Hey all - Apologies for the silence on the PTR front. But wanted to provide a few updates here.
The team was spending the last week going through the survey information and community reports from PTR. There may be another iteration of PTR as the team wants to implement some items based off of the feedback but that is still being determined. We are running up against some scheduling timelines and want to make sure we can get 2.5 out the door sooner rather than later and get Season 2 kicked off for ladder. Extending PTR to continue to test and iterate will of course hold those two dates back. We are going to see if we can fit something in the existing timeline for right now, but if we can’t we may use some of the buffer between Patch 2.5 hitting and Season 2 starting to ensure we can get some additional game time from players on some of the Terror Zone items.
Some top level items from the feedback:
Players were noticing some zones were kind of not great for Terror Zones so expect some to be moved out and some others be moved in.
Players found some of the TZ content to be easy but we also can determine what characters played on PTR who offered that specific feedback and we noticed a lot of this came from Hammerdin players. The team has some ideas on this and we will be sharing that soon. I expect it to create a bit of a shift in build/class opportunities for players.
We will have more info on unlock conditions for TZ and how long each zone will be terrorized as well. We appreciate those who offered their thoughts on this.
Lastly, I know there were a lot of voices wanting this in SP. I can say that it is being looked into but for now, I would expect this to be a Ladder S2 feature as we are able to make tweaks to online numbers on the fly while SP has diff values for XP and needs to be tuned differently. The desire is high, but we want to get this nailed down for ladder play first and will move into looking at it for offline afterwards.
Lastly, I wanted to clear up on the S2 timing as there is a bunch of confusion on this and honestly it is 100% understandable why there is confusion. Before S1 began, we had noted that we were aiming to have seasons last 4 months. We are obviously past that timeline and to be 100% honest, we kind of didn’t plan very well on our end for that date. Terror Zones was a cool feature we wanted to nail correctly as it teetered back and forth on the line of “Should we do this or not?” many times throughout development and with that it caused a little bit of a delay on the Season transition. I just wanted to state that and apologize for that murkiness around when that season transition would occur. We are looking at mitigating this issue for future seasons in D2R.
The current order of operation is that we will end PTR here soon and start submission for final builds on 2.5 and get out that to everyone on the live environment. Season 1 to Season 2 will happen fairly immediately. We expect S2 to start a week or two after 2.5 hits so we have a date that everyone is aligned on and knows about. S1 will literally end the second we transition to S2.
For example: Season 1 will go to 4:59:59pm Pacific Time and Season 2 will begin at 5:00:00pm Pacific Time.
As more dates become aligned here in the coming week, we will provide updates to give a better window on 2.5 and S2 for the community.
PTR<feedback<changes<patch2.5<reset, what else do we need? u can always implement changes during the s2… but lets play for time again, the next week after week
i can see the hammerdin mention idea going 3 ways:
a specific hammerdin nerf, which i would greatly enjoy. dont kill it, just knock off a bit of its dmg. bring it from S++ to S. keep it at the same power level its at for p1, but dont make it as good as it is on p8. this would allow for reasonable monster/character buffs without quickly trending into power creep.
RNG monster res in TZ, like every monster gains high res/immunity to one or two specific elements and has none to the rest. this is also interesting. it has its pros and cons. im indifferent to this option really.
rebalance monster res for areas in general? this is a pretty big change, doubt theyd go for it. could be good, or could be a dumpster fire, depends purely on implementation.
Question, I just filled out the survey today, will that still be considered? I’d previously been posting here in the PTR feedback forum because that seemed like the natural place to give feedback, but I’m getting the impression no one at Blizzard actually reads anything we post in the official forums.
Should I just put all my feedback in the surveys instead?
It’s cumbersome to try and keep up with the multiple avenues for news on the game… Twitter, Reddit, the official Diablo II:Resurrected forums… Pez snuck one in the PTR forums and we noticed the Reddit post first…
Challenging content = good and gives people that spend their time MFing for items something to actually do, rather than just spamming spells into the center of the throne room.
