related to the belt nerf. So your new point of optimizing is minimizing CC duration and time between packs. And just so you know, at that point Zei's is immaterial because you're looking at a 19x damage multiplier off stacks alone. The set is definitely about snowballing with exponential clear speed increases rather than havin ga solid baseline stat value.
Go forth and test for 100% uptime.
Hell even if the chain just works the first time i na rift maintaining full stacks would have you at like 300 stacks by 10 minutes anyway off attacks.
Wouldn't the Wave of Destruction hit for 7350% weapon damage since every stacks adds 350% to the original Wave?
350% + 350% * 20 = 7350%
But I still have a hard time seeing how this will outperform TR, Archon has a blatant weakness and it also requires you to be in close range in order to utilize its full potential.
it is actually 7500% weapon damage at 20 stacks, 350X20=7500 as to your issue with the viability, it is "fine" to stay in melee range after they changed the 4p with the season exclusive belt power, and that you gain defense from the set bonus now, and with the swami in the cube (which is pretty much mandatory as your "armour" slot item), you will be fine for the ~20 seconds you are out of archon form for and with obsidian ring of the zodiac in the cube (again one of those where you will likely not be using anything else for this slot) that downtime is cut even shorter.
350*20=7000 if this number is added on to the effect it would be 7350% (IDK how much damage it really does, I was only wondering) but whatever it is it doesn't make a difference, to elaborate what I meant by a blatant weakness: I was talking about is the fact you won't be able to utilize Focus/Restraint which is a separate 2.25x mulitplier, not to mention TR which is a 7x mulitiplier plus the fact that Archon stacks are pure sheet dps.
Ofc the melee thing is fine in most cases but not all.
What's locking vyr's+chantodo out of F&R?
As far as the 7x damage mnultiplier on Tal's... Just think about whatever your sheet +damage. If it's 100% then you need 100 stacks to be the same damage bonus as tal's. If it's 200% then you need 200 stacks. The question is not whether or not it's additive, the question is whether or not you can get that many stacks.
The absolute value difference is completely meaningless though. It's a nonsensical metric that doesn't express comparative power between characters and the only way to eliminate it is to completely remove the level system as a product of playtime.
The "absolute power difference" you're talking about is just a product of relative stat totals (compounded a small amount by player efficiency). Barring capping XP gains per day there's no way to guarantee players with arbitrary playtime differences are on an "equal field".
Now if you wanted to "accurately" reflect player leaderboard standing then every player would need to be placed on a leaderboard respective to other p[layers in their playtime bracket. It would theoretically reflect player skill and efficiency of their leveling. If you wanted to perfectly reflect player efficiency then you'd have a leaderboard which ranks players based on their XP gain rate rather than their absolute XP total.
But it all boils down to there being no "scaling power gap". It's a figment of your imagination. The only time one EVER exists as you describe is if two players play at two different points in the season. A 20% paragon level difference in two seasons is the exact same level of competitive fairness no matter the absolute level differences. It's the same competition with bigger numbers.
The effect that XP inflation has on non-seasonal is a total non-issue of course. It's not intended to be "balanced" it's just a dumping ground for testing and casual play. The fact that there are even leaderboards at all is idiotic to be honest.
And FYI blizz is destroying XP bonus gear and XP calculation last I checked.
And how about we go and look at the actual time investiture difference between whatever arbitrary players we're comparing is between seasons? It does nothing to say players 1 and 60 have larger paragon gaps without also looking at their playtime gaps. Then we have to sit and look at how they reached that paragon (Rubies? Support builds? What are they ACTUALLY doing different). You need extensive and detailed information to make any REAL comparison between season leaderboards.
Valid point, I wanted to at least compare paragon earned against hours played but unfortunately the data wasn't available. I almost added a disclaimer but my post was too long as is. Even if you want to disregard that example though you should still be able to see that if you understand how the system works you can accurately determine that a widening power gap is inevitable.
Let me try a different sort of example based on math rather than incomplete statistics:
Every season/era there is power creep, this means we can farm paragon faster than before with each new patch. If this season we both farm paragon at a rate of 100 bil xp per hour and you play 5 hours a day but I play 6 then at the end of 1 week I will have gained 700 bil more xp than you.
Lets say next season power creep allows us to both farm 150 bil xp per hour. If we both play for the same number of hours again I will have 1050 bil more xp than you at the end of 1 week.
The difference between how much we both play doesn't change and yet the difference between your reward and mine increases. My previous example was certainly not scientific but by doing some basic math you can see that a similar outcome is inevitable just because of the systems current design.
