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Basic Matchmaking Concepts, MMR & the Soft Reset Explained
Legion Beta - Build 22018
PTR Patch 2.4.2 Hotfixes
Blizzard has applied a few hotfixes to the Patch 2.4.2 PTR. Not only bug fixes, but also some mechanic tweaks too. Below you can see the changelog.
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Below you will find a list of hotfixes recently applied or coming soon to the PTR that address various bugs or mechanic tweaks.
These hotfixes should not require you to download a new patch. Some of the hotfixes below will go live the moment they are implemented while others may require restarting the game to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch. Also note that changes to certain abilities will not be reflected in its tooltip until a patch is issued.
Last updated June 24. Hotfixes are denoted by the date they were applied to the PTR servers.
[LIVE HOTFIXES]
Monk
Note: Many of these changes play into a larger development effort onto which we've gone into detail here.
- Epiphany
- Soothing Mist healing reduced by 60%
- Blinding Flash
- Crippling Light damage reduction reduced from 40% to 25%
- Starfire
- The benefit to lightning damage is now capped at 40 yards
Items
- Fixed an issue that caused Girdle of Giants to increase the damage of all skills by the percentage it applied to Earthquake damage
- Fixed an issue that caused Scarbringer to grant a damage bonus of 200%. It has been increased to 300% to match the tooltip.
- Fixed an issue that caused Lashing Tail Kick (Vulture Claw Kick) DoT to not benefit from the bonus damage granted by Scarbringer
End-Game Group Meta & Upcoming Changes
Wyatt Cheng has made an extensive post about the group "meta" and some upcoming changes to it. He gives their perspective from a design standpoint, what's interesting and engaging, types of gameplay, and highlights some problems with the current system and possible solutions.
While long, the post is definitely worth reading if you wanna know where D3 is headed next, and also shows just how much the developers care about the actual end-game gameplay. Check it out!
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Hey folks,
Many concerns have been brought up regarding "the meta" - the current group composition perceived to be the best at high levels of play. From a design standpoint, our job as a development team is to give players tools and leave room for players to combine these tools and perform optimizations to reach the highest greater rift that they can. The top-performing 4-player group composition is not something we rigidly design. Indeed, we feel that if we designed in such a rigid manner so as to know what the best composition is beforehand, we likely haven't created a rich enough space for players to explore.
Over time, the community settles on a small set of ways to combine these tools. Every so often, a discovery is made that shakes up "the meta," but these discoveries become more rare as the game matures. In reaction to this some players would like us to change the balance of the game just for the sake of change. I want to be clear—"the meta" being stale is not a good enough reason for us to take action. As Diablo matures the "meta" is not going to change every season. With that in mind, there are three criteria we use to decide whether change is warranted:
1. Does the current best composition represent a variety of classes? For example, we have taken action in the past when 3 Demon Hunters was the best answer, or 2 Monks and 2 Barbarians.
2. How far ahead is the top tier vs. the next best composition? If the top composition was 2 greater rift tiers ahead there might be a sense that there's still room for alternate specs, or people could make a playstyle choice at the sacrifice of some efficiency. When the top composition is 10 greater rift tiers ahead, then even farming groups or casual community pickup groups start to organize into this composition.
3. Most importantly, how interesting is the gameplay? As much as we'd all love to see a variety of classes and gameplay styles, it's actually the most critical that when you are playing these high-end group compositions that the gameplay is interesting and engaging.
How do we define interesting and engaging?
Currently there are many suggestions on how to shake up "the meta". There have been a LOT of really great suggestions. We've reviewed many of them through the lens of the three criteria I've outlined. Most specifically many people have called for a straight up nerf of the Twisted Sword. While we are going to nerf Twisted Sword, I also want to explain why we are going to do more than that.
- It's more interesting and engaging if you are moving occasionally than highly stationary
- It's more interesting and engaging if you have to adapt to the type of monster you're fighting
- It's more interesting and engaging when you are playing the monster mechanics
- It's more interesting and engaging when a group has to coordinate for maximum benefit
If all we do is nerf Twisted Sword, we believe what will happen is most groups will simply swap out the current top Wizard build and go to the next highest DPS build. You'll still see a grouper/tank (usually a Monk), a puller (usually a Barbarian), a DPS buffer (a Witch Doctor) and then whoever outputs the highest DPS in the game (currently a Wizard). Only going after the Wizard is going to do very little for addressing criteria #2 and criteria #3.
There are three major problems and three corresponding major changes we are looking to make.
PROBLEM #1: Bringing damage support buffers is more effective than bringing a second damage dealer. Why bring damage dealer #2 when you can bring a damage support who increases the damage of damage dealer #1 by 300%?
