Overall thoughts about patch 2.5 with some realistic solutions

PTR Feedback
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At start I’d like to ask you for not judging my English skills. This is not my native language and I’m trying to provide feedback the best way I can. I didn’t mean to make anyone feel bad or anything. Before we get to details I want to say that I appreciate the fact that devs have new idea and that they work on bug fixes. I have some "but"s.

Really guys for all who like terror zones PLEASE go learn about how loot is working in this game. This patch will ruin PvM. They can’t make enemies higher than ilvl89. Why? Certain mods require specific ilvls (item lvls). Like +41-45life on grand charm or +2 to all skills for class. Not to mention that treasure class is also scaling with game creators character level. But let’s go one by one:
Magic items - in order to get desired item level on magic item you need to get it from monster of that level or gamble for it using character at lvl +/-5 off desired lvl (or to be precise item will be in <-4;+5> range from gamblers level). This is why everyone who wanted to spend in game gold on gambling was leveling his/her character to 95. Why is that? At this level you could get any item property that exists in game. Lets say circlet could roll +2 to sorc skills. In 2.5 everything on buffed areas any monster will be dropping such helmets.
What about charms? any grand charm will be good to get +1 to skill and 45life. You might say that it’s a good change. NO it’s not. Until now in order to get nice skiller with high health roll you needed to get grand charm that dropped from Diablo (ilvl94), Nihlathak (ilvl95) or Baal (ilvl99) and use cube recipe (magic item + 3 perfect gems) and “roll” it again. In 2.5 you won’t ever need to do this, every charm will be able to give such result. Just identify every charm you find and you’ll get there.
So we have no reason to gamble or collect gems. That means that new players just lost the easiest source of mid runes. You will have to find another way. But you might say:
“I can get any item now, I will sell unique items and get runes”
Are you? You are competing if 100s of thousands bots running 24/7. No you won’t get wealth trading items. But now you’re saying to yourself - “this guy is a moron, it won’t be like that.” Well ok, I can bet with you that I’m right ^^ we’ve seen it on ladder 1 SC on D2R, in Wow, in Lost Ac aaaand pretty much any other game where Devs didn’t fight botters.
Please blizzard at least try to do ban waves more frequently. It’s better for everyone. This really is the biggest problem in Diablo 2 (both D2R and Legacy)

What about leveling? Anything above 94 is useless for PvM. 99 was meant to be achievement. You should work for that. This game was not meant to be like Diablo 3 where you farm for few hours and you get all of the items for the build ( yes yes I know, you still need upgrades, augments etc - bulshiet, you only increase GR level and get more paragons. Your setup is not changing any name).

But back to patch 2.5:
Currently on PTR you get ~0.4k exp from white monster, around 8k per elite pack on p1 at lvl 98. Which means that on p8 it will be 2k per regular monster and 42k exp per elite pack.
For 98-99 you need 291mil experience so you would need to kill 145.5k regular monsters.
On cow level you have 350-400 enemies, you can clear p8 cows in 3mins so in worest case scenario you get 14mil per hour and best probably 20mil per hour (including elite packs). It would mean that you can get 98-99 in 15-20 hours.

But let’s compare it with current patch:

  • general tactics for 98-99 is to join baalruns and do Nihlathak Diablo and Baal. That will give you around 140k exp per game. Assuming that you are insanely lucky and your team is a dream, you do 2min per run and you get 4.2mil exp per hour. In this scenario you would need +/- 2000 games → 4000 minutes = 67 hours. Reality is that runs are not as consistent and take 3 mins per game and you need 120-150 hours to get there. No slaves included
  • so called Teo’s strat: you get invited to games where Diablo is already spawned on players 7 difficulty so you only enter chaos sanctuary, kill Diablo and go next game. Every Diablo kill will give you +/- 54k exp. You need approx. 5.4k Diablo kills to get whole 98-99. From what I’ve heared teo did 4 kills per minute by avarage so 216k exp per minute → 13mil/h → 22.4hours for whole level. You only need 5-7 teams of 8 people to pull this off. Total of 40-56 people involved to get one character on leaderboards.
    It only requires 39-55 more people than on public strat to get there.