(Disclaimer: 150 bil xp per hour next season is a number I pulled out my ass. No one knows what an accurate rate for farming xp next season/era is yet but surely we can all agree that next season/era we will be more powerful than this season/era and therefore able to farm paragon faster. This has already been demonstrated on the current PTR)
What you're not taking into account is that is we assume the case where the largest numeric paragon gap exists (perfectly linear paragon level XP requirement - plvl1 takes 100xp, plvl2 takes a total 200xp etc) the difference in paragon levels will always be the exact same. 20% more paragon on the player playing 20% more.
In any OTHER case (increasing XP requirement per progression) you actually see a smaller paragon gap relative to XP difference.
The part of the system that is broken isn't the XP gains going up making a bigger gap (the gap will always remain the excact same percentage difference no matter how you change the XP creep) it's the fact that a certain subset of gear loads (zDPS XP farming gear) gain exponentially more XP than other builds. The guys in top tier paragon levels are spending, by definition, significant amounts of time playing XP gear builds compared to their actual DPS characters.
In other words if we both farm XP at the same rate per hour we will always be split by a gap relative to our time spent farming and that gap will always be the same amount of power whether we reach paragon 1000 or 10000. 20% more playtime will always be 20% more experience will always be 20% more paragon will always be 20% more main stat. Baseline XP creep has no effect there.
Going back to your quoted numbers the number 1 earner has 22% more paragon than the number 60 earner in season 2. In season three the number 1 earner has 10% more paragon than second place and a 48% lead over 60th place. If we discount Vajet as most likely an anomaly then second place has a 33% lead over 60th place. We absolutely need information about how these players earned that experience as well as relative playime differences in both seasons, however if we assume second place and 60th place represent the same time investment as 1st and 60th in season one and also assume that neither player spent time in XP gear (not likely but necessary to treat them as equal) then the actual paragon gap inflation between seasons is only about 10%. eg the difference in relative power between characters. That's not a whole lot given how much baseline XP has changed.
To illustrate we're going to pretend it's season 10. Everything has gone crazy you're earning ridiculous nXP/hr without any XP gear. First place has got 130000 plvl, 60th is down at "only" 100000 and there's a 30000 plvl gap. Thing is that that 30000 level gap represents exactly the same power gap we're seeing right now (30% mainstat). There's no functional difference in relative character power between such a hypothetical season 10 and the real season 3.
The only major potential issue is XP momentum. That is where the gap is coming from and it isn't exactly difficult to fix. Doesn't need grand sweeping changes or anything just needs an actual curvature to XP requirements. You do need to keep i mind though that there IS a cap to XP/hour, you can only get XP so fast. And you need to remember that paragon levels at extremely high values of paragon (the point when the curve becomes flat) mean essentially nothing to your XP/hr. That means that players will initially pull away then recompress and stabilize as they hit the XP farming wall.
I expect to see a similar amount of power gap inflation in S4 as there was S3. About 10%. Assuming that XP gear builds contributed nothing to the gap.
Many RPG have significant amounts of skill involved for player performance. Especially the tabletop posterchildren of the genre. aRPGs are very much a subgenre which requires no skill. In contrast to the relatively high degree of player skill (often in the form of decision making) required in games from other subgenres.
You're going way off topic but I was referring to the video game genre because this is a video game... Pretty much every RPG video game involves tons of grinding to gain power and any "decision making" takes 2 seconds to google the answer. Table top is totally unrelated.
I can think of a number of non-tabletop RPGs where a major component of success is strategy. You have the option of grinding to outlevel content in most RPGs but in other games of the genre player skill ends up important.
See almost all tactical RPGs. And a decent chunk of endgame in certain jRPGs (where strategy is the only thing winning your fights against OHKO enemies).
You do realize this is an ARPG. Your entire argument about skill is completely contrary to the format of roleplaying games. You grind and grind and grind to get more power, skill has little to do with anything in RPG's. The game doesn't take much skill at all, it takes a little knowledge which you can learn quickly, and lots of time grinding gear and paragon. Bots are pretty good at grinding and can play 24/7 so they are on the leader boards. If you want bots banned then that makes sense but arguing for a leader board that displays skill means that you don't want the game to be an RPG.
The bigger issue is that botting generated tons of GR keys which were then used to run tons of speed GR's which gave inflated XP to support leechers who now have 50% more main stat than a typical well geared player. That's 50% more dps that no amount of skill can make up for. Whether a particular top player bots or not is almost irrelevant because they get speed GR keys from people who do, and pretty much everyone who plays multiplayer has benefited from all the "free keys" for speed GR's that botters farm up.