CHANGE #1: We are going to be reviewing the party-based damage buffs provided by all the classes. The degree to which some classes can buff party damage is a huge contributor to the 1 DPS - 3 Support meta.
PROBLEM #2: It is too easy to group monsters together. This is bad because:
CHANGE #2: We are going to make adjustments to crowd control and pull effects to make it harder to perpetually pull monsters onto a single point.
- It disproportionately increases the damage of the group compared to adding a 2nd damage dealer. If you have twice as many monsters grouped, not only are you dealing twice as much total damage - you're also scaling Area Damage upwards.
- On top of this, many of the grouping mechanics encourages stationary combat. If you're chain-pulling monsters to a point, you're fighting in one location for extended periods of time.
- In addition to being stationary, you’re also casting spells at a single location – it’s more engaging when you have to adjust dynamically to a changing battlefield.
- The grouping mechanics also act as a soft crowd-control, disabling monsters from attacking players, causing combat to feel stagnant and non-interactive.
- Grouping increases visual noise, which makes discerning (and hence responding to) monster mechanics difficult.
- Finally, it can cause server issues. While we are always working on server performance optimizations, we also need to recognize that the current game design rewards players for bringing as many monsters as possible onto the screen at once.
PROBLEM #3: Extremely high rates of healing favor standing still to do more damage instead of respecting and avoiding monster mechanics .
CHANGE #3: One of the reasons you can ignore most monster mechanics is the amount of healing available. Expect to see a drastic reduction in available healing.
Will this affect solo play? Yes - some solo builds will be affected. For the most part we are trying to target the changes so they affect groups more than solo play. Weighing the needs of solo players vs. group players is a never ending and difficult task and in this case we feel that the quality of improvement to group play warrants the changes. It is an ongoing goal to make more builds viable, and the classes closer together in competitiveness. The requests for buffs to particular class sets or legendary items have been heard, we just feel making meaningful changes to group play is more important at this time.
Will this cause the highest rift tier to go down? To be frank - probably. We've never really done this before - nerfing the top performing builds. There are open questions ahead of us. How will this make the season feel? How will this affect non-seasonal play? In the past we've always had a philosophy to adjust the balance of the game by buffing what's low, but in this case that's not really an option. Take a look at the problems and solutions being proposed - these are problems that can't be solved with larger damage numbers. These are problems with group-based damage multipliers, healing, and combat utility.
Finally - I want to circle back to a statement from the start of this post - as developers we do not know what the new optimal group composition will be. We're making some significant changes here and the game is intentionally too complex for us to figure out optimal strategies on our own. The collective wisdom of the player base is far more resourceful and capable than us. As a result - we really need people to jump on the PTR and try this stuff out! Particularly 4-player groups. If some highly competitive group discovers a composition of 4 Crusaders that is the most effective but deliberately "hides" it from the rest of the community, then there's not much we, the development team, can do. While we are ultimately responsible for the quality of Diablo III, we can't improve this game without your help.
There will be specific changes available to peruse in the next PTR patch.
Fair warning: The reduction to group buffs is severe. People will be shell shocked.
If the goal is that 2 DPS can do more damage than 1 DPS + 1 support then it means no single class can bring > 100% worth of damage multipliers to the party. A support Witchdoctor in particular increases the effectiveness of party DPS by 300%+.
The meta wont change much while 50% of the sets in the game are total garbage at the same time LoN being nothing but a thing to house..4 gr builds maybe. 4! Out of a game that you can make dozens per character skill combinations that make sense. All of those should work in a sense but...here we are.
To change the endgame they need to remove endless GR.. make a CAP for it. Remove damage bonuses from sets also and the support legendaries to give us huge amount of variety.
Make last 5-10 GR levels so that they won't award more XP and so on. Those last GR levels should also be really difficult to reach so there would always be some goal. So in this case it would be more beneficial to run a bit lower GR and while doing so you don't need mathematically most efficient group composition.. a mix of builds and classes will do the job fast enough.. of course the top guys can still optimize this to squeeze out some seconds or minutes out of the time.
They could also cap the Paragon levels while at it so the end game could be something more than just farm exp in GR.
A GR 100 would be fine for solo at least. Nice solid number plus it's almost where the game is at now. Maybe 120for four man
I just hope one day blizz will realize this is diablo and we dont need tank or healer in the game. its ok to have healing stat and tanky stat but look at D2 everyone can arm to the teeth in different style in 8 player game and doesn't even need a tank or healer all you need is damage to kill mob
Some comments are curious... I remember that back in the early D3 days the "group meta" was having 4 DPS characters, and anyone who didn't contribute to that was useless. 4 whirlwind Barbarians was the norm for farming Act 3 and above, and later on the highest Torment difficulties. Most complaints back then were on how "support and tanking abilities were useless, because only DPS is important" - people couldn't "role play". How things have changed.
