Primal Ancient Set?

General Discussion
21

Sad thing is their solution is to kill the build/class rather than fix the problem.

Well, if your version of fun is playing in groups, you won’t get an invite as a WD and be relegated to playing a class you do not find fun.

I don’t need the builds I like to play to be the meta. I just need them to be relatively competitive with the meta.

Getting full Primals is not a problem. Getting correctly rolled problems is generally the huge problem as your DH only has like 1 or 2 correctly rolled pieces.

I have full Primals for my UE DH, but only 3 pieces are correctly rolled, shoulder, boots, and belt. My Yangs and DML are decently rolled, but missing an affix or 2. Sadly, I do have 7 correctly rolled Shadow pieces, a build I hate playing.

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22

I got a well rolled primal typhon helm, but equipping it means cubing the magistrate (which is nice, max orange range) and equipping tasker and theo, a notoriously difficult item to roll, as you need maximum orange range for the AS breakpoint, on top of crit/crit/IAS, and ideally even quads with AD. So without decent TnTs, the primal helm stayed in my stash, and I was running with a non-ancient magistrate (with almost max orange range though) and non-ancient high-range crit/crit/ias/int typhon gloves. Then recently I found a primal tasker and theo, and I was so excited! But, of course, the roll was atrocious, and I ended up giving it away for a friend to complete the altar. So in the end I ditched two primals and instead run with non-ancient gloves and helm… So close though!

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23

Not poorly designed but definitely lag monsters, or at least have that potential. The developers always expected WD to be the lag monster, but funny enough Demon Hunters beat them to it by few occasions. I think the principal designer of Witch Doctor and Demon Hunters are the same developer; Wyatt Cheng. He is also the main designer on this game, so I think poor design is not a thing.

At the season start, I was itching to play something different other than Monk or Crusader and I just taken by nostalgia to get back to Witch Doctor. I’m having a blast actually. I found that Witch Doctors are really slow at stacking Bane of the Stricken at some builds, so I had to experiment around and research through some discussions to alleviate that. I found that certain skill runes, despite recognized as trash or useless, could help me with that. Sad thing is, you can’t really include such skills at every Season to WD without sacrificing something else for it. However, when you manage to do so, it pays back really well.

24

Wouldn’t putting mechanics in the game that break the game be the definition of poor design?

Even worse, dealing with the situation by simply breaking builds that use it, shows a lot of lazy design.

Really, I don’t recall the developers ever saying they expected WDs to be lag monsters. Curious why you are saying DH beat WD to it. Don’t remember DH ever being the lag monster unless it had to do with the GoD stacking exploit. As far as WD, they have had lag issues since Vanilla.

The problem is in skills that do ticking damage, which unfortunately, applies often to WD since most builds need Locust Swarm to function decently which is why they have made the class bottom of the barrel. Was way worse when Firebats was the WD meta as that also is a ticking damage skill. Rather than redesign these ticking damage skills, they simply chose the lazy way of nerfing it into oblivion (firebats, Wiz Twisters, Barb tornadoes).

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25

They obviously don’t want to promote its use by giving it sheer power. Their popularity is telling that between the lines. Also it’s known to be a lag monster looking at the past of how meta evolved along the years.

There were two occasions, almost back to back, where DHs broke the game. You can look that up by a web search.

That.

Witch Doctors didn’t “break” the game but Demon Hunters did.

Sadly, that sounds accurate. You can be powerful as it gets but you’ll never be part of group meta gameplay due to that.

I can’t argue that.

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26

That is the problem in this game. The perfect roll in a way will never happen. Because of having so many rolls on a item that you will never ever use in 100 years. Some items have over 20 different rolls that shouldn’t really even be there.

If you get a item and it doesn’t come with the right stats. Where you only change the one stat. To get the perfect roll it will never happen. Yes you get one here and there but that is far and in between.

You spend hrs, days, weeks, months & yrs. To get loot, mats, gems & what ever. To make character perfect and it will never really happen!!! LOL

Plus talk about Primals I have one account that is at almost 1200 in paragon. Has finish the season journey, has like 12 or 13 gems over 100. That is well over 300 GR’s, done more than 50 vision, and what else has done playing the game. Plus only has got 5 primals.

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27

Definitely quote of the year :smile: :+1:
(I know what was intended to be written of course) Merry Christmas to all :christmas_tree:

And things don’t have to be perfect to be fun. :santa:

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28

yes… but it takes some time.

