Hi team Blizzard, thanks for an awesome PTR and the new features you’re building into the game.
A situation that was rather frustrating for me while testing this PTR was during SSF play. I’ve, up until now, been used to leveling and then joining a game with a friend to get access to higher-tier greater rifts instantly.
With SSF, completion of a greater rift only unlocks a greater rift three tiers higher, e.g. I complete an 18, and I can now attack a 21. By the second or third (granted, because of the PTR merchant selling me every piece of gear I could ever need), I was immediately in need of running 90+, but was forced to do 21, 24, 27, 30, …, and the list goes on.
Please reconsider the “+3” behavior upon successful GR completion. Perhaps make it scaled based on fast you completed the GR, e.g. if you complete with 10 minutes remaining, +3. If you complete with 11 minutes remaining +4, 12 minutes remaining +5, 13 minutes remaining +10.
Just FYI in case you weren’t aware, you can unlock GR levels by doing a regular rift of the same tier, IE: finishing a T16 rift solo will unlock 75. I know it’s not exactly what you’re asking for but the examples you listed suggest you might not know this trick.
I think raising the cap based on the speed of completion beyond +3 is feasible.
To be fair, if you’re playing SSF, there’s no way you’re pushing immediately higher than that without finding multiple pieces of your build.
It’s one thing to have someone power level you, where you can get your high level build in an hour, to having to farm it all yourself. This is also where people tend to exaggerate on how the 6 piece alone can take you to GRXXX. There are very few 6 pieces that can even handle GR70 in a demi decent time, let alone anything higher.
I tend to do 1 grift 20 for the journey, 1 grift 70 for the primal and then farm keys, by the time I have “enough” (100+) I usually have the vital support items to push to 100+.
Roughly 7h15m to SSF 1 to Guardian complete, but about the 5 hour mark, I was playing T14. Granted, 3 of those hours were spent running bounties, and would have served better in terms of leveling if focused on actually leveling than bounties though.
They already do this. If you don’t complete it in time, you don’t get an extra level. If you complete it in something like 17-15 minutes, you get +1.
If you complete it in 0-7 minutes, you get +2.
If you complete it without dying, you get +1.
So you can get anywhere from +1 to +3 levels from clearing the GR based on speed and deaths. I don’t know what the exact break points are, or how many times you’re allowed to die before it subtracts 1, but as you level up you’ll start to notice that your unlocks start to go down to +2 once your time starts to increase.
Anything more than +3 is too much given that most of the time the difference in difficulty with 3 ranks will take you from clearing fairly easily to getting destroyed, depending on your setup.
It would of course be nice if we got more per win, but it’s not really necessary. You’re not going to be pushing 130+ until you’ve got all your legendary gems to 100+ and got a few augments anyway.
Obviously the next season, yes. While you get fewer bounties through a fissure, the chest gives you several of each chapter. And you can pretty much speed farm the fissures, to probably get enough materials to cover all the materials needed for the journey in roughly 45m-1h. Otherwise you’ll have to run at minimum 2 full sets of bounties, and that will take an 40-60m alone per bounty run.
Starting at 1 on Normal, +1 per tier up to 20 on T16. Doubled mats if you get a long one (5+ levels or something, not exactly sure how long it needs to be to get the doubling).
So something like this (just showing a few key difficulties, from what I could tell the +1 trend continues across all difficulties):
Bounty mats (you get all 5 act materials, same number of each):
Short
Long
Normal
1
2
T1
5
10
T6
10
20
T16
20
40
This seemed to be the case at both low levels and at level 70. I didn’t check every single difficulty combination, but after a fair number of portals on a variety of difficulties, I didn’t find any combinations that broke the trend.
In my experience, you can farm a portal much faster than a full set of solo bounties. A good strategy will probably be to farm whatever act you are lowest in and do any portals you get along the way. Or farm an act that you need an item from E.g. if you are low in act 3, or need an Avarice Band, farm a set of act 3 only, and you’ll probably get 1 or more portals along the way. That way you even out your mats AND get more total mats at the same time. The mats per hour doing portals, even factoring in the time to get one, should be far higher than SSF bounties without portals.
You should really only need to do bounties for the bounties-specific items. And to complete chapter 3 of the journey.
Did a small test of 10 portals to see average speed the other day, that took me 30 mins so 3 mins per fissure. Even if we assume they all was short so 20 mats a pop that would still net me about 120 mats in the time it would take me to complete a full bounty run that gives 22 of each, so at worst you’re looking at about 5 times more efficient.
(Assuming of course the spawn rate of fissures remain the same)
I didn’t time it, but I’d just go to a high density zone (Fields of Misery, Ruins of Corvus etc.) and kill stuff, I’d usually spawn one before I finished the zone.
I don’t know if the spawn rate varies by enemy type or zone, but if it’s just a constant rate per kill, you could also try stuff like running any high density Cursed Chest bounties (Bellows, Spire, Peat etc.) that happen to show up as a way to get a lot of kills very quickly.