Fortunately for me, I mainly play for season journey completion, so this will be a good test to see what a default completion will be, with no gimmicks.
I’m at the point the end game is boring, so it’s time to step into something new. I’ve already gone for the fast season starts, high placements on the leaderboards, so now it’s time for the season journey rush, which I’ve never really done before.
I want to know more about defensive legendaries and how they’d work. Would I be able to use like stone gauntlets, ice climbers, Aquila’s, etc in order to forgo the do not die token and actually use a different token. Honestly if you can’t gear the follower to survive high GR’s without the same token then this is a worse update than it seems on the surface.
However if you can gear them up tanks then we get more options with the other tokens which is cool I guess.
We’ll see, but I think if they’re inheriting stats only they might have wanted to be clear about that. I’ll likely read the notes again, but I dont recall that detail being present.
If fully implemented, this could have been quite a bit of work - perhaps explaining why it’s such a dominant component of the patch.
Follower full outfit.
FoT Emnanate:
Why do you think so many players keep playing PoE? New content gives people a reason to play. Same for WoW. I hope they do the same in D4 bringing continual new content to the game.
I’m not a fan for this update since I don’t think D3 is intended for solo play, but rather group play. Some people will like this update and as I stated previously to my buddy Genetix, I am going to sit out this upcoming season completely.
March 12th is a new season of Project D2 which should last, hopefully, to when D2:R will come out or Alpha/Beta testing. Now, if they added the content from these mods onto D2:R that would be really cool.
It will make solo farming a more efficient for people who play mostly solo, so they have that going for them.
I didn’t read 100% of the commentary in the GD thread (linked below) that’s got quite a lot of attention, but I did skip through most of what MissCheetah put up and some surrounding.
The gist of it basically seems to be some players that have waited along time are getting something nice and it’s not quite so cool for those who are doing so over in GD to be ranting/declaring Game Over/etc. because there isn’t something specific for groups.
I think the demographics would be quite interesting if we had better visiibility of the actual numbers or percentages
Different people will toss around different percentages, but perhaps we’re not sure where the numbers come from so could be arguable.
I wonder if it would be fair to say a very significant portion of the group players also enjoy pushing the solo leaderboards.
Rhykker’s pretty upbeat about the season and expresses in the latest patch note review those pushing the very top of the leaderboards are probably representing just 1% of the player base.
Reviewing some of the support for MissCheetah’s comments, shows there’s a LOT of support among active forum players for giving all players a fair go too.
It’s an individual call for each person of course, but it does seem there’s quite a bit of optimism out there.
Season 23 = Nothing for Group Players. Are you Crazy
Bumped into the link today… I agree… it seems pretty likely that’s what he was referring to.
I mean if anything I’m excited if this is a trend of things to come, so even if this next season is kinda meh. It implicates that mabye, just MABYE some big changes are underway this year. Love it or hate it this update is no small change.
Watching wudijo ptr test the new follower system.
And in his words its ‘dog s**t’.
No items work, cool down doesn’t work, no additional damage. I know it’s ptr but this overhaul needs overhauling.
His review was reasonably optimistic…
“overall it has pretty cool stuff”
“massively buffed, so they are insane now”
In the streamed PTR test part I saw one 2 piece worked, but 3 piece didnt… on another 3 piece worked and 2 piece didnt… ice climbers worked… aquilla didnt. A lot not working.
When I was watching, nothing equppied made any difference to gameplay apart from fot/nems.
No damage increase for follower or main, no cool down for follower or main. There’s nothing in this revamp that’s going to be game changing.
The inclusion of fot/nems is helpful but not amazing.
Unless there’s major changes, s23 will be over within a week!
Yea Its not making a lot of sense with it as it stands hitting PTR.
Some items working, some not… some set bonuses working while others not in the same set.
There’s either some explanations or some changes due or both. Looks like they rushed it into PTR… not sure why they’d do that or if it’s typical for substantial changes.
He looked tired with the sun soon to come up at the part I caught.
Even with some gear working, it’s overall effect was not better than the normal follower system. There is no benefit from any item apart from emanate items.
Adding items to the new follower that’s not emanate, must surely either:
A. Increase damage of follower to kill enemies, which it doesnt
B. Apply cool down to enable faster casting of new skills, cool down has no effect.
C. Apply damage mitigation to main char, no additional mitigation applied.
The 4th cube slot achieved all of the above in one way or another.
Inclined to wait for some more clarity around this.
I’m not seeing it working as intended atm when theres no apparent pattern or explanation for why
Haven’t seen all of his results yet. He also looked pretty tired by 5am.
Not feeling a rush to draw conclusions on where it all lands. Feels pretty early still.
Yeah I played PTR and note no damage buff for Followers thus its like us wearing items with no set bonus or Legacy of Dreams and you will be lucky to clear T1.
Basically they have added Nems and FoT to everyone.
Very uninspiring.
Survivability wasn’t there either for high GR without the relic.
Pretty big disconnect between expectations and reality at the moment.
I’m still soaking in the concern about SSF and the apparent “Theme”…that be Followersgetting access to gear…but as one who has been playing solo mainly due to almost all my friends leaving to other games…I welcome this with open arms.
…BUT…I do agree with those on the Group Play side…yea, not a lot there but on the flip side; there’s actually LIVE Players in the group and not some “Bullet Sponge-hardly-do-anything-signifacant-AI-Follower” that is about to give Solo Players something to use and do…
…frankly…I think in group Play, maybe allowing say, One Follower in the mix would be nice and fun…one from player or maybe one from a pre-built selection…just throwing stuff out there…
…oh Homer…I’m …“Older”…does that count… 
Lol you must be “older” if you are not revealing!
Make no mistake the current PTR iteration of the new Followers setup does very little for Solo play bar add Nems and FoT which group play have anyway on their supports.
The Follower does zero damage as that is not changed, cooldown is not working correctly and the Emanate system works for stuff not in the list and doesn’t work for stuff in the list.
Even if that is fixed it really is just Nems and FoT so the change could have been “everyone gets Nems and FoT”…the other stuff like free cheat death etc is decent but again really doesn’t impact on group play who get damage mitigation via support builds anyway.
I really think the devs had a great idea but lack the resource to implement it correctly…it needs further iteration.
Whilst it benefits solo its nowhere near a big benefit compared to the benefit of group play where you get damage mitigation, Fot and Nems, Paragon and ranking of LG’s.
Well that just su*ks…be like getting a nice fancy awesome paint job on your car but the engine and transmission is broken and hardly runs…
Well…in terms of…Age…lets say I played and used…
Commodore 64/128, 486DX, Pentimum II, Nintendo 8, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, PS One, PS 2, XBox, Xbox 360…and currently PS4…and Gaming PC from Cyberpower with Intel 5
…and best and fun times was with Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Areana on a 56K modem…
Yup I’m a C64 man…over 1,000 games…my fav ever gaming device!
Was a early PC man too with Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament being my fav’s too over the old 56k modem…they were epic games in an age where I was at uni doing that instead of studying…
I’m really curious to see what’s next from Blizz on all this. (see further above)
The feedback’s sure to keep rolling in following high visibility expectations.