29

i think i have like 6 or more itens with perfect rolls, and ibelive some rolls are totaly senseless, with extra gold for example, and for long time, many players asked, to remake the itens stash , they didnt.

still, game have a great potencial, sadly they didnt get it yet.

30

Totally agree. I have played 44% of my playtime is on DH. I have 3542 hours played on DH. My favorite DH build, UE, has 3 correctly rolled Primals. If I play 40 hours a week, it will take me 7 years playing DH 40 hours a week to perfect out my build at the current pace I am on.

As I have stated many times, this game has way too many layers of RNG, and way too many punishing layers of RNG. If you find a Primal, it should be end game. You shouldn’t have to find dozens or hundreds of the same Primal to get one that is better than ancient you have.

My fix for this would be to let players reroll all affixes at the Mystic with the cost being Primordial Ash.

Correct, but when you have 8000+ hours in the game, fun for many becomes checking off bucket list items:

get all gems to 150 — check
complete a GR 150 — check
complete all achievements — check
get one build perfected out — not even close to check

I am not asking for correctly rolled Primals to rain from the sky, I simply want to get 1 build perfected out before I die. I am 53, so max 47 more years left and doesn’t look like it will happen.

Quick story: I was playing last night. Got the double red beams. Instead of being excited, I was leery about what I would get. Hovered over them. One was a green amulet. Instead of being excited, I was like “There’s my Primal Blackthorne’s amulet”. Picked them up and the amulet was a Trav’s Pledge. Instead of being excited, I was resigned to the fact that it was going to roll dex, vit, lph or something lame. I identified it, and it was lightning, dex, cc, so pretty good. Instead of being ecstatic, I was simply relieved.

Fun would be that Primal drop making you feel ecstatic rather than relieved.

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31

If you keep removing rng, then pretty soon everyone will be running around with identical rolls. And people will be here complaining that one is their items had one wrong roll at 1000 paragon. I like that the hunt for gear is endless, just like paragon farm.

It’s already easy for anyone to get decent rolls in all slots early season. Don’t understand why we are so keen to remove the item perfection aspect of mid and late season.

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32

I suspect it’s because you and most casual players operate on a different time scale when it comes to “late season”. Someone who grinds to 4k compared to someone who dips out before 1.5k. Considering the non-linearity of paragon, that’s a huge difference in play time. More so considering casual players are nowhere near as efficient as you are when it comes to farming paragon. The time it takes someone of your experience to hit 1.5k in-season would probably be closer to less than half of what it takes others to achieve the same thing.

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33

Well, I did say:

I agree players should not have all perfectly rolled gear in every slot at p1000. I don’t agree that it should take near infinity to get there.

I also believe that you can have a long and engaging gearing process without layers upon layers upon layers with layers sprinkled on top of RNG. There should be other ways of getting to the destination than winning the lottery.

Even if you allowed the rerolling of all affixes on Primals at the mystic, it still isn’t going to end the item hunt in mid season and most likely not for late season for the vast majority of players. There are those players that play 20+ hours a day 7 days a week for 3 months and they will hit the full Primals by mid-season, but they are the exception rather than the rule and the game should not be designed around them. The vast majority of legit players still won’t hit full Primals by the end of the season even with my Mystic suggestion.

As I have stated before, some people enjoy playing slot machines all day hoping they one day hit that jackpot. I am not one of these people. I want a goal I can grind for and if I get lucky on the way fine, but I want the option to get to my destination when I don’t get lucky.

I don’t need instant gratification where I get the goal in an hour. I have no problem putting in significant time if I can achieve my goal. I just want the progress to matter and not be simply buying more lottery tickets.

34

Yes, some spend a lot of time and try hard, others chill and are casual. Doesn’t really change the point though. For there to be a meaningful gear progression between 1.5k and 4k paragon, then we can’t have perfect completed gear at 1.5k. And gear shouldn’t be perfect at 4k either.

You typically have a playable build well below 1k, and it will play roughly the same way as it will play on 4k, as long as you do some defensive swaps (like guardians). Difference is only that you can scroll up a bit more on the GR selection drop-down when you’re 4k. So there is no gatekeeping. Chill and casual players get to play and have fun with the build just like try hard no-lifers, just with fewer red borders at lower GR. And I think that’s great!

I guess we have different preferences on this then. I don’t want to ever reach a point where my gear is 100% perfect.

