Predictions for Season 30 Patch?

General Discussion
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I’m curious what you guys are expecting for the upcoming patch?

Do you think it will be on the 3 month schedule from current season launch?

Do you think any of the power boost effects from the altar will be kept?

Do you think any major nerfs will happen (Tal Rasha/Nova/Raekor)?

Do you think we will be getting anymore small set reworks or buffs?

I remember they said “no more new content”, but do you expect there to be ongoing balance changes in future patches? Or is that considered new content?

Curious what the community thinks we have to look forward to!

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Not much would be my guess.

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My guess for Season 30:

  • Paragon point cap becomes permanent for ladder only… Perhaps some tweaks to the cap and/or one or more categories. Perhaps a small boost to run speed and a small rollback for area damage.

  • The Altar of Rites returns, but with some balancing… My guess is to tone down some of the damage benefits.

  • Character balancing for the paragon cap, Altar changes along with the upcoming seasonal recycling of themes.

  • Enmity portals become a permanent addition, but their chance to spawn is reduced.

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I would like to see the underperforming sets brought up to par, but I don’t expect too much.

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I hope we never see the paragon cap ever again.

Hopefully they’ll buff some of the underperforming builds.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if the only thing we get is the recycled season theme and nerfed altar of rites.

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Well, after easily making it to run a GR115 below 4 minutes on the Solo HC Americas server this season 29 (my goal was to get to the top 100, which I managed, now even with the GR115 clear the rank is probably not amongst them), I would say the cap did not affect me. Not saying that this is true for any other player.

The season 29 does not have any power creep theme, so I guess with the return of the Altar Of Rites - in whatever state - and some of the returning themes, I will be easily doing GR135+ (as I did on either Americas or European servers, not sure which), which is totally fine with me. Never had the will to even dare trying GR 150 which either needs cheating or/and devoting 25/7 hours :wink: a day playing D3…

Same idea; if they do not tone some of it down and keep the 200-points-in-one attribute paragon option it might break the game with some (especially AD) builds with some of the recycled themes, in particular if, which I doubt but hope :-).

If I remember correctly, Blizzard said there will be some character balancing. So we will find out “soon” what that means…

Good idea, but seriously if, they should be as rare as vault or cow level goblin portals. Or better it is scaling with your char level: same frequency (as of now) before you reach level 70 and then logarithmically decaying to the frequency of aforementioned portals until you reach Paragon 800.

All that said:

So time will tell - and time′s never wrong
So time will tell - but time takes so long

:rofl:
(lyric snippet used in a completely different context the song it is from)

See you in Season 30!

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I hope they announce that S29 ends soon and that S30 wont have capped Paragon. And of course Altar of Rites back

It was clearly a bad idea to implement the Paragon Cap and this was the worst Season in a long time

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I see three distinct routes they could go for the altar.

-One extreme would be to keep the paragon cap at 800 and have the altar be the balancing act to give back some of the power we lost in the current season, but with a hard limit on main stat (keeping most of the damage and toughness buffs in the altar, just without the potion powers). This would keep the focus away from paragon grinding, which has been a refreshing shift in priority so far.

-The other extreme route is to remove the cap (it seems possible it may be kept for SSF mode only and removed entirely otherwise). This extreme would likely see little to no damage buffs kept from the altar of rites, using it strictly for its quality of life features. In my opinion, this would revert a very good change for D3 (taking the focus away from paragon grind and onto gear and build optimization for pushing).

The middle route would keep the paragon rework system (cap Max primary resource to 100 pts and AD to 100 pts would be advisable), but raise the seasonal paragon cap to somewhere around 1500-2500. This would involve keeping maybe a small bit of the damage boost from the altar (specifically a bit of toughness and damage against elites and bosses is nice, as this is the wall many players hit when trying to push to higher tiers).

Overall, this middle route allows the most build diversity going forward. It does fend off casuals a bit and seems unlikely though, since the goal of the latest changes seems to be to make the seasonal experience relatively short for most players, so they can get back to D4. I think keeping the paragon cap and using the altar to bring us back up to around 4k to 5k paragon equivalent of power (before season themes), seems like an excellent way to accomplish this.

What that means to me, is that we have targets to shoot for that feel like a journey with a clear destination, while leaving gear grinding to be a reason to stay around a little longer, for those interested in playing more than a couple weeks.

TLDR: What i hope is that there is still a signifant paragon cap, and that the altar comes back as a way to earn meaningful power (within reason).

Side note: Solo GR 125 (1750 Bloodshards sacrificed at the altar) would be a really cool goal to chase to unlock the final node on the altar.

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Now, to each their own… i like the theme. I don’t care for leaderboards but as a solo only player this season has been fun so far. Paragon cap? I don’t care at all… this season is my bounty mat farming spree and so I will use it to hoard mats and nothing much besides that.

As for what happens in S30…

• the altar will be back, adjusted in some way or another… we don’t know.
• some thing from somr other theme(s) might come back or not
• they will rebalance some things - they said so, but I don’t know what, so…

What else? Who knows, and I don’t care. I don’t waste time thinking about what they might do or not do. Time will tell and we won’t know until they release the ptr patch notes. And not even then…

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It makes no sense why SSF should be singled out to have a paragon cap.

The only acceptable way to keep the paragon cap is by making it its own game mode like hardcore and SSF.

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I expect this but iirc it was just a test and with the feedback they got it’ll prob be changed to a higher cap.

Found the line from patch notes. I bet 2000 will be new cap.
“We chose 800 as our initial starting point and would appreciate your feedback on this cap.”

