Blog post thoughts

I know this’ll probably die here but I felt the need to chime in regarding a few things.

1st, anyone else surprised at the 5k paragon mark? As some that typically only plays season content it seems super high but maybe it’s just my seasonal mentality.

2nd I’d like to see two significant set changes
A. 8 set pc for each set with no change to bonuses. This is mainly to allow for more gear diversity so I’m not pidgeon holed into using specific pieces.

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B. More 2-4 pc sets ( like Capt. Crimson or Krelms) that grant non-class specific bonuses to play around with. Not sure what sort of bonuses I’d like to see but definitely something that changes how the class is played without just adding more straight damage. Maybe something like grants slow spheres or adds element to skills. I’m sure yous guys have better suggestions but you get the idea.

Thoughts?

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Hello there!

  1. Just wanted to make sure it was known that the 5K Paragon statement is targeting Non-Season. Seasonal play is far less than 5K for the majority of players.

  2. I can say that we’re not currently working on adding additional set pieces to current gear.

Thanks for reaching out and we appreciate any feedback

Thanks Matthew and the Diablo team for their blog post.

From the Blog post it was written:
" Assuming a player is at 5000 Paragon, here’s where all the classes landed, on average , a few weeks into Patch 2.6.7 for non-Seasonal play , aggregated across player leaderboard data world-wide:"

I am still rather confused about how the table was made, especially since it seems odd to me that barbarians and witch doctor both were GR 130 at 5K paragon…

I had downloaded from Blizzard’s API the era 12 leaderboard data on January 3. Below are the average GR clears per class for players with between 4.5K and 5.5K paragon.

Class Barb Crusader DH Monk Necro WD Wizard
Average GR for 4.5K-5.5K Player (Era America Region) 123.9 127.5 118.8 121.6 108.5 115.1 120.2

Certainly, this is just the America region and not worldwide; however, a few things become evident.

  1. The clears reported in the balance blog post are much higher.
  2. Witch doctors and barbarians are dissimilar in power in the above calculation and by a separate GR efficiency calculation. In the blog post table, both are GR 130 at 5K paragon.
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You mention, “focus on making the current game the best, and most varied, experience it can possibly be.”

I’m one who appreciates that approach. Is it in the cards to fix some of the issues regarding crusader shield bash?

That’s a bit disappointing to hear honestly.

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There’s a few points of error for your math, MicroRNA. I’ll try my best to explain, but I’m afraid I can’t give you a full step-by-step of the formula.

We started with a list of records generated, by region, for each class. These spanned a variety of criteria. I can’t speak to the specifics, as I didn’t generate the original list myself. Only select teams at Blizzard have direct access to certain data, and I’m afraid those are not my secrets to share.

From the provided data, we adjusted the estimated actual Greater Rift level performance by either subtracting or adding to it accordingly based off of either lowering their Paragon level to 5000 or raising it (in the case of Seasonal players). Finally, we averaged each final entry across all regions to get a global number.

With your math, (1) you’re taking an aggregated snapshot far later in the Era than when we took ours (our data was from roughly early December), and (2) you only have a small slice of overall player data. You’re also (3) excluding players who aren’t within your chosen range, as well as (4) from other regions, rather than accounting for them by adjusting their performance numbers to fit that range. This is important to account for many factors, including a wide variety of skill, build differentiation, and other balance considerations like augment levels.

Those levels of averaging are incredibly important, because otherwise your data is skewed to a particular type of player. Our goal is to make sure our balance changes appeal and benefit broadly, and not to any one particular camp.

Data can be very easily manipulated to prove one thing or another by changing only one or two factors. This is part of the reason that raw Leaderboard data is often very misleading and shouldn’t be taken in a vacuum. It’s easy to say one class is over-performing and supply information by excluding any number of details to prove it. Any data analyst will tell you that taking as much data as possible is the best way to get the closest absolute “truth,” and the Leaderboards really don’t provide enough on their own to give the full picture since they only ever represent the highest level of play. Imposing too many filters will always produce a biased result, and so must be used judiciously.

The table I provided in that blog isn’t the only one we looked at, or will look at. It’s meant as an illustrative example, not a representation of cold, hard truth.

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Summed up perfectly I think.
Thanks Nev

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Thank you for your feedback and, frankly, for shutting down the nonsense. There have been many of us saying similar things for months, but sometimes it has to come from an official source to really impact.

Thank you also for your participation here on the forums and, of course, your connection with the community.

