I played D3 at release for about 6-8 months. I just began playing again in February with season 28. My question…
How many GR levels do the altar buffs add compared to a non seasonal similarly equipped build? The DR and AD isn’t small so is it like 5 or 10 levels or is it more?
Depending on the build it is roughly 5-10 GRs. The extra toughness is relatively higher than the extra power so builds that are typically glassier should benefit more.
On paper I should say around 10GRs. However, in reality, it may be more than that because apart from the damage increase, you also get tons of utility, toughness, speed, exp pools, potion buffs, etc. Some builds take huge advantage of the resource on crit mechanic and can blast everything without worrying too much about resource management. You will also most likely farm faster and end up with more paragon and therefore be able to push higher for that reason too.
Generally, in a season without any power-adding theme, I can clear GR130+ with some good builds when I am around 2k paragon, and currently, I can do GR150 with pretty much the same effort. And when, usually, I fast farm GR 105-115, I can farm now GR125-135 within the same time. The comparison is based on Season 23, and Season 26 which didn’t add a seasonal power.
Depends on build, but around 20GRs seems to be most common number.
This is based on leaderboard clears on and off season, and typical XP farming levels seems to give about same difference. My own experience matches that as well, and yukos numbers seem to be in agreement.
There is lots on the altar apart from the raw damage and defense nodes, and different builds benefit from different things. Nodes like resource on crit, passability and cc-immunity.
But the big one of course is the potions. The shrines are permanent with gloves of worship, and frenzy is a flat 25% attack speed, protection is 25% damage reduction, empowered is a huge 50% CDR and even more resource generation. And the power procs giving you 3.5x damage (close to 10GRs there alone) one time out of 6. On top of that we get circles, where in particular the one in three purple power circle can add another factor 2 on damage for 7 seconds.
Gap is so big it even seems hard to compare.
Also this question could partly be considered as paragon comparison.
With most of the builds, I could do (much) better with S28 Paragon 2k than with NS Paragon 8k. Which was after less than 10 days of season.
If paragon 2k vs 8k is about 9GR levels and “much better” is about 3-6GR levels depending on build → my gut feeling has been total benefit of about 15 levels. With some builds a little less, but maybe I wasn’t experienced enough to take full benefit.
When it comes to speedruns, it seems to be less. Maybe I’m worse at speedruns. I only got ~3x faster time with ~0.5x paragon with Tal rasha now at Paragon 4k.
Rage did a comparison for non-season vs. S28 adjusted (5k, 15 min) clears, and the average was a little over +7 tiers. With some builds as high as +10 tiers: State of Set Balance Report - #77 by Rage-13139
Math on the damage numbers suggests something around +7-10 tiers is a reasonable estimate as well.
I’ll do an update for all sets in a few weeks, that may have changed a bit as people start doing higher effort clears in season.
+20 tiers is a bit generous though I think.
Yeah. Before the season I had estimated it as high as 15 tiers, but that has definitely turned out to be inaccurate. I’m actually still a bit surprised that the “+tiers” numbers are as low as they are, considering how many different buffs come from the Altar, and how powerful they are cumulatively.
One might say that this is due to builds becoming so strong that they undergo “speedification,” i.e. they get to a point where they only build for speed and forego any of the things that buff your damage relative to density, like AD for most builds, or Bloodshed for Barbs. But, we’ve seen big damage boosts before, like with WOL Monk last season, or with Inna (among others) with the Soul Shards in Season 25.
So: I dunno.
I’ll link you the sheet I built to compare the State of Set numbers with the ones from Season 28, so you don’t have to recreate it!
Only 10, really? It feels like way more. Hard to tell when there is no pushing any longer, only GR150 time attacks. And only 10k+ paragon ppl on top on off-season LBs, hard to get a feel for what level normie 3-5k ppl can do… 
Right now (well, as of last Friday) the average Altar buff across all sets is +7.4 tiers. When restricted to only sets that are either “best set for a class” or “S-tier” or “recently reworked”, the number is +7.9 tiers. Or if shedding the “recently reworked” and only looking at “Best or S”, it’s +7.1 tiers.
Well, just look at State of Set. That gives you a much better picture of actual build strength. And for some sets, the average paragon for the top 10 in State of Set isn’t super-high. For Raekor, for instance, it’s about 6k.
Yeah… Like… The soul shards were up to 10 GRs, and 4th cube slot added things like deathwish that’s almost 10GRs. But the altar feels way more powerful than those. I’m mostly thinking about the most powerful sets of the seasons too, like tal rasha, poison nova vs things like fire inna or fire mirrors.
Idk, I wonder if the extrapolation is really valid from 2:30 GR150 as comparison. You are limited by how fast you find find and pull mobs rather than by how fast you can kill them. Tal rasha is corrected to GR162 at 5k paragon, but I think it’d be able to clear much higher. Like imagine 1-floor grotesque fields with condi, power and good pootion procs… You’d go back to stricken ofc, but givin gup powerful is nbd. Someone should clear a solo GR160 by opening a rift as 4 and have the other three leave. 
