I think it’s more annoying, personally. Not remotely challenging, just annoying.
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After all that testing the Two Builds that weren’t tested are getting buffed and will be on top again. GoD DH and Mundunugu’s WD. 
(Edited: I forgot about that Busted Meteor Wizard that got ignored. That will be on top as well).
It’s been recently made aware that the patrons of this establishment can’t detect sarcasm. So I’m just going to be an idiot and roll a Crusader Friday night.
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All that testing? It was only a week and y’all ran around with Red Soul Gem in helm that you can’t even get this season refreshing OP pylons like crazy - what did you expect? 
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Ya’ll? Um OK. Way to disparage the entire PTR testing group. 
There’s a huge difference between “challenging” and “never ending time sink that stalls your season journey”. I killed hundreds and hundreds of uniques in multiple set dungeons on the PTR. After several hundred kills I had 1 page and it was the other one, not Neverending Questions. We’re already going to have the “joy” of hunting for the Gibbering Gemstone. Another requirement that pointless would’ve ended the season for many players.
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Not saying everyone, not saying you, but the vast majority did. Sure I did day 1…easier to level but then took it off. I’m just saying in general PTR testers have a bad habit of playing clearly unintended mechanics for far too long then say they never listen. It’s just ironic.
This new requirement is going to be a significant time sink, it’s just one that means players don’t have to leave their purple dungeon.
I’m not sure the vast majority even know that gem exists.
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isnt it just gather 4 sets of your class, go to leorics with 1 set, get tome, do it on next class set x4?
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Really? Because I get so many set pieces while farming that I think it’ll be a breeze. Especially with RoRG letting you get by with only 5. And it’s not like you even have to run the set dungeons… Just port to Leoric’s Manor… walk inside and pick up the page from the podium. Maybe you’ll spend 15 minutes of time stashing gear and walking to the podium 4 times. Tops. You don’t the weapons/buff items/etc. for the sets or ancients just any 6 (or 5) pieces and you’re good to go.
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Fair argument, but everyone I ran into in the PTR and all the leaderboards were full of em.
Anyway just wish they would have done something to make the shrines more attractive than, especially Fortune but at least those will still last 10 minutes so an entire GR or multiple rifts/bounties of CDR, attack speed, movement speed bonuses are still very nice to have.
Only need to run there once. Just town portal, grab the next set parts put them on, use the portal and click the book again with each set. Alternatively, you can just carry enough parts for all 4 sets to the book and swap them on the spot.
Consider this is node 19. Do you think the kind of player to “quickly” acquire 4 sets does so before they could do a GR110?
IMO, and maybe I’m wrong, this is a pretty significant speed bump now.
I don’t disagree. I think many of us saw this kind of solution coming because it’s one of the easiest to implement. That doesn’t mean it’s how it should have happened, but that’s just how game development often goes.
Right and we just assumed they’d remove all pylons so at least they did keep Power and I guess since removing = more chance to get Power than reducing it’s duration makes sense too otherwise you’d get runs that have Power the entire time. Eh that’s just +16-20 tiers c’mon let that slide 
So if we can still get Shrine effects, more often and @ 10 minute duration that’s at least still 25% attack speed, 25% movement, 25% DR, 50% CD for most of the GR if you’re NOT Fortunate (see what I did there?).
So not bad, just a bit disappointing.
It’s way better than a hundred runs thru a set dungeon. Multiple people had racked up numbers like that so it wouldn’t have been atypical. By the time you get to node 19 I think it’ll be much more like you’ll have multiple sets (remember you can do them from any class) I’ll admit, perhaps I’m wrong about that. But I know how to get sets and with the cube you can take wrong pieces and get the ones you want. I have zero idea on how to improve the chances of getting that cursed page to drop.
Apparently neither did Blizzard.
It was nice though to have something that got you off the beaten path a bit. The game was never meant to be endless GR grinding at Mach 10. You had to do bounties to get neph keys to get GR keys, so the percentage of time just doing GRs was relatively small. The Altar seemed like an attempt to at least provide some incentive to do something other than speed GRs so this solution, to me, is less than ideal. Just feels like a speed bump now, nothing more.
I do think the real theme of the season is “Go do a bunch of stuff you probably wouldn’t normally do and we’ll give you buffs for doing them!” Which isn’t a terrible idea for a theme but it also shows how meaningless many of those tasks were.
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If people didn’t do that here then it wouldn’t be the Diablo Forums