In my opinion if someone can get that many people involved then he will be able to abuse any leveling system until pX scaling her removed. No metter how we call it, which zones are gonna be good or bad, if you can organize something on that scale you will win.

Summary on loot and exp levels?
This is one big misconception. Patch like this will ruin whole PvM part of Diablo 2. Free levels, free items will make people quit very soon just because they reached their seasonal goals (in most cases get character to high level and high end gear).
I don’t want to be hater here, I like the idea of rotating buffed zones but please don’t go too far.
Solution?

  • cap treasure class scaling (will prevent gg item flood)
  • cap ilvl of monsters at 87/89/90 (i think that it should be 86/88/89 but I get it that we want some buffs to MF)
  • change experience penalties system so we get 15-18 % exp from enemies +/- 12levels from character level. This way at 97-98 we will benefit from killing elites in regular zones and from killing any monsters in terror zones.
    Another solution would be changing flat exp multipliers so we get more exp for kills while keeping boss exp caps at same level. That would also give us option to farm packs/ terror zones instead of grinding 3 mobs.
    I’m fine with buffing exp but making it 10 times faster is a bit too much. If you make it 2x faster than what you get on cbaal leveling it will be just fine.

On top of it this patch buffs S tier builds and nerfs all off meta builds. It’s too early for such patch. There are soooo many changes to be made before that high level monsters would be even remotely close to be balanced. Starting with chance to hit calculation that includes defenders and attackers level.

But OK let’s think about what’s gonna happen if this goes live: we all have 99s, leaderboards is the same (people with communities on top - tactical advantage), we all have high-end items. There is no gambling and no trading (explained above) . So I’m asking you guys: What do you do? I personally quit and wait for next ladder. After a month I have nothing to do in my favorite game and I have to wait 3/4/5 months for next ladder. I wish to all of us so this patch doesn’t go live.

Personally I got 5x 99 in d2r and 8x 99 in LoD. This ladder got #2 HC and I did 1-98 mostly solo. Did I farm bosses only? Ofc not. 1-98 is about killing elite packs. You should really think a bit further than “I want”, “streamer privileges”, etc. It’s not that hard…

Start with learning about game mechanics and try to use your brains. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t need 50 slaves working on your 99, you don’t need to use bots maphacks or multi-box, you don’t need to use jsp to get your items. Just read learn and follow the plan. If you’re gonna spend 50% of your uptime staring at NPCs in town then you will never get high level. If you are dying alot then maybe you should think about the reason why it’s happening and find the solution for it.

You people want everything for nothing. Work for it. Make teams and cooperate. I’m reading this forum for a while now and all I see is that people can’t play together. Crying that someone did something better then 5minutes later they act selfish on public games. Those who achieved good ranks on ladder didn’t play solo, they had teams of friends and what is most important they knew what they were doing. They DID work for it for years, people like Llama are here for many years making content for regular gamers like us. We might disagree them or even dislike them but these are facts. Llama is just an example here.

And BTW do you really think that you will play with others now? Really? Did you think about your SPLIT MF games? Everyone will fight for terror crappy zones and y’all will end up on single player online game trying to sell your craps on flooded market. But hey! I have a news for you! Rune drops are not really affected by those changes. All your griffons, shakos are gonna be worth PUL runes. Why? Because you are outnumbered by bots. They will get 94 on day 1-2 and spam items like there was no tomorrow. You already forgot what happened on day 2-3 on softcore ladder. All prices went to the ground because botters started selling.
Surprise surprise, people went back to non ladder because there was no reason to play ladder.

At the very end here are some changes that I would love to see. Not gonna be original with this part.

  • option to buy stash tabs and/or character slots
  • currency tab
  • more synergies between classes (for example concentration buffing necro’s magic dmg?)
  • add +1 to masteries for Act3 mercenary
  • alow act 5 frenzy mercenary duo wield 2handed swords
  • fix fhr for pvp - here I’m not asking for reversing the change. Just find middle ground :slight_smile:
  • basic loot filter - here I’m talking about filtering potions, gems and gold
  • new ladder rune words (as promised)
  • Please give some love to Classic (pre -expansion) gamers :broken_heart:
  • min/max dmg bug (both of these are assigned wrong if not on weapon)

I’m aware that these are small changes that might cause big server problems. I’ve also watched some interviews where You guys (dev team) explained that it would be too hard for servers at least for now and I understand it xD just wanted to mention those.

