A PTR overreaction

General Discussion
1

So here we go.

Warlock ES nerfs are fine. The most important thing is to reward players for obtaining elite gear and optimizing the build correctly. If the build can hit around 30K with theoretically perfect gear, that seems about right. More than that is just too OP given there is still crit and curses to multiply damage.

Bind Demon seems better overall, though I would like to retain the ability to make it into an absolute tank if I max out its skill and synergies. Again, reward players for committing to skills and optimizing effectively. As of now, it dies no matter how much points are invested and is basically worthless as an endgame option.

Not sure why Miasma tree was nerfed down. If anything, it needed to be buffed up compared to other skills. Ring of Fire did need to be tamed, though. I would have reduced the damage by 50% and added a cooldown similar to that of Blizzard. The ability to spam it was what made it broken, not the high damage.

The Sunder situation is confused and is easily the worst of the proposals. Classic case of spotting an error, then overcorrecting as a result. If the PTR changes go through, then Shards will become mostly useless except to renew sunders, which will be so common that they will have lost all their value.

My solution would be to make Heralds harder to find. Yes, you heard me. Perhaps two to three times harder, or about 1 per act. And then make the tier 5 herald ALWAYS drop a sunder. The goal would be to expect a Sunder on average after completing a single terrorized version of the game, and most players would be willing to invest the three hours of play if they knew they would likely get a sunder for it. This makes Shards actually useful again, and promotes extended gaming sessions (which I believe was the point of all of this, yes?).

Additionally, having sunders drop like normal items makes Heralds completely pointless. If I can get them running Mephisto or CS, I’ll just do that. Especially since the Heralds are practically impossible for many builds to kill quickly. They should just be removed if they don’t have anything special to offer other than spawning right on top of us and causing us to lose our hardcore characters.

Rant over. Thanks for reading.

1 Like
2

Overall agree to the changes to miasma and Ring of Fire but the 100% drop rates of sunders even if a monster is hard to find or kill feels outside of a looter definition. Agree that Blizz overkilled the low chance of sunders. I saw in another forum the idea of the basic drop of the sunder to have a high downside (like sunder physical but your accuracy is half or something like that) and then stablish a progressive upgrade of the item with materials that are harder to find with each upgrade and add the posibility of bricking the item after multiple tries… this will add a good smooth progression to the overall endgame goal experience.

1 Like
3

yeah i think they should only focus on bind demon and echoing strike. the rest is ok or justifiable.

1 Like
4

the only reason they nerfed the warlock is cause it was the easiest thing to balance. I get it. Personally, I agree with the sunder charm changes, not so sure about the drop rates but I have farmed for literal days for one on my warlock in hell and nada. With an early sunder charm I could at least run any class other than echoing strike warlock or sorc to get to endgame on a first toon. Will be interesting to see. That’s disappointing about the bind demon being trash in hell.

1 Like
5

I’d be fine with a drop rate similar to the uber keys (~1/8) if a guaranteed drop feels too easy. But when you consider that a torch can be farmed in less than 2 hours, it doesn’t make sense that a sunder should literally take hundreds of hours of play just to get a single charm that may or may not be the one your build needs.

6

Changing the heralds and the way sunders drop on the PTR effectively means there is no longer a mandatory reason to create or join a Tz 95 herald farm game. While sunder definitely are hard to come by on live servers that mechanic alone did incentivize players to play together for more than just chaos \ baal \ cows xp runs. If the changes on PTR go to the live servers it will de-incentivize players to play together. You won’t need to group up, you will get your sunder in 1 game. I have 17 now on the PTR realm. In a week you won’t even have to farm sunders, you will be finding them in Act 1 town in stale games where people id and tossed them.

1 Like
7

i agree with sunder drops needing to change. as it stands i do not like the herald system, it has multiple layers of random and it’s just not that fun imo.

first you must draw the ire - a total random instance. you have no idea when it’s going to happen. then you have

a herald is hunting you - ok at least you know it’s close. but then you have to fight it. and only after you find what? your fourth one. do they drop tier 5. and even then, the chance to get a sunder charm seems very low, i’ve killed countless tier 5 heralds and this point and gotten 1.

thank diablo it was the sunder charm i needed.

so your proposed idea is definitely better than what we currently have. but i also think having them drop 100% is bad. because you know after x amount of time you will have it, which just, isn’t the way of diablo.

the only two drops like that are torch and anni and those were given to use by placeholder devs (i say that because they were not the OG creators) .

but ya i’d def take your version over what we have. i’m currently losing motivation to continue the search.

1 Like
8

The good : demon mastery, blood oath, not multiplier anymore for ES, AR as planned, bind demon not as 1 point wonder.

The bad : miasma change.

The ugly : Sigil of lethalgy could have a base -20 % physical -5 % every hard point. Bind demon feel clunky. Sunder changes and goblin loot herald.