I doubt Blizzard will ever be able to find a middle ground. It's probably impossible to balance numbers out and make both play styles viable. I'm glad they're trying tho, and good luck to them.
Look at TX normal Rifts.. it doesn't really matter what build and class there is.. every class has enough mobility and dps to clear it quite fast.. if the normal farming difficulty in GR's were something similar .. maybe slightly tougher it would be about the same.
Lets say if you play 3 support 1 dps in there you would do quite nice.. maybe preferable for HC or 2 support 2 dps. In Sofcore you could go crazy and get 4 DPS and you would deal so much damage that the incoming damage from monsters would not be a problem anymore since they don't have so much chance to hit you.
They'd better buff WD DPS more than, as after the nerf to zwd i doubt i will be welcomed in groups anymore. And i won't have a spot at all. Would need to do some zbarb, zmonk or other zshit again :((
Also i hope they NERF zuni as well. It's too damn tough. So much healing and damage reduction. OU MY GAWD i am steamrolling gr100s all the time with Zuni.
The nerf to some damage buffs can easily be reworked/coded to affect groups and not solo in the nerf, such as "for each player this buff affects, its impact is lowered by 50%". This means that for a 2 player group, the buff provides 50%, 3 player is 25% and 4 player would be 12.5% while still allowing a 100% buff increase for solo. I am not sure they will do this from the start, so we may have to go a single season without that coding, but I expect it by season 8.
In Diablo the point is to do damage. 0 dps may not do damage themselves, but they provide damage increases for others, which results in more damage. That can easily be acceptable.
The issue I have are 0 dps that heal and pull. I feel those are not roles that should be present in group play of an ARPG, and instead found in an MMO.
"The requests for buffs to particular class sets or legendary items have
been heard, we just feel making meaningful changes to group play is
more important at this time."
This makes my brain hurt. If most of the class sets weren't completely worthless then there would be meaningful options in group play. If you're not interested in buffing class sets or legendary items, why put in a bunch of already completely useless new ones this patch?!
I don't even care if they're not all viable at gr 100 or whatever - I just want there not to be one set that's 5-30x stronger than every other available option for a class so that we can actually choose a slightly less optimal build that we find more fun without being unable to play most of the game as a result. Having to play the exact same build every season because there are no options is really really dull. As it stands now, I'm playing each season solely for the stash tab - otherwise I wouldn't bother at all and I'd soon forget about the game entirely. This is not a good situation.
I have no problems with support and you shouldn't. In Titan Quest you must have a tank in MP, that takes aggro, otherwise the range damage dealers get obliterated. ARPGs aren't limited to only dealing damage, no idea where you got this from. D2 isn't the only ARPG.
I enjoy doing damage, I enjoy healing, and I enjoy tanking. The problem is that there's always one option that's 10 times better than the others. Why? Because they refuse to fix bugs mid season, and they always make one set much better. They can't balance for shit, and that's the trademark of Blizzard in all of their games.
...bring back damage resists which scale with the number of players active on a game.
I wonder if they could keep the self healing and nerf the group healing instead.
Imho the issues are pretty well explained.
- supports are not toxic by themselves, but the fact they actually provide more damage than a single dps is extremely broken. You choose support because you can do more damage than with a full dps setup; this is simply wrong - supports should be a tradeoff from damage to utility and not utility + more damage.
- tied to point above, room for only 1 dps makes all specs useless but the #1.
- third, and frankly most important, supports are all about healing and pulling. Healing makes people simply facetank everything (which is boring) and massive pulling leads to the extreme lag that makes other potentially competetive builds completely unusable. Example, for this season fire EA/Mara6 DH had a damage comparable to Wizard, but the immense amounts of ground dots makes the build not feasible.
Less supports would lead to a more dynamic gameplay and possibly less server issues that are 99% due to having insane monster density in a single place. Then it would be a matter of balacing sets to make more options viable, as you all know that reached a ceratin level Rift density and comp matter more than everything else.
As Zero said, 2dps+tank+sup is a definitely more interesting setup. ideally imho a 3dps+supp/tank should be the norm (utility of grouping mobs shouldn't be killed, only made less relevant/reliable).
I for one really enjoy playing support, it is a nice change of pace after playing D3 since day 1. Fun is what the game is about, but fun is not a universal theory.