Seasonal Buff Feedback

PTR Feedback
1

Where to get started with the seasonal buff;
Problems

-Add to the lag scenario
-Buff is really hard to keep up transitioning between floors
-If you are playing an elite killer spec your going to see next to no benefit in solo
-If there is any gap or hard to kill mobs you will be losing the buff in high grs for sure especially in 4 man while grouping mobs up.
-The buff is super underwhelming and very hard to get to max stack seen maybe 600 max and had to change floors and lost the buff.
-The animations feel like they are coming from the mobs which can be a little distracting.

Solutions
-Increase the baseline duration of the proc
-Reduce the stacks so its easier to achieve
-The powers that are generated at different stack levels should be rethought/reworked.

Personally I have always wanted to see a Hellfire Amulet season buff where we get double the effect of the chosen passive but cant get everything.

2 Likes
2

For a bonus that was designed to stick with the character it doesn’t really stay active all that well.

The buff to damage and movement speed is nice, and having scale with kills is interesting, however, it drops way too frequently and doesn’t stack back up quickly. It reminds me of the old design of Taeguk, which I assume was removed for good reason.

It would be much better if the stacking buff were permanent, or there were some other means to stack up. Say, giving extra stacks for killing elites (or from progression orbs).
This would allow elite focused builds to also stack up adequately.

Another method might be to ramp up damage based on a mixture of both progression and kills. Meaning: half of the stacking bonus ramps up over the course of the rift, and the other half comes from the on kill stacks. This imo, is fairer to those builds that are not trash focused, or don’t attack often (blade dh, impale, starpact, wd / necro pet builds, for example).

Or, as suggested, the ability to stack back up quickly after dropping stacks. Example. I drop stacks after 500. Ramping back up to 500 then gives 50 stacks per kill instead of 1, and after 500 it would revert to one stack per kill.

At a bare minimum the duration need to be significantly increased. As mentioned I would prefer permanent.

I will test the on kill proc bonuses and return with more feedback.

2 Likes
3

The stacks could drop off gradually: after the 5 seconds timeout, you start losing 10 stacks every second instead of losing them all.

With an SSD and playing DH so that I could attack from a distance, I still lose the stacks just entering some new areas.

2 Likes
4

I’ve really enjoyed the buff, much more than the triune in the current season. I haven’t had any lag issues, and have had a few times where the tail end of a buff has followed me thru a portal. I do have one criticism: as a ranged DH, I would like the buff effects to begin at my cursor, where the mobs are, rather than directly around my character. Also, maybe add a touch of color to the tornadoes, so I can distinguish them from the damaging ones the RG throws at me :smiley:

1 Like
5

I’ve tested the seasonal bonus a bit more, both in Speed and in Push with a few variants of Vyr Cold Chantodo. Here is my feedback after this experience.

In general, I’d like to get higher move speed and damage bonus quicker. If that means cutting the max stack count to 500 or 750, but scaling the damage similar as it is now (max 100%) I’d be okay with that.

I’ll reiterate the need for permanent, or extremely slowly degrading stack count. This would prevent or limit issues with players abusing dropping stack to reuse on kill effects to destroy elite packs and density.

For the on kill effects, general:

  • I like that these on kill effects actually have an impact on gameplay.
  • I don’t like that some of these on kill effects can be abused for purposes of clearing the rift.
  • Felt spacing / pacing is fairly good between on kill effects.
  • Certain effects felt very short or didn’t cover as much area as I’d hoped.
  • 15 Kills: Five massive energy twisters are unleashed

I felt the twisters were really cool for a starter bonus, they stay up a long time, which is nice, and don’t always wander where you want them, making it engaging to pull your enemies into them.

Perhaps they deal too much damage for the starter bonus. Slight reduction please.

Con: Makes me miss playing Twister build on wizard.

  • 30 Kills: Dark Geysers form beneath enemies

Not enough geysers, and they need to be spread out more, if possible. Increase to duration would be nice.

Can lower the damage if they last longer and more are spawned.

  • 50 Kills: Exploding Chickens seek and destroy

Needs more chickens to spawn. Damage felt low compared to other effects, but I feel more chickens would solve that.

  • 100 Kills: Corpses rain from the sky

Slightly longer duration would be nice.

  • 150 Kills: A wide Frost Nova freezes enemies

Needs to deal some more damage to the enemies hit, or apply a debuff of some kind, making enemies more vulnerable. Seeing as it’s a one time effect, and only freezes at current.

A flat 25-40% of total health in damage to anything in range would feel amazing, or perhaps debuffing, increasing damage against that target by 50-100%.

  • 200 Kills: Treasure chests fall from the sky

Loving the theme from this one and the fact that it’s a little random on chest drops.

Needs to have a significantly longer duration.

  • 300 Kills: A ring of fire engulfs everything

Damage feels underwhelming for such a high kill streak bonus.

Enemies close up to the character upon spawn don’t appear to be hit all that much.

Would be cooler if multiple rings of fired off in succession, spaced a second or two apart. This would let the player aim the bonus.

  • 400 Kills: Meteors hail from above

My favorite! Starfall is amazing.

Duration is really short though. Needs to be at least doubled for such a high level bonus.

Perhaps triple the duration but decrease the damage some.

  • 500 Kills: Angels descend upon the battlefield to fight for your cause

Angels should not die to monster attacks.

