Devs went overboard with nerfing the Altar. Fix: instead of going from say 50% dmg inc to 5%, change it to 25%. Right now unlocking the Altar feels like it only meaningfully gives QOL benefits.
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The current state of altar is to mesh with the recycled season themes. For example, the current altar and the Soul Shards theme is creating more power than the altar did on its own in S28.
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It’s not that simple. There is a long road to getting a Soul Shard leveled with the right stats for it to be useful for a given build for a given task: (speed GRs, push, etc) RNG on the upgrades and low drop rate for Hellforge Embers means most players won’t have a suitable Soul Shard for a given build/task for quite some time. Grinding Visions for Embers (6 per hour if that is all you do, 4 if you pickup loot/salvage/etc) isn’t where I want to spend most of my game play time. Also, some popular builds, i.e. GOD 6, can only get minor benefit from Soul Shards. And since you nerfed Marauders, the pet build Soul Shard is worth a bit less than you might think. It’s not like Marauders was overpowered, so not sure why that got nerfed, too.
I’m not saying don’t nerf the altar at all, just don’t nerf it as much as you did.
Bliz can’t make the altar that strong just because some people won’t play the seasons enough to reach ideal Shards. There will be plenty who will achieve good/ideal Shards and they can’t be running around doing the equivalent of GR170-180.
The original Soul Shard season was only 4 months long and a great many players achieved good/perfect Shards (including me on multiple characters). With seasons aiming to be ~3 months long, that’s plenty of time.
Nah it’s not nerfed enough. Altar is meant to be for QoL only. All potion effects should be removed, so as to not disable Shimizu setups 
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Soul shards are really strong.
I mainly play solo, so it means unlocking all GR tiers by myself.
I remember, that by P2200 (last time we had Soul Shard season theme) I had all the legendary gems, including red soul shard leveled to max, by myself.
This season, it should be even easier, probably with another build than I was doing back then.
Also, I hope/believe, with doing a combo of Visions/speed GR’s we should get adequate (not BiS) soul shards by P1500, even when doing SSF. Consider we should have perma pools in S30, so P1500 will not be so time consuming.
Honestly, I probably will not be satisfied by the item quality I will have by P1500 (especially rings/amulets), so this upcoming season will actually be decent in it’s possible upgrades throughout the season cycle anyway.
Was the altar overnerfed though? Well, I would prefer if Movement Speed bonus stayed at 25%, and some 50-5% changes should be more like 50%-15%.
However if they solve any issues that showed up, why we not gonna get Altar in NS (so far), it’s probably right since the QoL nodes mainly stayed.
I still would like to have option to auto pick up materials though (Reusable parts/Arcane Dust/Veiled Crystals). But I guess that one will not show up…
To me Altar has always been the speed and QoL, which is the same thing basically; besides actual movement speed didn’t get changed. This increase in speed is exponential and gets you more power quicker, achieving your goals faster. So in a way that’s the real power creep besides just bigger damage numbers.
That being said, 5% boss damage as one of the final nodes is pretty insulting, if it wasn’t for needing it to unlock potions I’d skip it which should never be the case in those final nodes.
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I wouldn’t call it insulting but if 5% is the final number we get, then it’s pretty much an obsolete node. Had I to decide, I’d say 12.5% sounds about right, that would be Stricken halved.
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12.5-15% would indeed be more reasonable. That node helps only against RGs and bosses so mere 5% is definitely too low.
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Personally I don’t car about those dmg boosts from Altar… all I care about are QoL changes that it gives… that is enough for me to grind it… we were missing those changes for years… there is enough dmg from items, gems, stones and everything else
Agreed. CC Immunity for the int classes, huge pickup radius (and bonus globe during GRs) and bringing back all the auto-pickup and salvaging of pets during visions is going to be awesome. Also since almost all primals are terrible getting the second one brings the chance at the primal drops actually having an upgrade to a more reasonable level.
Easy solution:
Add the altar unnerfed with full benefits to non season, since there is no season theme to compensate for nerfs.
Add the altar nerfed to season since ther3 are season themes to compensate for nerfs.
It is stupid in my opinion to balance builds accordingly to compensate temporary season themes. Balance them without having to focus on season themes. Thank you.