I know pylons aren’t the focus of the PTR and my thoughts here might be unpopular. But these thoughts are carry over from season 24, and when or where else would I bring them up?
- Add a pylon spawn progress meter
Pylons are more complicated than most people realize. They have a chance to spawn based on your progress in the GR since your last Pylon spawn. And top players do actual weird things like go and “break” the pylon spawns to force them into another level.
There’s no way to communicate all that to a casual player, but one thing that would help immensely is to have a progress meter for the pylons. A simple colored bar under the main progress bar that changes color as your pylon spawn chance goes up and then turns green (or whatever) when the pylon actually spawns, ideally with an icon showing which one spawned.
- Power pylon should last longer
Of the 5 pylons, Speed is probably the weakest. The next weakest, in my experience, is Power. It depends on the player’s build whether Channeling is godly or just okay. Second place now goes to Shield, because in a world with Squirt’s Necklace and Oculus Rings, having a Shield pylon can literally triple your damage, in addition to making you immune to everything. Top place goes to Conduit.
But here’s the problem, Power pylon only lasts 30 seconds (60 with FoT), half as long as Shield. At high GRs (130+) it’s quite a challenge to get much benefit out of it. If you get it right before the Guardian, you win, but otherwise, you might not even clear 2 elite packs or one juggernaut with the Power pylon before it runs out. In order to make it balanced and competitive with Shield, Power pylons duration should be bumped to 45 or 60 seconds.
- Remove spinners from Nemesis spawns
This issue is possibly unique to DH. This last season I played HC for the first time and I found the spinners to be more frustrating than any elite type has a right to be. The problem with spinners (or Mage Wraiths) is when they spin, they will instantly one-shot a DH that is firing at the time.
If the spawn rate were reasonable, it wouldn’t be such an issue, but the spawn rate of the spinner group is around 50%. I had GRs where the spinners spawned on all 3 or 4 pylons. As you can imagine, this is very troubling for DH (GoD specifically, but other builds too) because clicking a Power or Conduit pylon is supposed to be time to nuke, not time to run for your life.
It’s especially frustrating because when playing Monk, Wizard, or WD, the spinners could easily be ignored. This kind of imbalance is detrimental to the game. The solution would be to change the spinner group so that it spawns a different type of support elites with the yellow, or to significantly reduce the spawn rate of that group.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.