Yeah, that’s what I mean by “speedification”. At a certain point, the “normal” relationship between damage and clear time starts to break down, because you are not doing any of those “normal” things you would regularly do in a clear, like grouping mobs together to leverage Area Damage.
On some level, the way State of Set reckons the value of extra time is not quite right. You could improve this system but it would be very complicated. Me and DMKT and Tinne and Skelos (and others) talked about this a lot in this thread, which is an interesting read:
On the other hand, we shouldn’t really be seeing those “speedification” effects on some of the worst sets, like Pestilence, LoD DH, Raiment, or Seeker for instance. Because these builds are for sure still doing everything they can to maximize the benefits of stuff like Area Damage.
But, Seeker is still only at +11.1 tiers, Raiment at +9.5, LoD DH at +8.9, and Pestilence at +7.5. None of them are way up at +15-20 or something like that. So even when you don’t have a situation where every clear, even at GR 150, is essentially a speed clear, you aren’t seeing those huge number of +tiers.
That’s a great idea, you should reach out to a few of the mega-paragon players and see if any of them are game- particularly any of the folks who generally record video of their clears. It would be fun for us to watch, and great bragging rights for them!
Yeah it’s weird… These numbers are maybe a little higher, but not drastically different. Don’t they know that they have to press Q??
Some of the benefits are self-limiting. You accumulate shrine powers over the course of the rift, but by the time you may have them all up, the rift is basically over.
The raw power of all of them in full swing could be higher than 20 tiers.
https://imgur.com/a/EgdxunFIt depends on the build and some of the benefits are harder to quantify:
With optimum use of the altar tree some builds will likely see a 15-20+ GR tier improvement given identical gear. The points mentioned above also allow more offensive gear/stats to be slotted in, since you need less toughness or CDR or whatever.
i would just mention, that in group play, people rarely use the power pools cause its safer as they are rarely in a place that’s optimal to be useful, however in solo , they are way more useful
20? Nah. I haven’t done any final pushes yet, SC or HC, but I think I’ll max out with my s6 impale build ~GR132 (probably around p1600 cos I just can’t stand the paragon grind as a solo player). That’s for me, around a 10-11GR bonus for the season buffs over what I’d achieve with a season without buffs.
I guess it’s possible that the s28 theme benefits some more builds than others (another argument for crappy balancing in this game, since themes should affect all builds EQUALLY).
What, no they are used a lot in groups? It’s one of the big benefits of znecs, they will spam out power rings for you. And you have to pay attention as support to go out the wizard when you press Q (at the start of a fight, don’t press if they already have one, and save for RG if convenient) to place the circle close to where they want to dps from. Zbarb might be excused from that if they are busy rage flipping, but placing rings at a good time and place for your dps is part of the duties as zdh and znec.
My previous all-time highest ever solo GR clearance was a GR139, and that was done on a seasonal hero (during a season with quite a powerful theme) on a Witch Doctor having around 2500 paragon.
This season, so far, I’ve done a GR144 solo (and just missed a GR145 by under 5 seconds) and that was done on a Necromancer having around 1450 paragon.
Now, bear in mind that for every GR level you go up, mob hit points increase by 17%, so effectively you need to have 17% more damage for each GR level you go up to still be able to complete it within the timer. An increase from GR139 to GR144 is a (1.17)^5 increase, i.e. roughly 2.2 times as much damage is needed to do the GR144.
So, I’m doing 2.2 times more damage, with 1050 less paragon (which equates to 5250 less main stat) than my previous all-time high.
My previous high was 140 with GoD with a little over 2900 paragon back with ethereals. This season I ran Nat’s and did a 150 with 2750 around abouts. Nat’s is quite a bit stronger than GoD now that a playstyle and strat has been established. But that said, in non-season with half my gear not ancient and with less than ideal stats, I’ve come close to doing 137 with around 4250 paragon.
So I have to say a lot had to do with the set I was using this season in doing that 150 but the Altar was definitely a big help, but I’d wager that 7 GR buff estimate from the theme is around right.
Using GoD this season, with 2900 paragon I’ve been able to farm 139 with some effort like around the 7 to 9 minute mark while my Nat’s while taking off CoE, losing Nat’s Slayer, and not having to fish for an Empowered Shrine effect to start the rift on account of using Dawn, I can farm 140. Losing those items and what not cuts about 4 GR Tiers off farming Tier territory.
Anyway, just saying for classes like DH, some of the higher clears come from a buff to a set more than say the best parts of the Altar.
My opinion only.
I think the power scales inversely with paragon.
That is to say, the more paragon you have, the less of an increase you will see. But for the 1k paragon players, its a huge increase.