First things first, the whole playerbase is going to be grateful for this:
Players can speak to Orek to close an active Greater Rift. This option is only available when in a single player game.
Now, regarding the season theme. While i like the idea of something more to do in game, it just feels like another way to farm but and while the new gem is nice, it will just save time, not necessarily improve your character.
What I’m rambling about is after two seasons with extremely powerful themes, it’s going to be underwhelming just having an extra way to get stuff but no real power increase (faster augments don’t count).
Whilst I’m not proposing every season having 2 minutes 150’s cleared , It would be nice to have at least something more for example the 4th cube slot again.
On that topic, I feel that themes that affect the leveling process as well are better (my suggestion would help in that regard)
Regarding Barb balance changes, I’d love to see a 5% CDR per stack of frenzy added to the 6pc of Horde of the ninety savages , it would let it benefit from morticks and bring it a lot closer to WW.
Really happy water ally wasn’t touched, thank you for that.
As much as I liked the 4th cube slot, It was wildly imbalanced between the classes due to legendary power discrepancies. The easy 150’s would certainly return for at least 3 of the classes.
As a non-season oriented player, I am in the mindset that a season must offer me something that I cannot do in non-season, otherwise I should skip it. I used to feel that a season ALWAYS needed to reward more power to compensate for the rate of paragon that I’d accumulate – so my overall progress won’t suffer if I ventured off into the season.
As time passed – I don’t really care about the total paragon, or clearing GR150 so that I can accumulate more GR150 gems. GR150 gems used to feel special when they were hard to obtain, now they’re a commodity. New builds that clear GR150… cool initially, but they too become a commodity.
So now D3 is like a basic recreational activity that you do, where the equipment doesn’t matter, like kicking a soccer ball. And Season 26 is just another playing field to visit – if you want to.
I agree to an extent since it’s the same game every time. But take a look at the past two seasons, they are vastly different than non-seasonal play due to the themes even if it’s mostly powercreep.
I’m advocating for more changes exactly due to the fact that running an extra instance for more chances of loot and faster augments are not incentive enough compared to non-seasonal play.
I’d liked to have seen more build balancing and new item tiers (ethereal, mythic, epic) for long term loot chasing.
Getting back to the point of why play it again… if you’ve dumped hundreds of hours into a build, there is little incentive to replay the same build/class again from a loot hunt standpoint — apart from just wanting to revisit it. Not much is getting brought back to our non-season stash.
Within the season itself, the loot hunt on Ethereal and Soul Shards was too short, we had everything needed in 2 weeks, with trace amounts of incrementing power other than Paragon. The overall loot hunt needs improvement, especially for returning and long term players.
More effort should go towards catering to the 15% of the population that actually keeps playing the game after the first 3 weeks. It just requires more depth.
My guess is this GR revamp is going to shorten fishing tremendously, expediting when the player says… I got my GR150… okay … I’m done.
If non-season leaderboards + monk nerf is any indication, we shouldn’t be seeing 150’s solo pop up at all until maybe mid season for most classes. Some are not going to like seeing seasonal clears comparable to non-season clears, but I think it’ll prolong the GR climb, thus giving people incentive to play a little longer. That combined with a pretty hefty GR update and there’s reason to grind away at D3’s end game for longer than we normally would.
I too would like to have seen more items touched, though I also think the GR update is long overdue and a very important part of improving the game long term at it’s core. It’s also possible that newer strategies and certain builds that have lower top ceilings (I.E, S6 Impale) could benefit from some of the mob progression rebalancing. Overall, I’ll take the compromise.
I like how they nerfed monk without actually destroying the build but just the fire rune. That’s probably the most elegant nerf we’ve seen. Water allies should be pretty great!
Which is exactly the mindset that you shouldn’t fall for. Just pretend the powercreep of the last 2 seasons never happened and try to improve your playing instead. There’s been 25 seasons now, a lot of them without added powercreep, and it’s not been enough of an issue to make people stop playing the game.
I think these were great patch notes. You can’t have every season be OP af. You saw it with this season, it got stale very quickly.
All the rift changes were actually exactly what I was hoping for. More open maps, better progress for bad mobs, close rifts; these are awesome QoL changes.
Probably the best patch addressing end game pushing we’ve ever seen actually, there’s actually something new to do here and GR overhaul; we haven’t seen this to this effect since the GR scaling patch with hp/damage and introduction of those horrible empty maps that they’re reversing now.
Power wise? Very behind, probably the worst since Follower patch but we’re near the end here so it’s okay, still would have liked to see some under-powered sets/builds with some work but would take the end game overhaul before that, perhaps next patch focus on this.
Might be saying this prematurely though as we don’t know for sure if Augmenting these new gems will bring just main stat and we don’t know for sure how rare these dream rifts will be.
To be honest, aside from the pet and bonus storage spot for completing the journey, I don’t see myself bothering with seasonal much once that is completed.
maybe for you, but for s6 impale players, they were CRAP. No thank you. The shards in the current system are FAR FAR better imho. Everyone can use them, irrespective of the build that they are playing.