Inarius

EDITs:

  • Corrected small mistake in gambling lvls
  • added PvP bugs that need to be fixed

There will be few more updates here. want to showcase some loot chances and put some precise numbers for “Leveling” Part

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100% vouch
mainly part of QOL

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To sum up, your arguments are:

1: Too easy

2: Bots dominate

I’m not sure I agree with #1, but I do agree that bots are bad for the game.

What if the Terror Zones were always random instead of set as always the same for the hour by the server? Would that not make it very difficult for bots to farm the correct terror zone?

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Inarius,

Lots of good things in your post, a tad aggressive here! Also - on forums LESS text can be MORE (as people rarely read a huge post). It seems like your feedback would be along the lines of:

  1. Don’t let TZ’s item level get out of hand to flood the game with the S-tier elite uniques.
    – Seems reasonable. No need for all TZs to always include the best items. Could cap it ilevel 85 (gimme my griffons)

  2. Don’t “completely” ruin the level 99 grind and make it TOO easy.
    – Fair point - We could simply “cap” the uniques in TZs to be level 95, or adjust the exp multiplier. This would for sure greatly slow down the last level or 2. However, I doubt many people will STILL push beyond level 96 ish as there are diminishing returns.

  3. “The END” of ladder meta.
    –I HIGHLY doubt that this will happen. Griffons will still be rare and worth a LOT even if its more common (If it drops from 2x ber to a Lo - that is fine by me). The majority of players are casuals who play probably between 100-300 hours per ladder - its okay if they get better gear by the end of it.

  4. FIX THE GAME OTHER WAYS

  • Yes I agree. TZs could be a lot of fun, but it should ONLY be the tip of the iceberg.
  1. META BUILDS (hammerdin/lightning sorc) will dominate TZs.
    -Yes. This is true and unfortunate unless developers listen to people and make some HARD CODING changes in how the monsters in TZ work. I’d like there to (ideally) be a good TZ farming meta, and a non-tz farming meta for PVM (by adjusting the monster mechanics in TZs).
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I agree to a large degree, especially about the charm re-roll ilevel argument - There will be market oversaturation, no question asked. It’s great for casuals who never sell and who only buy, it’s not good if you want to make some high runes as a casual player rerolling diablo charms.

+1 post.

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I hope Blizzard realizes that the majority of people posting on this forum are not representative of the majority of D2R players. I completely agree with GGM when he said.

In My Opinion you have a very warped Idea of what is casual play, and that seems to be an epidemic across this game. Maybe in your mind you really see that as casual play, but it’s not.

Casual play is a guy who can’t find his first Jah Rune, Casual play is a guy who Dreams about building a Runeword enigma, or infinity.

Casual play is the guy who has sub par equipment, and Definitely can’t do P8 CHAOS SOLO

Once you get an enigma or an infinity, unless you purchased them or it was given to you, you have already left the realm of casual play in Diablo II.

I’m not singling out the OP here, but I will say that the things he’s worried about are non-issues to the vast majority of players. Most of us will never “buy” items which makes bots irrelevant. Most casuals still won’t hit level 99. The only people this really matters to are those who want to race to 99 first and have an army of support people that spoon fed them three NPC’s.

Just like in the real world. The “rich” want to maintain their position.

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Hard to agree with that. Casuals are trading mostly misc using in-game trade system.

If this patch goes live they won’t have that luxury and it will be even harder for them to get that gear.

About rich getting richer i think it’s quite opposite, in my best interest would be so items are cheaper. I never MFed in my carrier and I spent all my pre-D2r time on private servers.

Also to worth mentioning that I’ve started knowing noone and with nothing when D2R came out.now I have 8enigmas, 5infinities, last wish, few perfect annis etc. Haven’t spent any Irl money on in-game goods. All came with efford and KNOWLEDGE. And I’m not writing it to flex or anything like that.
I’ll write it again. In diablo 2 it’s like in real life: you need to work for your items.

