The party requirement for dungeons in Hell difficulties has been removed.
for many players.
New Resource: Telluric Pearls
Telluric Pearls are a new resource that can be used to craft Five-Star Legendary Gems.
There are currently three ways a player can receive Telluric Pearls:
By trading Hilts with Lieutenant Fizriah, the Hilt Vendor in Westmarch.
Through participating in limited-time events.
From purchasing specific in-game shop bundles, such as Seeker’s Supplies and Rift-Runner’s Supplies. The Seeker’s Supplies bundle will now refresh in the shop every Monday and Thursday instead of every three days.
Interesting change but I doubt it will be that easy and cheap.
Apparently, there are huge differences between EN and China updates for this patch…
In China patch note:
Shadows now get a chance to receive mystery equipment when blessing others during Assembly, which can be legendary (CN Patch Notes)
BG AFK Timer: Battlegrounds will have a AFK timer to punish AFK’ers by withholding rewards and putting a cooldown on them from being able to rejoin a new match.
Helliquary Tree in Westmarch will have an icon on the minimap that you can click to travel to.
After submitting a report on a player, there will be a place where you can check the status of the person that was reported.
Shadow Assembly will start providing gear as rewards, including chances for legos.
Lego/Green Drops from the dungeon 4-person chests will now show in party chat.
Just so that people don’t get too exited about the removal of the dungeon party requirement: the difficulty is not changing.
Yep.
Now they will work more like WoW’s dungeons. Current level (or near it) will require a party simply due to the difficulty, whereas lower level dungeons will be more soloable.
I hope the changes in the Chinese notes are also present in the non-Chinese regions.
There are three ways to get them. Two of which are free.
New Resource: Telluric Pearls
Telluric Pearls are a new resource that can be used to craft Five-Star Legendary Gems. There are currently three ways a player can receive Telluric Pearls:
By trading Hilts with Lieutenant Fizriah, the Hilt Vendor in Westmarch.
Through participating in limited-time events.
From purchasing specific in-game shop bundles, such as Seeker’s Supplies and Rift-Runner’s Supplies. The Seeker’s Supplies bundle will now refresh in the shop every Monday and Thursday instead of every three days.
Hopefully this includes Hidden Lairs too. I am a solo player so yeah, I hate the mandatory group stuff.
Given Blizzards track record, the rate of acquisition just seems more likely to be in the range of years or decades.
It is more Predatory design:
Blizzard goes “Craft a 5 star gem for 1000 materials. Here, take these 500 materials for free”. Brain goes “Oh noes, I have 500 materials, it would be a ‘complete waste’ if I dont buy the last 500! I am literally wasting money/time by not paying!”
Similar mechanism to how they make sure that the currency used in the shop never aligns with the quantities it can be purchased in.
What more and more of us are starting to realize is that, much like communism, 5* gems are a red herring. There effects aren’t that much higher than a 2* - they really don’t start to separate until level 6 or so (7K in cash or 7 months of max grinding). On most servers, there are so few actual whales (6K+ resonance), that it pretty much is irrelevant.
A 5* gem has a 5% chance to drop on a legendary crest run, with a pity timer for eternal crests - just doing you dailies will get you a pity timer legendary gem every single week - plus you can craft them with the runes you collect during your rift runs.
If you are a battlepass player - they aren’t that hard to get (I have 6 so far). I have even gotten my 1st duplicate - so my Echoing Shade is now at Rank 3.
It is better (and a whole lot easier) to simply get six 2* gems and level them up to rank 5 (Six 2* gems at rank 5 give you 60% magic find - Six 5* gems at rank 4 give you 0% magic find - magic find is important).
It really isn’t that hard. Keep the 5* in your stash until you start to get duplicates.
If they finally decide to make 5 star gems somewhat achievable that’s great but this also a foretell of that their previous design has major flaws. If gems become way too easy to achieve by drastic changes, that’s an admittance of failure. You can write this as monetization scheme started to slow down abit, so they need fresh playerbase.
You can say those are a promise of what to arrive at other servers about months later.
The drop rate for 5* gems has always been 5%. That is why folks do the 10 legendary crest runs. (I have run 6 of these - I have five 5* gems - I used one to rank up one of my other ones) .
And as I said - the 5* don’t actually bring as much to the table as people that don’t play the game seem to think. The effects are heavily nerfed in the BG, not to mention that the reality is, there just aren’t that many actual whales on the servers.
On mine, I can count all of them (6K+ resonance) on both hands, and have fingers left over. On a server with 2000+ players (how many folks did at least 1 challenge rift last week), they are irrelevant.
Currently you can solo dungeons on Normal and Hell 1 (except for Monastery). At Hell 2, 3, 4 and 5, you need a minimum of 2 players, but the dungeons at those difficulties are all still tuned for 4 players, and there’s a bonus loot chest available after the end boss dies with 4 players.
The change means that players can solo dungeons at Normal and Hell 1-5.
Fair enough, but unless you’re doing them for the Codex’s Zone Exploration tasks (which need completion of events which only occur inside Lairs), the main reason people do Lairs is because, in a 4-man group, they’re a reliable source of non-legendary gems, which drop from the mini-events and bosses (so 6 in total on a 2-level lair). Solo’ing doesn’t get these.
The main frustration I have with Lairs is that you find one, create a Party Finder advert for it, get 3 other players into the group and it closes just as you’re about to enter and you have to apologise to the group and disband. Why can’t these have a timer bar above the entrance indicating how long it will be until it closes? (Much like the timer bar you see on Heavy Ornate Chests - heck, they could even re-use the UI elements from the chest)
So with this and the chests in dungeons, this is just Blizzard letting solo players enter the dungeons. But then specially making sure they can’t get the rewards after entering.
Seriously Blizzard…
However, imagine if the monster HP / damage was scaled according to how many players entered the dungeon rather than being statically set for 4-man. Okay, let’s use Hell 5 as an example, as that’s currently the highest difficulty. The minimum suggested CR for that is 5025. The dungeons are therefore currently tuned for 4 players of at least 5025 CR. If they were scaling, what happens when a player with 6500CR enters them compared to a player with 5025CR? Why would the 6500CR player ever run with lower CR players again, when they could just solo the dungeon quicker on their own than with a party? This would lead to whales solo’ing everything, much quicker, and obtaining gear quicker, pulling even further ahead, and filling their Battle Pass quicker.
Yeah, it is for those new (or slow) players who have difficulty finding a party to farm loot at a lower difficulty or people who woke up at midnight and want to run a few dungeons before going back to sleep.
Yeah, the reward for sharing your blessing in Assembly is a great welcome. Too many AFKers at that place.
True. I was surprised too that I was able to kill players with 1k~2k resonance with my 500+ resonance sometimes or didn’t get one-shot by them either.
Even if there is an actual whale, they are playing in their own league which most BP/F2P players won’t be able to reach there.
for many players.
Blizzard…