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Thanks Nevalistis. The numbers just seem very odd to me. I can see that barbs would be similar to wizards; however, the similarity to witch doctors in terms of power is surprising.

EDIT: The numbers presented can not be right. Specifically look at the projected performance of 5K paragon players in seasons versus non-seasons. This season the buff was very powerful, yet you have witch doctors losing 10 GRs in their ability to solo clear GRs in seasons (120) in comparison to non-season (130).

In addition to the American region data that included several metrics including GR efficiency, I also looked at the worldwide data for top 200 clears (US/EU/AS/China combined). I posted this awhile ago on the forum.

As I noted, the data analyzed has several limitations and I fully appreciate it.

Irrespective of the metric (region/worldwide, top clears, stratified by paragon), I have never seen that Barbs and WDs are roughly equivalent in terms of solo power in era 12.

My suspicion is that the difference in my analysis and the blog post must relate to the 'list of records generated by region" and/or how the data was scaled. Of course, this assume that some trivial error was not made in the data analysis. I guess this will be one of those things that are behind a curtain of proprietary information.

I do a lot of data analytics/statistics in real-life on large datasets and I can’t reconcile Blizzard’s and my numbers. Usually, distinct analytic methodologies even with marginal changes give similar results with recognition that they won’t be identical.

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I’ll give you this…WD being at the same level as barb doesn’t seem right at all. Certainly from game play, my experience with WD, is that it’s not in the barb range. Would have been nice to see the step by step.

Their game, their data, guess they’ll do whatever they do…

Certainly hope WD still gets some buffs, along with DH. Necromancer needs a complete overhaul badly.

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At GR 129-131, the GR efficiency calculation for the America region has barbs ahead by 11% over WD. This data does not a have ton of data points and is the America region only (n=75 for barbs and n= 6 for witch doctors at that time). As you noted, the gap becomes more pronounced the further left you go (i.e. to lower GRs).

Oh man, I’m laughing so much here :rofl::rofl::rofl:
Thank you, Nev, for shutting that troll down. He’s been always harrashing us with his “table” since the Barb WW revamp and refuse to acknowledge any valid point of argument. And now since you’ve told him some of his mistakes I hope he’ll cease to spread false data analysist from now on.

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Permanently bookmarking this on my iPad

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I agree that data can easily be manipulated. That is why I provide the source of the data, when the data was accessed, and how the data was analyzed. I also give limitations of the dataset. I agree that the more information one has the better the analysis. Blizzard’s analysis reached the conclusion that barbs were roughly equivalent to WD and wizards. I can not check their methodology.

You can check my work since I use accessible information and explained precisely what I did.

The analysis is imperfect as is the dataset. I even say so. It provides a picture on the data available that can be obtained in a feasible amount of time.

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Thanks for that Matthew. In a 30 day month, that is 166.666 paragons per day. While it is feasible to get over 1,000 in a single day, the first 1,000 i.e, because the experience required for each paragon exponentially increases, 5000 in one month leans towards either botting or no sleeping for 30 days. The natural response would be that it is not close to average unless you are only gauging it on people that have no life or no job and can play it all day in seasonal - But thankfully, you clarified it.

WIth the current season buff you can play 150s all day on a 10min average, it’s not too difficiult to get to 4-5k paragon even as somebody who has a job. But obviously the majority of people complaining here in the forums have never played 150s so they don’t even know what they are talking about…

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Why did you choose to post data from early December almost 2 months later? New builds take some time to be fully figured out. I am sure that right now Barbs are ahead of your 130 GR average.

Why not share newer data?

Only Blizzard have all the data. Community asked for better API support (so we can use data about augment levels for example) many times and was ignored as many times. It would be nice if your community could confirm your results.

Give us set specific leaderboards for all classes and we will give you more data for each set because people tend to use builds they can compete with. I don’t see reason to augment some sets now but I would if I could compete with them.

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In 30 days. solo? 10 minutes per day in 30 days by yourself solo you can reach 150 and 5K paragons with a full-time job without piggy-backing on others to progress?
Please tell everyone how you did that solo. I am happy to learn and I know other’s would too.

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This right here, is going to get quoted…a lot.

Granted, it’s already been said…a lot.

But to see it from a blue, you can pretty much shut the forums down now, as I doubt there will ever be a greater sentence posted.

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If assumed average GR clear @ 5K Paragons is 130 we should be able to observe that in practice.

If assumption is correct in practice clears from guys with ~5K Paragons should follow Gaussian distribution with most data points at or close to 130.

If practice shows something different, and I think it does for WD in particular that means assumption was wrong.

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