D2 has had about 15 years of soloable content. The golden years were during the cow runs era when people grouped and killed cows together (that was within the first 5 years of the game).
Challenging PVM content gives certain classes like Necromancer the spotlight to shine and use hard CC to crowd control the enemies while the Javazon or Sorc blows them away.
In my opinion Terror Zones is bringing the game back to those cow game days, the days that mattered the most.
Just open the website click on forum and once there on the top right there is a “Blizz tracker” option which shows you the latest/all blizzard replies…
Why not just give us Season 2 without Terror Zones. We have been doing this for YEARS. This gives you 4 months to perfect Zones. Let the Ladder items roll over, give us players that like a fresh start a new start. Take another season to get the Terror Zone area/items figured out then go. Instead we have no reason to continue playing because the season is old and stale.
Amazing… ONE SECOND… The ladder transitions for the original game would usually take at least an hour, sometimes a bit longer… Sometimes with hiccups…
I guess that’s the difference between a 1999 Compaq Presario Frankenbuild server versus modern state of the art server hardware, eh?
Terror zones are irrelevant for ~99% of the players. Before level 94, terror zones provide no benefit, as players still get full experience from level 88 monsters. In the current ladder around 4,000 out of 4,000,000 players are above level 97. Meaning that the rest 3,996,000 players are 96 or below. Seeing as 99.9% of players are below 97, it is reasonable to assume that ~99% would be below 94.
No, you shouldn’t have. You wasted your time. People have been telling you over and over and over what the game needs and instead of listening to your base, you invested your resources into a feature that only benefits some streamer who lost the race to 99 and started making excuses.
One more time - look at PD2. It’s made by devs who actually play the game and know what it needs. D2R is lagging horribly behind what 5 passionate people have done in their spare time and it’s beyond embarrassing.
Adding the QoL features that players were indeed asking for would have cost far lower in terms of effort and would have had a far greater impact:
stackable runes and gems
charm inventory
more stash space
and all the other features and balance changes that have already been proven to benefit the game by the PD2 devs
Every class in the game, whether it works for their build or not, can eventually obtain and use enigma to increase their farm/content speeds. And allow them to be “meta-enabled” (picked/played by average joes, whether faster or slower, at least chosen)
Now consider that within the druid class, a subset called shifters (both bear/wolf) is completely unable to utilize enigma. Dbrunski is one of the few that occasionally play this class despite it’s never-meta-ness via mobility issues, and can/has spoken to this issue. Allowing wolf/bear to teleport in form and potentially even cast CTA would be very positive for D2R as a whole, which he has asked/hoped for on youtube/stream. In ladder shifters are being told to leave group and get on another class because of just how ineffective and left behind they are. So much pain/sadness :(***. These QoL issues would potentially generate interest in playing a dead class and allow less “hammerdin/FoHdin” only metas. As long as it’s somehow not allowed in pvp/while flagged there is no logical reason for the community to dislike this change. Mainly because the shifter class still melee, and will still be D tier at farming even after such a change. It would just allow them to enter the room so to speak.
Nothing is more important to few who choose to be shifter despite the cards stacked against us vs. the other meta picks. Please please please make this change…
Free the shifter!
(edit: The lack of teleport use in form even means being unable to reset position of mercenary during battle etc, it runs deeper than just mobility failed class issues in D2R)
Players at level 83 will get the equivalent experience from a Terror Zone if the same area was a fixed level 85 zone. Regular monsters would be mlvl=clvl83+2, Champions would be mlvl=clvl83+4, uniques would be mlvl=clvl83+5.
Clvl 84 and up, you start gaining more from Terror Zones, again, compared to if the same area was a fixed level 85 area.
Players found some of the TZ content to be easy but we also can determine what characters played on PTR who offered that specific feedback and we noticed a lot of this came from Hammerdin players. The team has some ideas on this and we will be sharing that soon. I expect it to create a bit of a shift in build/class opportunities for players.
Please blizzard… don’t do anything… please don’t spoil the game anymore…
Your balancing is worst of the worst.
Stop please.
Pez snuck one in the PTR forums and we noticed the Reddit post first…