Starting at season 30, instead of rotating through seasons, I think it would be amazing to start combining them. For example, could you imagine having ethereal weapons plus an extra cube slot? Or if there’s a boring one like double goblins, combine it with the tree from season 28!
Some of us have been playing for over a decade, why not make some crazy themes that we can have fun with?
The altar will be permanent in all modes from season 30.
They will have to recombine seasonal content, because some are just way to underwhelming to stand on their own. Ethereals are quite dangerous in that regard. Especially if the Altar returns - in which form and however it will be adjusted.
Now, your suggestion. If you want wizards to grin from ear to ear, go ahead and bring it. But be aware that there’s Mang Song. That alone is an insane buff to Meteor already. Anyhow, it could be even crazier when they do what you suggested.
Keep in mind, Ethereals also include Oculus, a 1-H weapon wand with crazy ApoC, bonus damage some other nice affixes. That thing would allows us a full Meteor build with wand and source. Do we have a Meteor source? Well, not really, but Tal Rasha source isn’t too shabby with it’s bonus primary affix and +25% to Meteor. That source can roll AD, APoC, CHC on top of adding MaxAP. But the real deal is that you gain +1 set item, meaning you can now free one of the other set slots.
So, what happens when you add a fourth cube slot on top of that? You would be able to slot Swami in the cube, wear TR source and replace the TR belt with Fazula. Do I need to elaborate, why that would be insane? 
I’d imagine some of them may need to be combined to actually be an interesting season and others (like Ethereal) will not and already get a boost from base Altar.
Honestly I’m quite certain they will not repeat double goblins, if they do it will absolutely be combined. That’s like the meme theme at this point.
Since the Altar was announced to be a permanent addition, I suspect the chances of seeing seasons with combined themes will be somewhat slim. Alternatively, one can see every season as a combined theme with the Altar and something else - lol
If anything, I expect a lot of the power creep from the Ethereal, Soul Shards and Sanctified powers themes to be stripped and the Altar will provide the power creep. There’s just no way to balance the game so that the Altar with 4 cube slots offers enough power creep and not have the Altar and Ethereals, etc not be OP.
Agree. Double gobs, double bounties, triune, LON and possibly even RORG themes are out the door… they’re either part of the Altar buffs or too weak a theme alone.
What are all the seasonal themes (other than Ethereal weapons and no restrictions on cube slots)?
And then we doubled it… they can increase health\damage on mobs for that season… the beauty of seasons is they don’t have to be balanced, they are temporary … you can have a wiz dominant meta followed by a barb dominant one as long as its not “broken” being unbalanced is fine… its all about just having fun.
Its better to restrain altar’s power creep in favour for those themes. I am hoping altar provides QoL/Utility based abilities and season theme provides powers to rival NS paragons. Season A and B wont feel any different if power is sourced from altar alone. With capped paragon, likes of ethereal/soul shards/Sacred themes provides item hunt chases. Its not easy to obtain desirable gears under those themes and incentives to play for.
Yeah 100% this and that’s exactly what they’re doing. Otherwise you have base Altar overshine most themes and that just doesn’t make sense - mine as well just NS.
It should remain minor though, at this point it’s really okay to have crazy power creep seasons. Especially after this literally negative power creep S29 upcoming.
You can see them all here:
https://d3resource.com/seasons/index.php
But the ones of any significance:
I think the aim is to have the game on autopilot from S30… so no need to adjust mob health etc, etc going forward.
If there’s bugger all power from the Altar, we’re gonna have a lot of underpowered seasons before we get to the meaty stuff. The first 4 in the list above don’t offer much power creep. And both environmental effect themes don’t scale with your build power… they do a certain amount of damage by themselves regardless of your character’s dps.
I reckon if the Altar is able to get the Tals Meteor build with P1500 to GR140 in NS, we ought to be in a good spot. In S28, you could do GR150 at that point.
Then seasonal themes can provide the power creep for the remaining 10 GR levels, or NS players can grind paragons for the extra power needed for GR150.
Even on Autopilot, sometimes the pilot needs to intervene. Unless they want to add offline support and stop seasons altogether, some intervention will be needed, even if it is minimal.
Yes, but fiddling with mob health seems more than minimal. If it was, we’d see it done more often to balance the game experience.
Unless there’s evidence that seasons use their own mob health figures, and changes wouldn’t affect NS… I’d say that both NS and Seasons use the same mob health figures.
If I was sitting out a season and playing NS instead, I’d be plenty pissed off if all of a sudden, mob health doubled just to balance out the game experience for seasonal players and my NS GR achievable was reduced.
Have they said they’re going to tone down the altar in S30?
Yeah, combine echoing nightmares with followers update.
They sad “minor changes”
I think that they can disable an altar with power seasons such as 4th slot or crucibles also.
Weeeeell, I would remove Double Death’s Breath from the Altar and turn it into “Goblins spawn in Pairs”… because Double Death’s Breath is easily the most pointless one. Unless they add a huge DB sink.
Okay, double goblins might not be the best idea, though. If we want to stick to resources, then it should be “Triples the quantity of Reusable Parts, Arcane Dust and Veiled Crystals whenever they drop.”
As for those small time themes, double caches is part of the Altar already,
Double Goblins, Double Bloodshards, Double XP, Double Legendary droprate, double whatever … make those into a random community bonus of the day effect that runs in parallel to the season theme. Meaning, the bonus changes every day, could be a fixed cycle or at random, one day you get double goblins, the next is double XP and after that it could be double shards… just a thought.
As for recombining - one option would be to slap the cube themes and the free RoRG together. A season where we don’t have Ethereals, Soul Shards or Crucibles and the like could provide something like this instead:
Fourth Cube slot + Unrestricted Cube + Free RoRG
Depends on how they implement the Altar. I’m really curious about what kind of adjustments they will make.
I think it could be split into groups of themes, for example:
Group A - Ethereals, Soul Shards, Sanctified Powers
Group B - Killstreak effects, free cube slots, fourth cube slot
Group C - Triune rings, RoRG, and LoD effect
Group D - Rest which just fall away or become part of the altar or as timed bonus events.
Environmental effects got too much backlash and should just go, I would put them in group B and I didn’t have any problem with them but too many people despised them. And I am assuming Fissures will stay, I think too many people who want to play SSF are going to moan about having to do solo bounties.
So then you can say ok group A is strong enough that people will be happy with them on their own, B is really cool but people might not find them enough after how strong things got since Ethereals so might need to combine them with things and group C even more so.
And then you can make different versions of the altar now which are implemented depending on which group is used. So group A we have an altar that is only the QoL stuff, no damage or toughness, group B some power increase and group C the altar is basically like we have now.
If you have three versions of the altar it doesn’t require constant adjustment but also keeps all seasons at a level that is somewhat comparable.
Does that include NS?
I would think so as that would fall under the umbrella of “all”.