Nonseason will be totally screwed unless Blizzard does something to reduce the effect of paragons over 1k, especially since XP will be harder to get with the changes they've made on PTR. Super high paragon players will stay there while everyone else will have a harder time catching up. It will be a positive affect on S4 though because XP gain will be even among the party and you'll be doing a lot more T10 rifting (additive XP still) to get ~1.3 GR keys per run that can't be recycled.
aRPGs
Many RPG have significant amounts of skill involved for player performance. Especially the tabletop posterchildren of the genre. aRPGs are very much a subgenre which requires no skill. In contrast to the relatively high degree of player skill (often in the form of decision making) required in games from other subgenres.
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I'd like to see the Asheara 4p bonus made passive rather than a 50% uptime buff.
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Technically speaking "filtered out" basically just means it's a non-smart drop. Which means it's rarely going to show up.
0
So the effective removal of non-orange and off-class drops from the game is coincidental then.
1
It's filtered out of classes that cannot use polearms. Wiz cannot use Polearms so you'll only get it as an off class drop.
0
Staff of herding isn't really necessary for anything anymore. Nor is it filtered in any way. Just gotta murder Izual a lot.
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0
So basically this wishlist is "Remove items that are non-ancient non-legendary and non-smart from the game"
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It is if you make a few assumptions regarding relative statistical weightings of paragon stats vs gear stats.
After a certain point 20% paragon = 20% mainstat = 20% faster kill speed
The lower paragon levels will have the most statistical discrepancy because 1 paragon point means more relative to total stats. Currently maximum main stat on items is about 10k. Assuming we ignore the first 800 points of paragon in order for paragon to be 50% of main stat you need 2800. At which point a 20% difference in paragon level (another 20% main stat paragon) equates to 10% more DPS. By the time you've reached 10k paragon you have 84% of main stat from paragon levels and another 20% paragon level equates to ~17% more DPS.
Eventually any given relative paragon level difference becomes essentially a relative DPS difference. Which is really what my statement is about. Until that point there will be some competitive drift but we're already well beyond the point where we will be seeing exceptionally significant drift.
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Ah. Forgot about that wonderful clause. I suppose we have to start considering an alternative damage bonus source from rings at that point.
Mmmm... Depends on how close you cut it with the Swami and CDR I suppose?
You don't really have to solve an equation. TR is (Damage)*(1+6) archon stacks are +6%. If we assume Elemental + Skill + Global are all additive with each other (and I've seen a half dozen conflicting accounts of additivity between the three) then TR = Vyr's when Total Stacks = (Total Damage bonuses +100).
EG If you have +200% additive damage you need 300 stacks to multiply your damage by 7.
The tipping points are basically the performance of the new damage gem and whether WoD is affected by +Damage% from archon stacks. That raw base damage value combined with better single element scaling means as a pure DPS bonus it's quite a bit ahead of meteors if it's going off 1/second. Archon Beam + massive IAS boosts from stacks will result in a rather significant multplier to damage. As long as we can abstract out Fazula's as ~1/2stack/s gains in rifts since you'll never be more than 20s between archons if you're trying to maintain the stacks.
If we make the HORRIBLE assumption that archon will be able to finish rifts without dying and that they retain full stacks we're talking 300 stacks against the RG in a ten minute rift off a perfect nerfed chain.
So it all boils down to whether Archon can manage 100% stack maintenance. In which case you're looking at a 1800% damage bonus by ten minutes into a rift and a 300% Armour/Resist bonus. Doesn't matter what you have for additive bonuses at that point you're doing approximately all the damage. Which is probably related to the belt nerf. So your new point of optimizing is minimizing CC duration and time between packs. And just so you know, at that point Zei's is immaterial because you're looking at a 19x damage multiplier off stacks alone. The set is definitely about snowballing with exponential clear speed increases rather than havin ga solid baseline stat value.
Go forth and test for 100% uptime.
Hell even if the chain just works the first time i na rift maintaining full stacks would have you at like 300 stacks by 10 minutes anyway off attacks.
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What's locking vyr's+chantodo out of F&R?
As far as the 7x damage mnultiplier on Tal's... Just think about whatever your sheet +damage. If it's 100% then you need 100 stacks to be the same damage bonus as tal's. If it's 200% then you need 200 stacks. The question is not whether or not it's additive, the question is whether or not you can get that many stacks.
1
The absolute value difference is completely meaningless though. It's a nonsensical metric that doesn't express comparative power between characters and the only way to eliminate it is to completely remove the level system as a product of playtime.