As for RNG… We already have non-rng progression from paragon. Making high paragon gear progression not be rng (like some incremental upgrade you mean?) would just make it another kind of paragon point that lives on your gear. A bit like in immortal. I like how it is now in D3, with non-rng progression from paragon, but still sometimes get the excitement of winning the lottery from gear.

35

you forgot to add “experienced” and/or “willing and able to invest enough time”. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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36

My philosophy is gear drops should be RNG, and secondary gearing methods should be more direct ways to get gear rather than adding layers upon layers of RNG. My example would be D2 (please no one freak out, I am not advocating for trading to added to D3 again):

In D2, it took a while to get the gear you wanted from drops. In the meantime, you got a lot of gear with value you didn’t want. The secondary method was to trade the gear you didn’t want for gear you wanted or trade it for a currency (high runes) and then trade that for the gear you wanted. The secondary way gave the player an opportunity to work for the gear they wanted rather than praying to RNGesus to bless them.

As it applies to D3, I would use my above method to fix Primals as a secondary option. Let the Mystic reroll all affixes on a Primal for the cost of Primordial ashes. The player still needs to acquire the Primal they actually want and also acquire enough ashes to reroll the stats. This simply fixes the the brutal, punishing RNG of finally getting the Primal weapon you want only to have it roll main stat, vitality, LPH, and some other trash affix.

Other solutions I have suggested in the past to simple reduce the layers of the 500 lb.
onion of RNG we have were adding a cube recipe pay 10x the reforge cost to have them roll ancient, pay the rate in keys to get a guaranteed Orek’s Dream (key cost would be the statistical avg. of getting one), give players the option of paying to get the mystic affix they want reroll for (again, where the cost is the statistical avg).

It is cool when you somewhat regularly get a random a gear upgrade from a drop. It becomes frustrating and tedious for me when there are extremely long gaps with no upgrades. Very quickly in this game, the RNG curve becomes brutal. I am simply wanting some ways to work towards gear to flatten the curve some.

That is perfectly fine. We are all going to have similar and different opinions of every aspect of this game. I am simply trying to find ways to give players different options on how to achieve their goals. I try to find solutions where I feel they are broken without breaking the game for someone else.

I am always up for debate, because then I can adjust my proposal to be satisfying for all.

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37

Yes you don’t start with a complete end game build equipped after 1 second, and yes people learn and will progress faster for each season they play. I’m comparing to other RPGs I’ve played, mostly D2, D4 and poe. And in D3, you get a complete endgame build with all the pieces way faster than any of the other ones.

You’re ofc allowed to think that it takes too long to get a complete build in D3, and that it should be even faster. We’ll just disagree then, and that’s ok.

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38

Its depends from set itself. Blackthorne set is easy to farm primal :rofl:

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39

:roll_eyes: Come on, that’s not you.

I assume the set from the season’s journey?

Not at all. I prefer the D2 approach.

My main point was the “experienced”. D3, for me, has so many layers of stuff, and even though I’m quite fine with reading guides if and when available, that I’m still utterly overwhelmed to the point that I most often don’t know what questions to ask (since I still don’t really “get” D3), what things to do, what items to equip, what to focus on, and so on. For you and the experienced d3 player, one or two things were added within a new season and it was an iterative process and everyone was trying to figure things out together. For me, I’ve basically almost stopped playing d3 completely because … whaddaya do now?!
And the various objectives of the steps of the season journey are utterly inhomogenous in difficulty for a newbie. Some are so easy that you fullfil stuff one or two diff levels above it by just playing, others stop you in your track. Remember, I think you were the one who gave me the input on how to progress a while back?! But in that case I could pose an actual clear question.
Or take this very thread. I’ve now learned that a primal with your main stat sucks. I haven’t found a primal yet so it’s purely academic, but I would’ve been happy about a main stat roll since I would’ve thought that’s pretty great.

40

So your saying that D3 is too difficult to get into for new players?

I think that’s just a different topic that what we were talking about before, which was amount of RNG in perfecting gear. So we probably talked past each other.

As for “what do I do next”, it depends on how you want to play the game. Some try to get as strong as possible to clear higher GR. Some chase rare cosmetics. Many just do the season journey and then done. Others try out a lot of different classes and builds. Some just want to slay some demons.

If you feel stuck and want help, you can ask, but maybe you’ll get more replies in a different thread.

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