Season 26: Console

Console Discussion
#1

Okay, so I just read the notes…

Inna-Fire Nerf: It was coming, and since I only enjoy the water version to a degree, I don’t mind, but it sure messes up the fire-Inna play…
Reakor: I’ll try it, but I still don’t think I’ll like it
Ancient Spear buff: Should make for a nice underpowered LoD Barb, could be fun.
Norvald Nerf: WHY??? The only Crusader I really love is the Fist of The Heavens AoV, and that one just got kicked in the family jewels by this Nerf… Okay, I guess it’s back to low-level speeds for that build, and I’ll dust off Captain America… This is just BLEH!

As for the Nightmare Rift: Could be fun! I’ll really have to try it first.

But I was expecting a bit more… Oh well…

#2

Greater Rift changes are huge. Hopefully this will mean less of the jank rifts and less need for fishing. New super rare rift sounds like it might be fun.

New mode. Can’t wait to try it, if it is cool, i hope they keep it after the season.

As a Barb man, thank goodness they are at least trying to revamp Reakor’s though I think this will get more tweaks after the PTR, because on paper it doesn’t sound all that great.

#3

Looks like another season of rats. People running 135s in 1-1:30. Next season will be roughly 125’s in that same time.

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#4

Yup, going to be playing rats on the PTR tomorrow. More than likely it will be go to since we can feed a RAT all ancient gear. The new gems will be used for quick augments, so rats will likely be used. I hope they keep Fire ally bonus to the bracers and decide to nerf Inna’s instead. I am thinking they will make that change with final notes. I was surprised they didn’t change more sets like Trag’ouls or something. It seems kind of underwhelming for next season, but we will play it all the same.

#5

it’s a meh from me. Poor seasonal theme if you ask me.

new 'trials" GR will only really benefit the more powerful builds and is useless until ALL builds are balanced properly, to within1GR of each other. Groups will abuse this new GR to get heavy augments very early on in the season, thus screwing solo over players even more than what we currently are.

mobs/maps changes - partially good, but fallen shaman and accursed and moonclan shaman needed to be added to that list pronto imho. Fallen shaman will instantly add 5 minutes to any GR attempt. Actually, add tusked bogans to that list too - big hit point, spawn in mobs and do massive damage. Bonus: for consoles, the buggers charge from off screen, so we don’t see their wind up animation and can’t dodge them. Not a lot of fun when playing HC.

Blizzard still ignoring balancing builds. Even with the Inna and Crusader nerfs, they’re still 5 GRs stronger than any other build.

With all the modder cheater scum now in seasons on the Sony infrastructure, and what I consider a poor PTR patch/season theme, I honestly can’t see myself playing past the first week after I get the seasonal journey done. And on that note, the proposed seasonal theme doesn’t even remotely help you at all during the level to 70 process.

It’s a big fail from me.

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#6

It’s a shame they are not tackling the botting and hacking on all platforms.

The change to GR maps is welcome and whilst it is nice to see a new endgame added it’s not much of an endgame mechanic to be honest.

Will probably do a week or two in the season for fun but D3 has fast been added to my list of games I’m moving on from.

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#7

The more I consider the changes to Reakor, the more I realise they make zero sense. Just think:

We have this big powerfull warrior, who charges furiously into the fray! Yeah!!! And then, het starts throwing spears…

I mean really? Why charge into the enemy ranks and then start using ranged weapons? Now, the other way around would make sense: soften up the enemy with ranged attacks, before charging into them. It’s just silly like this.

But more damning, if I read it correctly, you still need to do the Harvey Wallbanger with Reakor: Great cocktail, lousy playstyle. I could never enjoy the fact that I had to charge into a wall before I could unload on the mobs, and this most annoying feature of Reakor still hasn’t changed.

And again: Why Norvald???

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#8

That would actually be work lol…Blizzard would rather put the blatant cheating in the too hard basket. Sanity checks to stop the modders, remove them from the LBs and working with Sony to ban their PSNs, online saves to stop save wizard save scumming. Two very easy fixes.

#9

Check out Grim Dawn. It is like PoE/D3 mixed together. Get it when it goes on sale for super cheap.

Playing D3 on pc is a lot better not just from QoL features, but also the gameplay is a lot smoother. AND, wait for it. No double damage lol.

#10

Seems I was a little premature in my Reakor worries: From what I read, there’s no more benefit in charging into in a wall. So at least that part of the build is gone forever!

#11

As an HC player, unless they change things, yeah, this season is going to be nearly pointless. Going into it means an almost certainty of dying.

But, at least this should be a very quick season. I figure, if I play things correctly, I should be able to have the season journey done within 5 hours of season start, at which point, I’ll put the game down.

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#12

Pretty much this. The new endgame mechanic kills you in HC and there is no way to get out of it.

#13

For those of us who ONLY game on consoles, Grim Dawn is a big fail, no port, never will be. Sad really :frowning:

Or, Blizzard could pull the finger out and fix the console issues. NONE of them are hard or time consuming to fix. NONE.

