GGM's PTR Feedback

PTR Feedback
1

This has got to be one of the weirdest patches.

First off let’s address the herald changes.

Changing the entire meta of the game just so people can get a Tier 1 & 2 Herald quickly is dumb.

The Tier 3, 4, and 5 Heralds are basically useless now as the best way to farm is just to leave game and get your free T1 and T2 Heralds again.

Instead of increasing the spawn rate of the heralds you just completely broke the meta of the heralds.

The second issue is that they drop way too many items way too fast.

I am already up to around 30+ Rainbow Facets, Soj, Raven, 3x Occy’s, Schafers, Stormlash, Maras, ect, ect

They drop so many good items all the time it’s gonna completely bork the entire economy of the game after like 1 week.

The herald changes effect every player not just warlocks, and if these changes are allowed to go live the game is not going to be better for it. It will be much worse, and boring as people will fully kit out their characters in a few days.

As for the warlock changes.

The Abyss/miasma stuff is clunky and bad to use. The chains won’t cast past targets, you can’t reposition with them without them disappearing because you moved too far away. They don’t work with blade warp, but do work with teleport which is weird.

The delay that was added to the spawn feels awful, the NHD change to the chains feels awful. Even with the best gear the miasma/abyss character feels like a subpar character.

Abyss itself does more damage than all the rest of the abilities in the miasma tree lol.

My final take on the entire miasma tree, is it feels clunky and awkward to use due to a lot of mechanical problems. Even with engima it feels subpar, but without enigma it feels even worse.

Echoing Strike, I think the changes are mostly fine but I would give them back the ability to use ethereal weapon. All the other nerfs can stay as is.

Lethargy, is currently broken doesn’t even work in ptr, but I felt the complete removal of the -physical resistance stat was a bit heavy handed. maybe give it back like 25%.

Taint fix was welcome, looks like its gonna be a fun build but an expensive one end game.

The bind demon changes are fine, except the overall survivability of the demon is just too low. He dies all the time now and you made him extremely hard to bind.

My opinion here is make him hard to bind, or easy to die, but not both.

I have a full 1 hour video going over everything in more detail (Ginger Gaming Mentor) on youtube.

12 Likes
2

if you add the phrase “as it relates to ES” I would agree, but as a pure summoner, its awful.

The ability to apply curse needs to scale with death mark.

5 Likes
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why misquote me, I specifically stated “except the overall survive ability”

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Right now in ptr.. pure summoners are gods… just use tainted..

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No casino would make the jackpot obtainable at Tier 1 and 2 of the bonus.

They need to either make a new jackpot item at Tier 4 and 5 or move the Sunder back and make an incentive for people to want tier 5 of the bonus.

I think a new small charm at Tier 5 could be worthy. It would feel how the Anni did back in LOD 2001-2003 era.

1 Like
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They are, but for all the wrong reasons. Right now, the best summoner/demon build ignores its own level 30 signature spell, Bind Demon, because it is too weak, and instead uses 3x Tainted. It does not sound right. Also, Goatmans could as well be deleted from the talent tree.
I agree that fixing Bound Demon survivability would solve a lot of problems. There is another issue, and that is I only recently noticed that the flat damage bonus from the Bind Demon skill does not apply. I think it might be bugged.

7 Likes
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I’ve seen GGMentor’s videos on the subject and he, as always, makes some very valid points. Few people have his breadth of knowledge and ability to put it so easily in an understandable form, like a relaxed guru.

BUT, I also agreed with some of Sweet Phil’s feedback, and I will mention one part I thought was very apropos as a consideration, not necessarily a counter-point.

It was that increased Worldstone Shards etc dropping, might diminish their trade value a great deal on Ladder, but it allowed FLEXIBILITY to then CHOOSE WHAT TERROR ZONES your BUILD could invest time in, if you have a WEAKNESS. Also, it allowed GAMEPLAY FLEXIBILITY, if you dislike TERROR ZONES, to take on say ACT BOSSES or UNIQUES ETC, and get some chance to have a non-TERROR DROP.

The idea then would be too accommodate the drop rates to match the various flexible methods to the rest of what GGMentor suggests.

It seems that the Devs have not been imaginative enough in customizing the drop rates to the methods of acquiring the various items. Likewise, they have gone from rare, hard to acquire, and one method – to now the complete opposite of common, easy to acquire 2 chances, and multiple methods of acquisition. This change is good for flexibility perhaps, but breaks the whole idea of gear and loot drops being so important in Diablo 2.

I’d suggest viewing the Sweet Phil short (about 16 mins video) posted probably yesterday on YouTube, combined with GGMentors, as a good way to get a feel of what both the expert and the everyday player both feel, and I’m sure together someone like the real GGMentor could come up with some great suggestions.

I mean his various “How I would FIX … Skill ….” videos are examples of GGM’s skill at explaining things and his ingenious ease at seeing the forest from the trees, and still remembering whether it’s a Maple or a Douglas Fir. Amazing stuff. GGM, you are much like my best Physics and Math teachers over the years – incredibly relaxed delivery and breadth of knowledge, yet easy to follow and enjoy. And even in the Live Streams, he’ll like listen to some chat and then you can see him decide to redirect, and his conversational style changes and he just does this incredible redirect with additional considerations, then makes it all come together, even bringing out the audio/visual aids and a bit of humor. GGM is , I dunno, like the best. Kudos for all you do. I found Diablo 2 esoteric and hated it until I saw your vides, now it’s like joining my favorite uncle to hear about the olden times (although I’m older than you, just saying how much I enjoy those videos).

