Season 21 - Trials of Tempests is NOW LIVE!

I might be in the minority on this, but please make it so you don’t loose stacks. I had the most fun in Season 19 and loosing stacks would make it feel less fun. The idea where you have to do something in the rift other than killing trash and elites is what I like the most. Being able to hold stacks and time them against mobs and elites is like a mini game inside the Rift. Very fun.

Yeah, I’ll have to agree with that. Wonder what they’re going to do about this. Season 22?

It would be fairly reasonable at this point to just scrap the entire season imho.

It’s too late to possibly rollback or ban everyone who’s exploited to 150, especially seeing as trying to push high GR’s legitimately is sabotaged by the seasonal buff as it kills your density that trash killers need to apply Area Damage onto elites (killing your whites without utilising them for AD on your elites is BAD).

And therein is one of the worst aspects of this season’s theme: It actively sabotages players trying to play legit. Trying to use a non-exploited, low stacks Seasonal effect on density usually kills half the whites while dealing minimal damage to elites, and elites are the majority of progression in a push.
This is opposed to Trash Killers skillfully aiming their skills at the elites in such a way that white mobs apply the maximum amount of area damage possible onto the elite. Therefore, short of having the entire push team run into a small corner of the rift each time the seasonal effect goes off, the seasonal theme is a huge detriment akin to trying to fight with both hands tied behind your back for teams trying to play legit.

This fact combined with how easy it is to achieve GR 150 has lead to many extremely dedicated diablo players quitting the season, and many high level 4man static teams have dissolved over demoralised members dismayed at the way the season is going.

There’s literally no purpose to farming better gear, or farming paragon, or bothering augmenting your gear. If you want a GR 150, you simply exploit it using one of the many viable zDPS classes which can easily survive a GR150 with full non ancient gear and minimal paragon (first GR150 clear was done with 4 players ~800 paragon all in zdps gear).

Theres honestly 0 reason to play diablo this season unless this seasonal theme is addressed. The playerbase right is divided into a couple of camps: Exploiters loving their free GR150 clears, and people who are about to quit the game holding onto hope for an official blizzard statement or holding out for Blizzard to fix this somehow. The latter group being the majority, and probably looking to quit the season soon if no action is taken, while the former group is getting their GR150 clears in <100 hours of playtime, and quitting the season anyway as they’ve accomplished the highest tier already.

Diablo 3 is dying, and if no action is taken, Season 21 will be completely desolate as there are no camps of players willing to continue the season.

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Heads up everyone, we launched a Season 21: Trials of Tempest hotfix today. For information and notes details jump in here.

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Here you go guys:

Go have fun and exploit like everyone else is doing lol. “Working as intended.”

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Unfortunately we can’t as they didn’t fix the accessability issues that meant alot of people couldn’t play the season.

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After a couple years of Vyr inflicting RSIs, I’m not sure that’s the case. I should report Vyr as an inaccessibility issue.

If you would like to address RSI related injuries, gameplay mechanics, and maybe even extended controller options, you can! D4 will allow a controller with the PC which opens up other key mapping options that reduce strain.

While they don’t directly respond usually, they do ask you to send in accessibility comments. That feedback is reviewed by a specialized team that tackles accessibility in all the Blizzard games and they give that feedback and recommendations to the Devs.

Not everything can be fixed to be accessible to everyone, but Blizz is taking steps to make what reasonable changes they can, especially in newer games.

Here is the Support Article about it and it includes an email you can use.

Also, please remember no build is something you re forced to use. You can switch to something less intensive. Be sure to follow best practices from your doctor regarding breaks, support braces, stretching, etc.

Am wizard. Most of my sets (and items, tbh) are useless. I think there are maybe 10 wizard items that don’t suck :wink:

My review of the theme this season:

The changes in weather, while neat, are really offputting in some cases. Same as my feedback on PTR, I would have much preferred to just have an Icon displaying the upcoming seasonal bonus effect, similar to how CoE shows element icons.

The current icon only displays when the proc is coming, and how many stacks.

The frequency and impact of the theme was not enough to affect speeds or nephalems significantly. In the future, make sure theme frequency is not based on Static time, but rather some other metric, such as kill amounts or progress gained. This will ensure speeds benefit just as much as when pushing.

After solo pushing hundreds of keys, I will say that the stacking effect does have noticeable impact on this game mode.

It does change how we push greater rifts, and the scaling with kills was a nice move to change it for the better.

I will admit, I do hate it sometimes:

  • Snowball, Fire wave tend to not hit enemies as consistently.
  • Sometimes the theme will simply NOT proc / bugged if you’ve died.
  • Lightning channel can be reflected by dune dervish and sand dweller.

The last point about the lightning seasonal theme being counted as a projectile that can reflect and kill the player is my largest gripe.

I’ve died so many times when 4 minutes up on progress from this, and the death(s) ruined the push.

Despite this, I’ve come to enjoy the times where the seasonal bonus lines up, and I’m able to set up seasonal procs to aid my push.


So, in summary:

While pushing with the theme can be fun, and I’m glad it was tweaked to be a little bit better; the visuals, static frequency, no icon element indicator, no-proc bug, and reflect mobs issues make it one of the worst themes in my opinion.

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I stopped playing the season because of the headaches.

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This event has been a neat idea although half of it does not work well. The firewall and snow ball are so slow moving that you invariably clear out the area and then leave them behind. A few faster moving waves of the firewall and 3 or 4 snowballs that ricochet about the area like when you get the multi-ball on a pinball machine would do well.
That said, I could see this becoming a legendary gem power in the future. It could gain a % damage increase with each level and then unlock access to your elemental bonuses. It could mix well with the Stone of Jordan and Convention of Elements powers.

On the log in screen it now says that season 21 is ending soon. However, when I click on the link, it doesn’t state when the official end date will be. Can we get that information?

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Hmm… it didn’t say that on my launcher until I changed the language from English (UK) to English (US)… and whilst the main text says Season 21 ending soon, if you hover the mouse over it it shows the text

Diablo 3’s Season 20 is winding down, and a new season is upon us. That means it’s time to start wrapping up your Seasonal goals and capture

Yeah, I didn’t truncate the text, that’s just what appears. Clicking on the splash takes me to… https://us.diablo3.com/en-us/blog/23428368/season-21-trials-of-tempests-is-now-live-6-4-2020?blzcmp=app …which is just the Season 21 starting announcement blog.

So, not only is the announcement not available in all languages of the launcher, the hover-over text is truncated and the link points to an article that doesn’t talk about the end of season.

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exactly, need new link.

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Yes saw that too… I guess the announcement must be imminent, probably with season 21 end on 8 November assuming they respect the usual two-week notice…

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They’ve done less than two weeks before. I am hoping it ends November 1.