If thousands of people can find a bug within minutes of “testing” then it means it had zero testing before it was pushed to the public.
If a multi billion dollar company doesn’t have the man-power to give even 10 minutes to test each new change then when am i going to start getting paid for quality assurance testing?
Hmmm Cold Hydras?
Is that looking to be best? Wouldn’t have thought.
D3 Classic Team has very limited resources and manpower.
they also have 3 months to play test the things they create before releasing it, or 6 months, or 9 months
They are probably not as creative as the players did. They are probably doing a basic testing like “oh yeah, the set or item bonus works on the specific skills. Ok, it time to test the next items or go home”
Just to update; we’ve already fixed this bug internally. I’m talking with the team about when/if we can deploy that change to the PTR, but I think it’s more likely if we’re going to do a PTR patch, we’ll try to put as many changes as possible in so those can be tested as well.
That’s not my call to make, but I know there’s desire for it, so I’ll make sure the community’s desire is well-heard. 
There’s likely a couple of bugs at hand with the new Hydra set right now. Exactly what PTR testing is for! Damage hitting shields shouldn’t remove Hydra heads, and I believe there’s supposed to be an internal cooldown on the rate that heads are removed when taking damage, but I’m still verifying this one.
This is not our specific goal. GR 150 is a cap we aren’t backing away from, but we’re also not intentionally trying to make sure every build can perform there. We stated our approach to balance in this blog earlier last week, so I’d recommend reading over that if you haven’t already.
Remember guys—PTR testing isn’t necessarily indicative of how something will perform on live. We have a pretty complicated game under the hood, and we extended PTR to two weeks for this patch because Class Sets tend to need the most testing. Things will shift around between PTR and live deployment, and we’re digging into all your feedback and bug reports right now to address as much as we can!
Thanks Nevalistis.
Could you please make sure that the leaderboard is reset when the bug fixes and other changes find their way to the PTR?
“If”? I’m confused…wouldn’t you want to make the change in the PTR so we can keep testing the fixed version of the build? Or did I read that wrong?
Ultimately that last paragraph would be ideal. I just like to go back to the early season play style where almost any build could participate in multiplayer GRs. This balancing seems too narrowly focused IMHO.
Certainly enjoying the new builds introduced with 2.6.8 (frenzy, hydra). Cheers.
Just use ray of frost or disintegrate instead of arcane torrent to test the real thing.
This one does not matter so much - hydra itself does not have cooldown so you can almost always cast another hydra.
“Channeling everything” playstyle is a larger problem, as I mention in another post: Wizard is now channeling everything
Wizard and channeling is on the level of Necro and Land of the Dead. It’s a little ridiculous. It’s everywhere. It’s required for nearly everything. In order to be competitive you can’t deviate from it lol.
Releasing a patch has a bunch of overhead that’s per release, regardless of size. If they do a bunch of small patches, they pay that overhead a bunch of times, if they bundle a bunch of small changes together, they only pay it once.
the main issue about that would be that DW / ES will always take 1 second to apply their dmg buffs.
So running around and re-casting hydras all the time will significantly decrease your dmg output.
The “hydrahead drops during shielding” issue needs to go then the set is actually in a pretty good state and can - especially during the season theme - compete with LoD.
However I still think the supporting legendaries are a bit too strong.
If we just compare the playstyle with channel meteor which is pretty similar we notice that hydra compared to meteor has several benefits:
I know that there are many more factors like raw weapon %dmg of the skills or how good the skills themselves compare overall in comparison. but those are the basic differences.
so the supporting legendary multipliers of hydra need to be tuned down to be at least equal or lower than nilfurs boast (600%) and grand vizier (400%).
Running around and re-casting hydras is a problem? You need to do that anyway since you are moving through the rift…
?
the hydras will die. otherwise they last for up to 30 seconds.
we’re talking about pushing the builds here and not speedrifting or anything of that kind.
Oh please. This is exactly why Lamentation got initially nerfed to zero into the previous PTR because one guy with also around 8000 para did a 150 with it.
PROPER testing is done by people that restrict their paragon to the 800 level so you can gather some actually good data instead of for that 1% class with uber paragon. Remember this is for a season an no-one runs around with 8000 paragon in season.
Failed to see that he ran the LOD version, but the remark about paragon is nevertheless still valid. Thank you for playing, next contestant please.
Haha what? And who does this? Not many. So should Blizzard look at data that doesn’t exist or at data that does exist?
There aren’t many players on PTR that equip 800 paragons and attempts to push high with it. There are plenty with thousands of paragons that do. Common sense and simple math will tell you that you can use 10k paragon clear to a predict a 5k one in a pretty simple manner. It won’t be 100% reliable, but it will be as realiable as it gets without Blizzard interfering.
The best thing though would be for Blizzard to maybe scale up all accounts to a desired paragon level (2k, 5k or whatever) for PTR so that fishing and player performance will be the only variance.
You got me, you found 1 guy. Hell you might even find 10 guys, or a 100. But how will Blizzard know they didn’t assign their points? Are they going to look through all youtube clips? Makes zero sense. These so called “proper testings” don’t actually count for sh1t in the sea of clears.
If Blizzard instead capped every char at 800 on PTR that would be something else. But as it stands now, without Blizzard interfering, the top clears on PTR are the best indicators.
edit. I will edit my original post to appeal to everyone.