I have been playing ptr since it opened. I am playing T16 and level 90 GR. I have bought 50+ packages from demon. Still have not seen an ethreal item. What gives?
Wow, this is the most entitled arrogant post I’ve seen in a video game forum. Good for you spending hours and hours grinding the same build for 4 months.
For the record I didn’t intend for you to just build around the very first Ethereal you get. If you get a build together that can speed gr 90s in a few minutes you will get the afix you are looking for fairly quickly. From what I’ve gathered in the PTR one should drop about every 3 rifts.
As for this, my intention was more like if you don’t like the rain, just wait a bit and the sun will come out. You seem very salty over what you perceive as a crappy seasonal theme. I myself am going to play in the rain because you never know you’ll get the chance again.
My dude, you gotta start a seasonal character in the ptr
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Did you make a seasonal character?
After playing on the PTR for several hours today I feel that the Ethernals are a great addition to this season. However, I feel that the one handed Ethereals should count toward any two piece set bonus that class could normally wear. IE The Bulkathos or Istvan sets for barb. The damage increase gained from the Ethereal is great however I feel like I lost far to much toughness on ww and feel even with optimization would actually stuggle to clear the same level of content as I would with a “normal”. I feel the goal of this seasonal theme is to empower the players by using diablo 2 inspired weapons and the builds that rely on weapon 2sets seems to be hindered more than helped. (I cannot speak for the balance of the other build as I mostly main barbarian)
If you go to the barb forum, I think the math is that equipping the 2 handed ethereal will be more powerful for ww/rend than the current setup.
See:
Ethereal weapon setups for Barbs: preliminary analysis - Barbarian - Diablo 3 Forums (blizzard.com)
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PTR leaderboard (overall and Wastes) certainly has a lot of 2-handed Ethereals with Ambo’s power on them, for sure. There’s also a smattering of H90/Frenzy with 2-handers too.
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How powerful is the +1 to max dmg till 800 paragon?
Mirco I understand the they are going to be “More” powerful but I feel like the will be glass cannons as a trade off. Istvans gives a fair amount of toughness. Ill look over the math though thanks!~
I agree seeing as Ethereals are season only and will poof out of existence at end of season they should just roll max stats for all of their stats.
o_0
As for a seasonal feature it’s even more terrible than I thought…
Well, this is my opinion, whatever. No problem to just skip the season.
Impressive. Who’s the other one?
JoyFactory. I actually don’t think he’s done 100% yet this season, but I’m assuming he will.
He actually did 100% achievements in season 1 too, so he’s got me beat there. That took 10k bounties, I wasn’t motivated enough for that. There were only 12 in NA who who were. From season 3 on, they went to the current system with a much shorter list of season achievements. There were a few others who had a 100% streak going from season 3 onwards, but they’ve slowly dropped off, missed a season somewhere etc.
JoyFactory is a pretty big loner, probably not widely known outside of the achievement hunters community. He and I used to team up for achievements/conquests sometimes, particularly Sprinter. After a while, it got too easy in a group and he and I both worked separately on soloing it. I haven’t heard much from him since then. Especially since they added the appear offline feature. I know he still plays and goes for achievements since I see him on the board, but I haven’t seen him appear online in quite some time.
I think he likes to keep to himself and solo everything, and once he was able to solo Sprinter and then they added the appear offline feature he sort of quietly slunk away and did his own thing.
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I definitely don’t know anybody like that…
Thanks for the personal history lesson, always interesting to hear these sorts of stories. And sorry to hear that the low Ethereal drop odds are going to put a damper on your quest for this coming season. Hopefully they’ll make some adjustments before the patch goes live.
That was a bit of a reactionary take from right after the initial announcement. After seeing how it is on PTR, it may not be as bad as I originally thought. Based on what I saw on PTR, it should be possible in a reasonable amount of playtime doing speed 90s and 100s.