9

no pulling a bait and switch 2 months after the new class is released is not fine. Then blizzard caves in to all the crying and complaining and streamer idiots thinking “they know what is best for the game and everybody else”. No this is absolutely not fine. this is absolute bs! No, blizzard made a decision to release the warlock like it is now so deal with it. if they do go through with the nerf then this was all planned and they knew exactly what would happen. release an op character so everybody buys dlc then pull the bait and switch cuz of all the crybaby’s and nerf it into the ground. we got their money who cares! guess what, nobody will buy a damn thing from you blizz if you want to operate like that. people can see the writing on the wall and they will boycott you!

5 Likes
10

Yes, this is clearly the case. The class was a marketing ploy to try and bring in new players and get some buzz going about a “broken” new class. But I like to think of this as a “beta” release that rewards those who bought the update with an overpowered toy for a few months before changing it back to what it was always intended to be.

That said, I can understand your annoyance at this. Calling these issues “bugs” when they were obviously intentional is a bit of an insult to our intelligence. I’d rathey they just come out and say “Don’t miss your chance to play an overpowered class while you can!”

And yet, they give us an eth Fortitude as a weapon to test the Echoing Strike in the PTR… you just have to laugh at this stuff!

3 Likes
11

i’ve seen this before, Bethesda pulled this crap for years and guess what, i’ll never by a damn thing from them again! Ever! nope they have been boycotted by me and millions of other people. absolute scumbag move. Blizz wants to do business like this then they can piss right off. Then all they will have is streamers who think they know what is best for everybody and all the whining crybabies that cry about every change made good or bad. you will never make these people happy…

1 Like
12

But be honest with yourself, you knew it was the plan when you bought it. Everyone knew it. Most of the ARPG work that way now.

and you know why, because people want to test the limit of the characters, get bored and jump to another game. I don’t feel been stolen, I knew the first version was the beta testing.

Also, of course, it was OP, but you give too much credit to the devs. Look, they even don’t know what is necessary to nerf and how.

13

deep down i think i did know they would pull this crap but hoped it wouldn’t be the case… shame on me for giving them the benefit of the doubt. shame on me….

14

ahha, no shame. Gaming business is at odd place. Before, they weren’t really looking at player feedback, but they didn’t build games for cash grapping like that.

Edit : by before, I meant the game in the 2000’s.

15

For the record I agree with most of what you said, but miasma chains damage was weird. I played through warlock when it first dropped and noticed the damage from the chains were doing A LOT of damage. I’m not sure how it was calculating the damage and so I’m not sure of the proper fix.

1 Like
16

You do realise they nerfed curse right.. for all intents and purposes there is no curse…

More than 30k damage.. with crit is not op…

You can clear trash mobs sure… but what about ubers…

You are missing crushing blow… openwounds…

I wonder how much damage.. crushing blow does per proc…:thinking: :thinking: :thought_balloon:

Bind demon is not okay… But if they wanna go the route they choose.. it makes even a real summon build starved for point.. so bad design choice…(messing up all builds because of echoing strike…)

Demon master nerf is also doodoo… again not everything should be about stopping multi classing… since all other character can multi class their trees…

All I see in this patch is over-nerfing…

Bright side is.. they did not touch mirrored blades and cleave… would have to tp back and forth to town.. but you can struggle through game..

Nice one Blizz.. handicapping a new character, bait/switch people with over nerf.. All you had to do was fix 1 skill.

5 Likes
17

The way ES was working before were obviously bugs. For example with Attack Rating, you can see it in the skill tree and itemization of Warlock pieces. It was meant to calculate AR.

Furthermore, while it’s unfortunate that the release-then-nerf played out this way, I don’t buy the argument of “Don’t miss your chance to play an overpowered class while you can.”

Nobody who bought RotW on release knew that the new class was “going to be OP and so I’ll buy it for EZ mode.”

I’ll grant that people figured that out pretty quickly but it wasn’t a buying decision.

1 Like
18

over reaction ?
people paid for this
they had hopes
and now we are right back to prehistoric tism clicker game
I haven’t touched the game since I read the patch nortes where they sucked all the fun out of the game again
and prob never will again

3 Likes
19

and now we are right back to prehistoric tism clicker game

Dude, go play another game. It is the same game with bigger numbers. It doesn’t change the game mechanism at all. People are not paying for a game, they are buying illusion at this point.

1 Like
20

Yes and no, Big OP build make good videos. People get hyped. Also, look at the posts, specially on llama channel. “I don’t want to grind”. “I cannot kill at p8, with my (crappy) gear". People don’t even know what is a good and the expansion bring a lot of casuals. If the warlock was hard to level as the other characters (I mean at hell with the immunities), I don’t think the expansion would have been a sucess.

1 Like