Some of the things I am going to say are going to sound like a rant, but I’d like you to think of it as things being said in a very harsh way on purpose, to get the point across. I’d still like to keep this constructive if possible, but I will be attacking the things, and possibly even the people who deserve it here.
So the actual point of THIS PTR was supposed to be to alleviate the problems of log ins and queues when high volumes of people are playing. The irony of that is, most people couldn’t get onto their characters. The other purpose was to see the balance changes.
I was fortunate enough however, to get on. The first thing I did, was run to my main - A Bowzon, only to be lead to quite possibly, the most concerningly horrible PTR / Beta test of my life.
It immediately became PAINFULLY clear, that whomever they have working on balance, has absolutely NO idea how to build this class whatsoever, and probably doesn’t even play the game. They gave you a merc with a piece of armor that spells no runeword at all (and even if it did, it’s not even a runeword that helps you), a bunch of skillers for bow/crossbow, and locked in 20 points into both Multishot & Freezing arrow. There is not a soul alive that knows how to play this character, that would build this way, even for a freezing arrow zon. A highlords? On a bowa that does all cold damage? Help us…
After how horrible this was set up, I immediately lost faith in even caring about whatever the changes are going to be, because it’s clear the team working on them is just throwing darts at random stuff on a wall and running with it, and I logged off.
I guess that’s why we have PTR’s though. Feedback!
So here’s my advice. Whomever you have working on balance in the future, please make sure those people are not only advocates of the class, but clearly one of the top contenders of that class. People that have explored all options and understand how gear synergizes, and also does NOT synergize. For example, Crit doesn’t help cold damage, so using a highlords is 100% pointless, not to mention, crit from highlords also doesn’t stack w/ critical strike, so the crit provided by highlords, only applies to an average of 34% of attacks, because an average of 66% of your attacks are already crits from critical strike talent. That means, highlords is only actually giving you 20% of 34%, which is about 7% realized more crit. Only the uneducated use highlords on bowas. It’s a waste of either FRW you could have from cats, or amp from atmas.
2nd, you dropped a bowa in with 20 hard points of Multishot in. Okay, there’s the first mistake…20 hard points of ms would never ever happen because at 24 total points, putting MORE points into the ability actually makes it WEAKER ( only ability that does that ), but if you had someone running that, and that person looked at the damage, and with ALL the unique gear that model has on, the character does EIGHT HUNDRED damage…you STILL didn’t identify the problem? That person should be FIRED. That’s not a gamer. You were duped.
It is pointless to test feature changes when your team builds the character out completely incorrectly for the test environment. It tells us very little, if anything at all about what the changes you made actually do to the real world characters your playerbase will create.
Also, when you roll out a new patch PTR in anticipation to TEST the stress of game saving, and queues, it is questionable at best that the problem is worse than on live realms, after this supposed patch is supposed to be the solution that took 3 months to conjure.
Another note - your queues are still broken.
I am logging in with 7 computers. Computers 1-5 got right in. Computer 6 is in a 142 person queue. Computer 7 got right in, after computer 6 was placed into a queue. This means your queues are artificial, and aren’t actually functioning as queues.
Next time, simply do what you do with world of warcraft classic releases, and allow people to copy over their existing live characters to the PTR’s. This gives everyone their build, so they can EASILY realize how your proposed changes are going to mess with the game most people already asked you not to screw with in the first place.
I have never in my life, done a PTR / BETA, and afterwards, been SO concerned about what I see, that I run to my computer folders, and back up my current live version, just so that in my anticipation of you guys screwing this up, I can revert back to the old version and play offline…that’s sad.
LlamaSC barely even knows what he’s doing on a bowa, but even he would tell you this was just wrong, if you weren’t sponsoring him and he wasn’t afraid to lose that reputation with you.
As another note, when you create a PTR, you’re not supposed to take the server resources away from your LIVE game that people PAID FOR…what in the world did your psychiatrists prescribe you guys? As I’m typing, the server status of live has changed. Nobody can log into the live game now because you jammed all your server resources into the PTR. You’re supposed to create ADDITIONAL servers so as not to disrupt your paying CUSTOMERS!!!
What this also means is, we should expect queues of 300+, because that’s what one of my machines is sitting in now…not to mention every time the queue finishes it just tells me “failed to connect to server”.
I sincerely hope we’re nowhere close to ladder after seeing this. This is nothing short of a catastrophic disaster. I couldn’t even bare opening the other characters. After knowing how out of touch your development team is with the environments they’re working on, I don’t even want to know.
And now we can’t play our regular characters unless we’re already logged in. You have managed to suck in 2 completely different d2r environments in a single night. That’s a new record. Don’t take this as a personal attack. I’m hoping you see this, and use my harsh criticism as inspiration to stop making the same sucky, stupid, horribly planned out, botched mistakes over and over again in the future. This has beyond gotten old at this point.