You think you can’t do good on battle net? Go YouTube and watch some videos showcasing people turning a bunch of craps into high end rune words. And I’m talking about things like RW packs, low end unique, gems, etc.

By the way if so called casuals won’t get to 99 even with TZ then why ruin the game for nothing?

You clearly skipped 99% of my #1 post here. I put numbers there and show that it affects everyone.

Those who have communities will get fed anyways and TZ change nothing

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I think our definitions of “casual” play is vastly different.

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for me casual player is someone who is playing his own pace, not competing and not looking for profit from gaming

But the fact that you don’t play 10+ hours a day, don’t try to compete, etc doesn’t mean that you can’t trade or learn about the game. Casual does not mean noob.

What I offered in #1 post is much better for casual gamers than what is on PTR now.
if you have different opinion feel free to explain a little bit more than “we have different definition”. I believe that this part of blizzard forum is to find solutions and middle ground with community, together DEVs and us gamers. Pros, newbies, casuals, content creators and everyone else that uses “Play” button in Diablo 2 Resurrected in Battle.net app

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Yep, and also to keep those who are not from becoming rich (monopolize the wealth).

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This is extremely well written from a very respected person in the community.

I agree on almost all points here. 99 should be an achievement, not something accomplished in 2 days from 98-99.

Perhaps the overall time is cut down 10-20% compared to baal runs. But we don’t want it cut down 90%.

What are people going to have to achieve anymore once they hit 99 on all classes?

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How about just testing TZs in next Ladder? If, after 2 Days, each and every 2h per Day Player is lvl99 and decked out with a full Stash of BERs, Blizz could stop Season and start a new one. Would be a fresh economy every 2 Days for you game pros…

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What about testing TZs with right values and let season last 4-6months? :slight_smile:
Meantime focus on banwaves for botters :slight_smile:

Everyone would eventually get levels and gear. All happy ^^

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well done. good summary :sunglasses:

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Agre ding ding ding.

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Dbrunski gets it.

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I watched that few hours ago :stuck_out_tongue:
also interesting approach for sure :stuck_out_tongue: I didn’t write anything about spawn mechanics in terror zones for now. will do on weekend edit.

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Therea are a few different ways to handle the request for flexible Terror Zones. One is to have more than on Terror Zone at a time, which is what Dbrunski suggests/

Another would be to allow the clearing of one Terror Zone to cause a new Terror Zone to spawn in the same game. The first is more direct, but the second method is also providing an option to player who don’t like the current Terror Zone. Instead of the only other option being level 85 areas and Diablo/Baal runs, you could clear the current Terror Zone in the hopes of spawning a new one.

Especially if the trigger for “clearing” the Terror Zone by killing the Boss Monster of the Terror Zone. That way you could always use the option of “sniping” the boss if the Terror Zone is really bad for you.

Dbrunski, mentions the idea of a “Boss Monster” but doesn’t really go into how there are already super uniques in each Terrror Zone that could be used for that purpose. (If properly buffed). Every Terror Zone has at least one super unique, except for Black Marsh, and you can just add Flamespike back into the game in that location since he’s the right monster type already.

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That is not a bad idea but I think that at current state od D2R client it’s not possible. We would need to buff monsters and program conditions for bosses so people who want chaos over and over don’t just pay someone to cycle thru maps on players1 until it’s chaos.

would be better to let players change zones using something like standard of heroes on their game. but for now I’d love to talk about numbers in the patch not overall idea.

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I don’t understand this too easy stuff. It took me about 8 months of almost nonstop grinding to make enigma and that’s just because I got a very lucky run in cows with jah drop and after running LK for hours to get a second sur for my ber. And infinity pfft, only in my dreams. My highest character is 91 summon necro and I grinder the crap out of p8 on console for that. All others are mid 80s before I got bored doing same old thing. I’d love for this fresh content for a chance at 99 and more places to farm. Every time I see fraise “it’s gonna be too easy” I think to myself that’s an elitist or a streamer. Get over yourself. This game is for all that love d2r, not just you and your sub helpers
Enjoy the game how you want to and let me enjoy it how I want to. And no I definitely don’t want it turning into d3 so no need to go there either.

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