3 Likes
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If the current herald meta goes live the shards will be mostly useless except for the renewed charm recipes and maybe some speed run exp strats.

The Two herald farming is better for exp, loot, and sunders. There isn’t much reason to do much else. Except Keys, and statues.

3 Likes
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GGM, pretty much agree with all your PTR feedback. One area I don’t agree with is the Tainted is absurdly OP. Right now, Tainted melts entire screens and needs to be nerfed hard, their damage is way overtuned.

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My primary vested interest this patch has been in ES, so was also really hesitant to trust the amount of tuning that it received. I agree that the changes overall are mostly fine. You can still make a functional Echoing Strike warlock.

I also agree that the skill shouldn’t break your weapon. If the amount of damage dealt starts turning into a problem, you have avenues other than nuking ethereal weapons (i.e. one-hand damage calculations like Barbarians have for swords, tweaking the weapon damage coefficient, etc).

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The ability to apply curse needs to scale with death mark.

Now that actually is the most reasonable take on the Warlock Nerfs that I have read so far. Imo there is little to no reason to invest in Death Mark and that would make it actually worth while, especially for a dedicated Demon Lock. Even if you get 1% increase to cast a Curse, that would make it 25%, which imo would be huge and you’d have to think about investing points into this skill in order to attain more power, unlike current state of affairs, where everything is a 1 point wonder with maximized profit and little to no thinking, just stacking everything to an insane degree.

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Hey, look at me go.

The demon build has the points for it, otherwise you end up just kind of tossing points into sigils or making a half baked blood boil.

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A thought came across my mind about the shards dropping so often. If they drop too often wouldn’t people just create many public terrorized games and now everyone would get good exp level 99 very quickly?

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It definitely would let people level quickly. Creating more terrorized games also means more Heralds and more loot. Overall, shards are an absolute blessing to anyone grinding levels or hunting for items.

They become a nuisance when they drop faster than you can spend them to create new Terror Zones. Eventually you’ll end up racking up so many shards that the material slot in the stash ends up permanently full, but a game is already terrorized and you just saw another drop as well, so they just end up on the ground.

The drop rate on Live is decent, because you end up seeing a handful of Shard games where everyone pitches in to terrorize the game. The drop rate could be just a smidge higher on the act 2-4 shards, but it doesn’t really need to be super high. With 8 players in a game and 5 acts to Shard, if every player gets 1 shard then you end up with 3 spares at the end of an 8 player shard game. That’s more than enough.

So I think that works out to about 1.3 shards expected per act cleared. That’s pretty much the highest it needs to be.

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And yeah the dropping loot seems cheesy I dunno maybe make it more of grind to get the loot or change to getting exp after killing heralds and the exp scales more exp with higher tier heralds or maybe making it uber style and gotta work to get to them and open a portal to get to them or last maybe even change it to a very very low chance to drop an already renewed sunder I dunno.

16

They need to outright drop the tiered approach altogether for heralds. Why do we have 5 flavors of fear? There are 5 acts and five aspected evils we already had.

I agree that making the first two only spawn quickly is silly and doesn’t help but I also think the tier system itself is broken and doesn’t belong in this game. So many of us have expressed an extreme dissatisfaction with this system, in fact this season I just stopped playing because of how bad it felt.

I would propose they change heralds to be randomly picked from Anguish, Pain, Hate, Terror and Destruction. They would all be roughly equivalent to one another and at a T5ish difficulty, with unique attributes that reflect the Evils they’re Heralding. At the same time, replace the bonus drop of the statues during TZ act bosses with the shards and let them drop normal or TZ. They’d still drop randomly also but then you could target farm specific ones. Sunders would drop in TZ how they used to and the statues would drop from the Heralds specifically. Upgrading a Sunder would require a new item, an Essence of Renewal, which would be used in the cube with the Latent charms to upgrade them. A scroll of town portal + Essence of Renewal would open the portal to Colossal Summit. In this way, the TZs become pick up at any time, leave at any time, no feeling obligated to spend 8 hours in one go, the basic sunders are still available in a reasonable way, and the chase is preserved because upgrading them still requires a lot of effort AND is an opportunity cost vs. getting one of the jewels, which would now also be a harder chase item.

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The amount of gear needed to reach that point is insane, infinity, plague, Full Demon Skillers, Faith Bow, +3 amulet with good mods, +3 Circlet with good mods, +1 boots Enigma, ect ect ect.

Your comparing a 20-50 Jah rune build at end game with all the bells and whistles to what exactly?

The end game version still isn’t faster then a fully decked out Javazon, or a fully decked out hammerdin.

Without infinity, without Plague, without a source of lower res or conviction, it’s no where near as good. And those are expensive end game options..

The 45K per tainted is so far down the line of gear that it’s practically impossible for most people. The highest most people will see is like 25-30k per and they will struggle to get negative resistance

4 Likes
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I agree with the original poster about herald 1 and 2 spawns coming too quickly as well as item drops being too much. I liked that there was a reason to stay in game (to get to the later herald tiers) rather than constantly making new games. The items drops from heralds are also very noticeably increased to the point where it feels rather excessive.

1 Like
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Yeah I tried this with a non-stupid setup and it’s so much slower, it’s still very strong against non fire immunes and they should for sure nerf it but also balance it to work with the player’s -res gear.

By non-stupid I mean not a full inventory of charms and gear that is more attainable. Also it’s interesting that tainted aren’t a fire skill considering they are all fire.