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Eh, if there is a cap change, I’d bet more on 1000 or 1200. And if there is a cap change, then I’d also bet there won’t be any change to the paragon run speed.

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Mhh…

okay, I will give my five cents on that.

Assuming they increase the cap. It’s likely because the feedback - at least from what I read - on the current limit was mostly negative, saying it’s too low. Now the question is how they let us allocate points past p800.

It could be similar to current non seasonal mechanic. 200 per category for the first 800 ranks and the rest can only be assigned into INT/VIT. A bit boring, but oh well… in that case it might, indeed, be around 2000.

But what would happen if we can assign everything above 800 into all four core stats? Then some will max out resource and ms. Others, depending on the build they play, will not do that and assign all into Mainstat (or Vit)

What if they increase the cap and maintain forced distribution? Then a cap of 1600 would be realistic, allowing us to max out two options in each of the four categories. That’s quite OP for some builds, though. Let’s not forget, the Altar will be back and we might see recycled themes as well.

It could also be that they set the cap to 1200, apply forced distribution and limit the maximum points per option to 100 instead of the current 200 we have now. Do never forget, the Altar will affect everything and depending on what it looks like, they might need to adjust the point limit per option to 100.

I wouldn’t think too hard about it. This time, with Altar of Rites coming back, a potential return of a season theme, some balancing (they said they would do so) and a on top of that a hypthetical implementation and revision of the paragon cap? There’s too many variables to predict anything.

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Would be nice if further seasons will be like the firsts: no need to create separate characters ando no separate themes at all but massive power creep like ethereals and crucibles added to core game. All direct buffs 4th cube, 3 unrestricted, thereals, crucibles, red gems and ofc altar. Minor such as double goblins, free LoD or free RoRG can be recycled.
P.S. ceiling must die!!!

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Yeah, some of the seasonal themes should have been added to the base game, like the demon gems and angel powers.

I wouldn’t add ethereals though. The demon gems just replaced gems in weapons and helmets, while the angelic powers were added to items.

The ethereal weapons made most weapons obsolete.

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Patch will come, not within or shortly after those 3 months. I’m guessing at least 5.
I expect a to the ground nerfed altar, but with the qol intact. And still usefull. Hopefully those awful and useless ring powers are gone.
Emnities become permanent, also nerfed to the ground. But still better than doing bounties.
I believe it was indicated that a meaningful balancing would occur. That usually includes boosting underperforming sets and builds.
I do believe small changes or little balancing here and there are not out of the door. Might happen.
Hopefully that paragon cap goes away. I still want to get to gr 150 solo.
I expect ssf mode for s30 and beyond as well. Possibly also for non season / eternal realm. If that happens, I really hope it includes much more character slots.

So, pretty quit for a while, until they anounce somekind of revival with some new, paid content.
Which I will extremely likely buy.

But for now, they are strugling with d4 and still in denial…

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I think that’s pretty much it. Won’t be as long as S28, but it won’t be a short season at all.

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I agree with your assessment on what makes sense for the paragon rework. It’s a little odd to me that the paragon system update would remain to be a seasonal only change going forward though. Whatever they do, I would imagine it is going to be aimed at being balanced in both seasonal and non seasonal.

I think being able to get 25 movespeed with 50 paragon points will be missed, so that slot should cap out at 50 points for 25 movespeed, IMO.

As for resource, 200 points is still pretty OP for the 2 resource dumping builds (already some of the highest damage dealing skills in the game right now). I think capping this at 100 points feels fair.

As for Area damage, this feels like it should be capped below its current value. From my observation of Season 29 so far, the main reason some of the weaker builds are still pushing GR 145+, is the extra area damage. This calls into play the need for the boss and elite damage we had from the altar, as I’ve seen many builds detonating high greater rifts and spawning the boss with 5+ minutes remaining, yet still failing to clear. I think simply cutting the area damage per paragon point in half would theoretically make sense, but there are no decimals in area damage values. So, i feel the best solution there is to cap the actual points allowed in area damage to either 50 or 100. IMO, the only universe where 200 points in area damage from paragon is balanced, is one where area damage is not a rollable stat on gear (TBH, I would not be opposed to this, but VERY unlikely as this would mean erasing loads of non seasonal gear). This, to me, is the reason this stuff would have been a great idea to address LONG before now.

As for the rest, I think all the other stats in the other tabs are perfect as they are, and would love to see this CDR customization especially in non season, as this opens up some VERY fun builds that are not excessively overpowered IMO. For example, raekor barb is not that fun to play without stone gauntlets cubed. This normally can’t be done without giving up your third gem for invigorating gemstone, but with the added CDR, we can afford to run them because we can remain CC immune. Is raekor barb suddenly erasing gr 150 in under 10 minutes? No. The other example is the LON set. Some builds are forced to used LOD because they NEED zodiac to function (Wave of Light monk for example). This paragon rework would revitalize the LON set a bit, which is a variant I’m sure some folks would love to play on non season.

Then again, if the altar gives us CC immunity, I guess we’ll be fine. LOL.

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Adding every theme would just ruin the game. Gr150 is already very easy, adding all themes would probably let a naked player clear them in under a minute.
I would never play d3 again if it was just hit 70 and breeze through all gr levels in the first day…

With the right changes they could add a lot of the themes but without severely nerfing them itd cause far too much power creep.

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Leave the 800 paragon cap on seasons. Across the board, even (all modes for seasonal play). Bring the Altar back in all it’s glory. Go back to regular point allocation for the first tab though (50 points max in each item), and let the other 3 tabs be whatever you want to do with your 200 points.

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