I wonder if the new GR trials will be like CRs - you can’t die, even in HC when inside them. Otherwise, yeah, it’s a complete crap theme for HC players.

I wish! Doing it solo is so much harder. I still can’t crack the 5 hour barrier for levelling to 70 solo. I know you can, and hats off to you, but for me, it’s something I’ll never improve on. Still, 5-6 hours is way better than my 1 week back in s10/s11/s12 lol…I guess an old dog can learn new tricks after all :wink:

Well, that’s disappointing then, isn’t it. So, the s26 theme has basically no worth to HC players and only really benefits the heavy hitting group players with the mega powerful builds. Basically Blizzard’s way of saying “screw you solo players who don’t play the mega builds”.

#14

Nope, you die, you die.

You have two choices.

  1. Quit the game, but you collect no loot.
  2. Get overwhelmed. This requires going about 1 minute without killing any monster.

The fact that you can be overwhelmed in 1 minute is fine for me. The problem is that it’s way too easy to rank up at the moment. I ran a basic GoD build. We’re talking 500k dps with all gems at Level 25. Within 1 minute I hit rank 100, and I finally got overwhelmed at rank 125. And at rank 100, everything was 1 shotting me. And the higher you rank, the more monsters are on the screen.

Let’s just say, that in Season 24, I barely managed to clear a GR125, and I had vastly more dps than that, along with ethereals.

And you can’t even teleport out of the dungeon. You are stuck. So, it’s surviving for one minute without killing any monsters. One minute, sounds easy, right? I did some testing. I tried avoiding any fights once I hit rank 70 in the Echoing Nightmare, and it took me roughly 4 minutes of not fighting. I mean, I guess you could make sure you have zero thorns on going in.

And the gem caps out at 100 anyway. Sure, you’ll end up getting 1000+ bloodshards. But you also only have 30 seconds to collect all your loot and spend any excess bloodshards as well. It’s 8 seconds to teleport back to town, and some loading, so I hope you are super fast on your clicking.

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#15

well, what a CRAP theme. The only thing good in s26 PTR is the QOL mob/map changes, and they only partially touch and address the crappy mobs/maps in the game.

I am not even remotely impressed with this crap. But, I am renowned for being harsh on Blizzard, or as some fans would say, “a troll” lol. It seems you can’t criticise anything on these forums without being labelled a troll and bullied by the fans.

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#16

I think part of the disconnect here, is that with the PTR, people are going to have unrealistic stats. Someone on the feedback forums was saying to just not go in with a dps build, and how GR150 is easily survivable with a basic build. But I wasn’t going in with a dps build.

Typically in a season, I don’t get past Paragon 600 anyway, so I try to focus my PTR testing on realistic stats that I’ll have at different levels. The few videos I’ve seen so far of people getting overwhelmed were on higher tier levels, but they also had unrealistic stats for their paragon. It’s one of the issues I’ve had with streamers for a long time. They state something like, “Here’s how high you can get with 0 paragon!” all the while having fully augmented ancient gear giving them 20k of a main stat when your average player will have at best one third of that.

I just think for right now, it’s way too risky to attempt it in hardcore. It definitely feels like it was designed with only softcore in mind.

EDIT

So, attempting this today, it’s about 70-80 seconds, give or take. Because I wear a Flavor of Time, on multiple tests, it was alright. But I have a few runs yesterday where I stood still and the Flavor of Time buffed shield ran out (i.e. 2 minutes of standing still not attacking anything was not enough). Perhaps it was just a bug with how the servers were being impacted yesterday?

#17

Grim Dawn is on xbox… I’m sure why you would limit yourself to ONLY playing console games. If you are wanting to use a controller Grim Dawn does have support for it and most newer games do. D3 does not, though.

#18

This is a long standing problem that is caused by the imbalance of paragon earned by group players. I’ve lost my #1 s6 impale (HC) slot to a heavy group player. He has such a paragon advantage that he can run without augments and still have more main stat with me at p2100 and full augments…

That is NOT game balance.

PS4 here, do not have the money to afford to move to XBOX at the moment. Not everyone is working full time or getting lots of hours/income with expendable cash…

#19

what is your definition of “all builds”?

some builds are literally just plain bad as they lack gear, combos, effectiveness, efficiency, speed, etc.

why don’t you just come out and ask blizz to sell you GR completion passes?

#20

I know that not all builds are equal, and they never will be. What I do question is why a company would try to FORCE players into certain builds if they want to compete in a chosen build. Some very powerfull builds do not get as much play as others, even though they are supposedly very powerfull. Examples of this are AoV Holy Shotgun (too clunky for words IMO), Exlplosion Necro LoD (waiting is never fun IMO), Zuni WD (love a glass cannon, yeah…).
A little bit of buffing to popular sets to bring them closer together couldn’t hurt, nor would just buffing some less popular sets that are being left behind. And that is no way asking for a “GR Completion Pass”.