ThanatosVIs PTR Feedback:
It’s been quite a few years since I’ve done a post like this.
I wanted to share my feedback regarding S29 PTR changes.
I’m a Crusader Main therefore I will only cover Crusader and general changes no coverage of other classes.
Crusader Feedback:
The new Vigilante Belt feels great. It’s amazing fun to speed Farm with Fist of Heavens now. There are a few changes I’d like to have though.
- The new power is on yet another belt. If you want to equip one of the legendaries the Vigilante Belt is actually nicer from the stats, therefore I’d like to see the Khasett’s Belt Power to either be merged onto Vigilante Belt or move the Khasetts power to bracers.
With the new power being on a belt, we have to equip one and cube the other. There is no choice left anymore in that slot.
This kills the previous mainstay of Cpt.Crimsons.
The build works with Guardian/Aughilds instead of Cpt.Crimsons but it would be way nicer if we can keep the choice here.
If one power is on a belt and the other on bracers we always have the option which one to cube, which to equip and which crafted set to use. - The tooltip is very vague on how much damage gets added. Is it 100% bonus damage even without buffs?(since we’re at 100% movement speed then) Does the Speedbuff of Steed Charge count in itself or only static movement speed from character sheet?
- Make the power stay active for 5 seconds after you ride the horse. On Bossfights you lose DPS when you decide to attack manually instead or horsing around
→ Please move Khasetts legendary power to bracers or merge on top of the Vigilante Belt
→ Clarify the Tooltop on how the bonus damage calculation works
→ Keep the power active for 5s after using Steed Charge
Akkhan’s Leniency
The stacks get lost during Rift Guardian spawn and stacking up the power is hard during bossfights and in low density.
→ Reduce the max stacks and increase the power per stack to rebalance.
→ Optionally also gain several stacks on Elite/Boss hits.
Invoker (even if unchanged in patch)
The set could use some more engaging gameplay. Bombardment is already a core component of the Set, so please add a damage multiplier to the 6pc bonus to make it a Generator + Bombardment build.
Suggested (6) Set:
The attack speed of Punish and Slash are increased by 100% and deal 67,500% of your Thorns damage and the damage of bombardment is increased by 1600%.
Rolands, Seeker of Light(also unchanged in patch)
These old Sets should just receive number changes, especially on the Shield bash Variant of Rolands.
Same goes for other classes.
Paragon Cap 800:
For one season this might be fine, but if this is to stay around for future seasons it should be increased to 2-3k.
In future seasons there will be the altar and extra power (higher speed GRs) which makes us gain xp faster again.
Also the cap “kills” Speed GRs as one of the contents we can play.
After hitting the cap it’s only about getting the correct gear, level the gems and then push.
After paragon cap and leveling the gems you need for your build, there is no reason to play more Rifts for the remaining time of the season.
Getting the correct gear will partially be done with the Visions of Enmity, due to the higher reroll options (more on that in the Feedback to this new feature)
From past experience you reach ~1400 Paragon by the time your main build is decked out in augmented ancients and your pushing gems are levelled. The cap should never be below that.
If someone grinds out several builds or even classes it’s realistic to reach 2k Paragon by the time the gear for those is in good shape.
For those that just like the steady grind I think 3k would be a good cap, in order to limit the effect of botting but at the same time keep the sense of progression for those that want to play the season in the long run.
→ Increase cap to 3k
New Paragon distribution
The Movement Speed node seems horribly tuned atm.
→ Keep movement speed at 0.5% per point but also keep the limit at 50 for this node only.
The other options seem very imbalanced right now
40% CDR are ~6 maxrolls of CDR on gear, while 20% Crit Chance are about 3.
Area Damage is Massive now 200% are 8! full gear rolls of area damage and doesn’t have meaningfull competition in this section (except for maybe Resource Cost Reduction when paired with Cpt. Crimsons). This becomes worse since some builds (e.g. Akkhan Phalanx) do not proc area damage at all. This shifts balance in a weird way.