Angels deal way too much damage to RG. Suggest limiting max amount possible damage that can be dealt to the RG by seasonal bonuses to 50% of RG health. This would make it such that it’s still a really good goal to shoot for, but not something to rely on in a push. While killing the RG in one hit is neat, it’s feels like a cheat.

EDIT (10/25/2019): On the upside, if this does go through as-is, we can play those trash centric builds that we’ve always wanted to run, but not wanted to fish RGs for, and in this sense, it does “change things up” considerably for a season, both for solo and group. Downside: some high damage, leaderboard topping builds such as LoD32/Bazooka might be able to benefit even more from this than other builds, and therefore widen the gap further.

  • 1000 Kills: ???

Feels unattainable without summoner / tiny mob type and every elite pack illusionist.
Cut to 500 or 750 or so (or 666 :smile:, per Baskenater), and scale the bonus to stay the same, even at this lower amount.

Or, as mentioned previously, scale half the bonus (50%) with progression of the rift, and the other half (50%) with a 500 stack maximum.

1 Like
6

I like the buff to reset it keeps the effects up most the time twisters and geysers. Thats why the ww build is doing so well. The damage is good and will get me to play seasons. Nerf the effects and whats the use of a season buff.

7

Also have the buff removed when going to town so no cheap cow lvl tricks.

1 Like
8

If there is any gap or hard to kill mobs you will be losing the buff in high grs for sure especially in 4 man while grouping mobs up.

You are wrong, buff stacks are refreshing by just attacking any mob, so if there are hard to kill mobs, you will not gain more stacks, but keep refreshing them until you kill something.

1 Like
9

This pandamonium bonus needs to re-thinked. This way players wanna get the effects of the stacks at certain breakpoints and in the end if the RG wont die from those 1 hitters, they open new game fishing the good map.

First we need a way to be in the need of not losing those stacks.

This cow lvl thing was already exploited if we remember that manald heal-rg killer-archon playstyle. They can easily fix this problem with a “you lose all your stacks when you go through any portals”.

If the bonus speed stays that’s cool, running faster is always come in handy.

The effect’s dmg could scale with the player’s stats and buffs, not the GR tier lvl like the conduit’s dmg.

I think the player’s damage buff could go higher (up to +500%) next to a defense buff (up to +60%) this way if you play well you could reach higher than as much as your your paragon and gear would allow you to go.

10

That’s an interesting concept, RohamBilly, and it might actually work.

I suppose if you spaced out the on kill bonuses more evenly, especially at the beginning, being farther apart from one another.

And also increased the benefit from the stackable bonus, then it simply might not be as desireable to use the (currently 15-100) on kill effects and reset stacks method throughout the rift.

This would increase GR clears for every class. I’m pretty sure they don’t want us to feel to bad the season after if we don’t get as powerful of a seasonal bonus. :grinning:

However, it’s definitely an option, especially if combined with damage output decreases to some of the on-kill activation effects.

1 Like
11

Honestly there were already many good season theme or “buff” already. My problem is that Blizz thinking only in seasons not the entire game. For example we could have the Rorg effect, the Lon effect ( so they did not have to make the LOD gem) the occulus effects, these pandemonium effects after some rework. These mixed up the game causing more diversity in builds and gameplay.

And if some1 says the GR 150 is not challanging now they could solve it with a multiplier. For example the GR monster hp/dmg could be scaled up with X100/70, and all the gem lvls in game could be scaled down with X70/100.

1 Like
12

These are great points Rohambilly. I quite enjoyed the theorycrafting side of the game when RoRG and LoN seasonal bonuses came around, despite them being appraised as “boring” by many. As also indicated by Riv and Bagstone (of d3planner and d3resource respectively), large upticks in player activity occurred around the time these seasonal themes.

I think if there’s anything I miss it would be this feeling I had when those bonuses were introduced.

While Triune and Pandemonium are and are looking to be great, fun bonuses that you might adjust build playstyles or run a more trash or elite focused variation on push, they definitively aren’t as build altering or defining across the entirety of your suite of builds (nephalem, speed, bounty etc).

For Grandeur, I even made alts so I wouldn’t lose out on the experience of having them, but still ended up not being able to experience it fully (missed out on monk).

Downside with the approach of a RoRG or LoN style bonus is you inevitably give some classes more power than others from this bonus (charge Barb, monk, DH, etc. with RoRG).

However, the great thing is, players care less about not receiving as much power from this type of theme on their main, because they are so busy enjoying the theme on their favorite class or classes.

I would love it if this type of seasonal theme could see a return (or be added in addition to some other active effect per Triune or Pandemonium). I’m thinking along the lines of a 4th cube or gem slot, for example.

One other good point is if this type of theme is very good and well received, it is more likely to be included in the main game, after season ends, as the LoD gem was.

I remember one of the cool things about PoE is that they hold these separate legacy leagues where many of the previous bonuses from leagues would be mixed in together. It was a lot of fun, especially as a new player who had not experienced those bonuses before.

Adding a separate season such as this would be amazing. You’d be able to experience many of the seasonal bonuses you might have missed out on. Be able to enjoy them again.

1 Like
13

I definitely enjoyed the RoRG season buff as it allowed me to bring back a old build I used to use from early RoS which was a Vyr’ Rasha build, as of now I’m unable to use such a build.