The "absolute power difference" you're talking about is just a product of relative stat totals (compounded a small amount by player efficiency). Barring capping XP gains per day there's no way to guarantee players with arbitrary playtime differences are on an "equal field".
Now if you wanted to "accurately" reflect player leaderboard standing then every player would need to be placed on a leaderboard respective to other p[layers in their playtime bracket. It would theoretically reflect player skill and efficiency of their leveling. If you wanted to perfectly reflect player efficiency then you'd have a leaderboard which ranks players based on their XP gain rate rather than their absolute XP total.
But it all boils down to there being no "scaling power gap". It's a figment of your imagination. The only time one EVER exists as you describe is if two players play at two different points in the season. A 20% paragon level difference in two seasons is the exact same level of competitive fairness no matter the absolute level differences. It's the same competition with bigger numbers.
The effect that XP inflation has on non-seasonal is a total non-issue of course. It's not intended to be "balanced" it's just a dumping ground for testing and casual play. The fact that there are even leaderboards at all is idiotic to be honest.
And FYI blizz is destroying XP bonus gear and XP calculation last I checked.
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What you're not taking into account is that is we assume the case where the largest numeric paragon gap exists (perfectly linear paragon level XP requirement - plvl1 takes 100xp, plvl2 takes a total 200xp etc) the difference in paragon levels will always be the exact same. 20% more paragon on the player playing 20% more.
In any OTHER case (increasing XP requirement per progression) you actually see a smaller paragon gap relative to XP difference.
The part of the system that is broken isn't the XP gains going up making a bigger gap (the gap will always remain the excact same percentage difference no matter how you change the XP creep) it's the fact that a certain subset of gear loads (zDPS XP farming gear) gain exponentially more XP than other builds. The guys in top tier paragon levels are spending, by definition, significant amounts of time playing XP gear builds compared to their actual DPS characters.
In other words if we both farm XP at the same rate per hour we will always be split by a gap relative to our time spent farming and that gap will always be the same amount of power whether we reach paragon 1000 or 10000. 20% more playtime will always be 20% more experience will always be 20% more paragon will always be 20% more main stat. Baseline XP creep has no effect there.
Going back to your quoted numbers the number 1 earner has 22% more paragon than the number 60 earner in season 2. In season three the number 1 earner has 10% more paragon than second place and a 48% lead over 60th place. If we discount Vajet as most likely an anomaly then second place has a 33% lead over 60th place. We absolutely need information about how these players earned that experience as well as relative playime differences in both seasons, however if we assume second place and 60th place represent the same time investment as 1st and 60th in season one and also assume that neither player spent time in XP gear (not likely but necessary to treat them as equal) then the actual paragon gap inflation between seasons is only about 10%. eg the difference in relative power between characters. That's not a whole lot given how much baseline XP has changed.
To illustrate we're going to pretend it's season 10. Everything has gone crazy you're earning ridiculous nXP/hr without any XP gear. First place has got 130000 plvl, 60th is down at "only" 100000 and there's a 30000 plvl gap. Thing is that that 30000 level gap represents exactly the same power gap we're seeing right now (30% mainstat). There's no functional difference in relative character power between such a hypothetical season 10 and the real season 3.
The only major potential issue is XP momentum. That is where the gap is coming from and it isn't exactly difficult to fix. Doesn't need grand sweeping changes or anything just needs an actual curvature to XP requirements. You do need to keep i mind though that there IS a cap to XP/hour, you can only get XP so fast. And you need to remember that paragon levels at extremely high values of paragon (the point when the curve becomes flat) mean essentially nothing to your XP/hr. That means that players will initially pull away then recompress and stabilize as they hit the XP farming wall.
I expect to see a similar amount of power gap inflation in S4 as there was S3. About 10%. Assuming that XP gear builds contributed nothing to the gap.
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I hit paragon 250 a week into season anyway. Which is about the time it takes to have gear for GR40+.
I see no problems here.
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I can think of a number of non-tabletop RPGs where a major component of success is strategy. You have the option of grinding to outlevel content in most RPGs but in other games of the genre player skill ends up important.
See almost all tactical RPGs. And a decent chunk of endgame in certain jRPGs (where strategy is the only thing winning your fights against OHKO enemies).
"RPG" is a giant genre even in video games.
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aRPGs
Many RPG have significant amounts of skill involved for player performance. Especially the tabletop posterchildren of the genre. aRPGs are very much a subgenre which requires no skill. In contrast to the relatively high degree of player skill (often in the form of decision making) required in games from other subgenres.