→ Rebalance the stats to reflect similar opportunity cost. Their shouldn’t be a clear strongest in each category.
Visions of Enmity
These are the new activity in the open world.
The Fissures are nice and fun. The rewards on T16 are great and help with the tedious bounty farming.
As they are tuned on PTR this would become a nice endgame activity to reroll your items since they drop a lot of Bounty mats and Forgotten Souls.
Please don’t reduce the spawn rate like you did with Echoing nightmares after the PTR
They are T16 content and no challenge at all. Therefore their special monster affixes don’t have any meaningfull contribution.
They are supposed to become more challenging as you go deeper into them, however they never become an actual challenge.
In my opinion the final rewards chest should include a new item like a “Visions of Enmity Scream”.
This item should be useable in town to open harder Visions of Enmity, BUT with a difficulty selector for “equivalent GR” level.
Like this the new Feature could also become challenging content, and since we are opening them from the town we could prepare by equipping the right gear.
If they were just to scale to more difficulty the deeper we go, we would have to port back and switch gear during fissures, since we always encounter them in our T16 bounty build.
Rewards of the harder Visions of Enmity could be dramatically increased chance on Primals or a new material that can be used to upgrade Ancient items into Primals with the exact same affixes (no random rerolling and no cap on how many you can equip) (and even more bounty mats)
If we don’t get the “harder version” from my suggestions and the spawn rate of visions of Enmity gets reduced, please increase the rewards to compensate.
Maybe with higher Primal droprate, or a new material that can be used to upgrade Ancient items into Primals with the exact same affixes (no random rerolling)
I see Visions of Enmity as content to “perfect our gear” while GRs are content to “maximize our Paragon”
As a seasonal Theme the Visions of Enmity are lacking, but they are a great addition to the base game.
→ make them permanent
→ Add “Visions of Enmity Screams” and harder Version triggered from town
→ increase primal dropchance or add a material to their drops, which lets us upgrade Ancient items with exact same affixes into Primals
→ currently it feels like their reward is a good amount of Bounty Materials, their Primal dopchance feels unchanged (so if it’s already increased it’s not noteable)
Option 2
Instead of “Vision of enmity screams” move the portals from the Overworld to Rift guardian bosses. That way the Fissures will offer challenges, since they could scale with the selected GR difficulty. Rewards should be adjusted accordingly (Bounty mats, +high primal chance/material to upgrade Ancients to primals with exact same affixes)
Random other suggestions:
Oreks Dream
Give us a chance on an Oreks Dream consumeable during a GR, so that we can trigger them when we “need” them for pushing.
S29 puts a lot of focus on pushing by capping the grinding.
Rift fishing during the pushing attempts is tedious and could be solved if Oreks Dream can be triggered on demand.
Droprate of the Item could be the same as the current chance on Oreks Dream rifts.
Follower
Share followers across each character (suggested by geto)
It would be a nice QoL change to let us deck out our followers once and use them on all our characters in the same gamemode.
Altar adjustments
The Altar is confirmed to return in an adjusted format with S30.
→ Auto salvaging white/blue/yellow items should also include auto pickup of white/blue/yellow mats
→ the passive Damage and Damage reduction nodes were equal buffs to all builds, maybe don’t remove all of these
Guaranteed item rolls
Some items roll with guaranteed stats. This makes it either easier or harder to find them in a “good roll”
Please change the guaranteed roll of
- “Ring of Royal Grandeur” to have guaranteed socket or crit stats. It’s not possible to have a CC / CD / socket RoRG which makes it a “must” to cube it.
- “Krysbins” also rolls rather unfortunate please also add Crit and socket to the guaranteed rolls.
- Guardian set, this is a mainstat + vitality focused set. They should always roll with both guaranteed and the rest of affixes random
Mystic
→ Let us reroll one primary AND secondary each.
Currently it’s very hard to build thorns builds unless they are guaranteed.
Yes this will increase overall power but the increase is nowhere near the altar power or other seasonal theme powers.
More Feedback to come later