I’m not going to have a ton of playtime this season, but I can probably scrape together enough playtime to get it done. I’ll probably play a couple weeks, see how it’s going, and decide if I want to continue to get the entire collection.
I think Meteorblade mentioned something in a recent post about using low level characters to obtain Ethereals at a higher-than-expected rate, not sure how fully that’s been explored, or whether it’s a bug.
The idea is that the item pool is way smaller, but the Ethereals are still in it. I got a couple while levelling on PTR, first one was at level 15. It might also be at a higher base rate? It felt like a higher proportion of my sub-70 legendaries were ethereal compared to once I hit 70. That was a sample size of a whopping 2 though, so shrug
The problem is your total legendary drops sub-70 are heavily inflated by the PTR rare drop buff. Hard to tell how efficient it will be on live.
I think the best baseline for what it will be like on live is how many drop in GR90+, since those aren’t as heavily affected by the rare drop buff (unless I’m missing something about the rare mechanics). You can’t get more than 12 drops from a GR. GR90+ always drops 12 items, not all as legendaries. With live drop rates, you maybe average 10 as legendaries per GR90. The average pushes up a bit closer to 12 as you increase above GR90.
The drop rate on PTR means that all 12 of those items always drop as legendaries, but you’re still limited by that 12 item cap. So we’re talking 12 legendaries per GR90 on average on PTR vs. 10 legendaries per GR90 on average on live.
But then outside GRs in T16 or levelling you’re getting 20x the number of legendaries. The PTR buff disproportionately affects the drop rate while levelling and in T16 compared to GR drops, where in GR90+ most of the items drop as legendary anyway and there’s a 12 item cap.
So it might be possible to farm them sub-70, it’s hard to tell with the PTR buff how efficient that will be compared to just slamming GR90s as fast as humanly possible. We might have to wait until the season goes live to see how it all shakes out.
PTR feed back section is a mess…so I write my feedback here.
Necro MoBC BS:
As I said before, no reason to play set while LoD version is stronger. We are back with necro perform without sets.
Pros LoD: 3rd ring/amulet free slot. 9750% dmg over 6000%, more toughness and more elemental dmg.
Cons LoD: simulacron only with 1 rune, so they can die, no more reservoir rune (so Prides Fall in cube needed) and only 1 curse is applied.
After all with necro ethereals, LoD will be same strong as MoBC this season, maybe a bit stronger.
Crusader Ethereals:
AoV needs Norvalds in speeds. I tried gr90 speeds with gg Ethereal (FotH build) it was +40s/gr, so Norvalds overperform in speed, which is ok (set is +400% afterall).
But in push and as a RGK ethereals win.
As a RGK with Shield of fury 300% +Asteron (Furnance +50% to elites) with higher dmg numbers on weapon + 100% to skill + 100crit dmg can be even stronger rgk as unnerfed version in s23.
My proposal is to change 1 ethereal to thorns weapon (if not crus, than who?).
WD ethereals:
+40% ms after health globe pick is sweet, but they didnt hit wd problem. WD SB speed build (keys/gr90) is fast as GoD or FotH, but he needs to execute elites, which slow him down + in group you are fast while you have mobs (cd reset pasive) and elites (In-geom) near to you, if not slow as snail.
My 5 cents to class I didnt tested:
DH: needs Dagger to use Shadow set. For Multi shot build need rcr instead of cc and Discipline. There is no reason to have strength on DH. Argument which says it was in d2 doesnt make sense, bcs this is d3, complete different game. This stat doesnt makes sense here.
Necro: every weapon has cool efect which boost different builds. Why other classes dont have 3 good weapons?
Low drop seasonal only items with RNG legendary and passives which you cannot craft, reforge, or reroll, further reducing the chance of getting a truly useful item? That just adds up to more grinding even than a typical season. Pass. First season I’m skipping since I started playing in S19.
These are what I want, it is a win for me, might play a full month now!