How many hours do you throw in the first week? Cuz there are players who take that first weekend off and can put in 30-40 hours in those first 3 days.
Another thing with groups is, they share items. You can gear and progress a lot faster when people are dropping things you need, sharing EN’s, and sharing Ramalamadingdongs.
Groups not only have the advantage of group xp buffs, but group speed xp runs tend to hit 10-15 GR levels higher than a solo person is going to do. Z buffs and play styles allow groups to clear higher content than solo in the same time span.
Well, if you want to do the high paragon thing, you need to play the meta builds. Not my design, but it is the way it is. The people getting high paragon legit or not, are main playing a small set of 6-8 builds.
Personally, I rarely play meta builds (only when the theme makes the builds I like meta). I also rarely play groups as I do not like to play a Z. This is a main reason I do not have 5000 paragon career, much less in a season. I play what I want to play when I want to play it.
So you aren’t satisfied with decent balance for a 3 month period out of 12 years of game life?
Trust me, this has been a big sticking point of mine for the life of this game.
[/quote]
Yes, but note that I didn’t say or even hinted everyone had chosen to prioritize playing. Some have it even worse than you, they have chosen not to play D3 at all and therefore only use zero hours per day.
But your uncalculated times are not terribly far either also (in case your travel is related to your work and unreported time can be used for D3 and travel is for work). Note that I mentioned normal 5d/week work days and you can do the awesome grinding at weekends.
1.5h per weekday
1.5+8+2.5=12h
Total 31,5h/w
Average 4,5h/d
→ You can do it if you play just a little more efficiently and a little more. Maybe 6 weeks
But seriously, we were talking about gamers, not person who does something else by choice. For example my workday:
work time 7.5h, includes forum time like this post at coffee breaks
Sports 0,5h (gym at work)
Travel 1h
Shop 0,25h (once or twice a week a supermarket visit, this is average)
Making food + eat 1h
Sleep 6h (a little more on weekends)
Random stuff that comes up 0,75h
This leaves 7h at workdays and considerably more on weekends for totally free hobbies (again - with a full time job). I don’t use that fully for D3 except near season start + I don’t play efficiently - but timewise I can average easily 8h/d D3 playtime, and I must admit that there are full work weeks in my history where I did so.
And why am I not 5k para yet - I actually probably have enough play hours for that but still am only 3,6k: I never play in XP farm group, in my groups “wasted” time is often more than run time + we play too high levels to be efficient and even wrong builds. And also solo I never play more than 1h efficiently continuously - and most often prefer higher levels which are less efficient. I probably have done once in my life more than 10T/h for a full hour in a group and maybe 7T/h solo. But people are different and some enjoy max efficiency runs.
Not that same old song again please…
As a matter of fact, and objectively speaking, paragon rewards are already severely diluted as it is today (because of the scaling of exp needed as you go higher and higher). It would make more sense to increase the bonus exp for SSF players at least.
Don’t confuse with pushing high GRs and best players. They are NOT the same. For too many seasons I have seen players ONLY rank high cos of mega paragon. Take that away from them and they are rather ordinary players.
That’s just luck, and not skill though.
Agreed. Which is why paragon rewards need to be severely nerfed, especially for group play.
Probably. The question is, why isn’t Blizzard doing anything? 1 ban wave a season is a complete joke.
I honestly don’t know either. I haven’t played on PC since 2012 and have never botted.
Yes, very true. I work every Saturday, and every 2nd Sunday. So I guess that answers that question. I am somewhat hampered by stubbornly sticking to DH and my preferred s6 impale build. Not gonna lie. It can’t push as high as many other power builds and gear drop rates are obviously linked to rift levels and GR levels. As are mats such as veiled crystals and forgotten souls, etc.
Yes, that is also true. Since I am playing SSF these days, that point is moot for me.
Then the group synergy is OVER powered, isn’t it? Reduce group synergy and group rewards. Will solve a lot of the games problems. Diablo 2 and the original Diablo, both better games than Diablo 3, didn’t rely on a paragon system and were just fine without it.
Balancing isn’t hard. Blizzard is just both inept and lazy. I stand by that criticism.
I work every Saturday and every 2nd Sunday. I have a mortgage to pay. I’d rather not be working myself to the bone at age 55, but it is what it is. Work and income are more important to me than a game. Most of my R&R is dedicated to my birding photography (shameless plug - www dot davepastern dot com). Getting good bird images takes time - the birds don’t always show up, or don’t give you a good pose or good behaviour of interest. Sometimes the light is crappy or it rains en route to a destination. Birding photography has been a massive boon to my mental health over the past 2 years and far more important than any game.
I also have health issues (shoulders, wrists and lower back) that preclude me from being a no lifer gamer. It’s not good for your eyes either (or your brain).
I reiterate my earlier point that a game should reward someone based on their skill and not time invested.
Paragon nerf idea has not much to do with possibility to do 150s start of season. Paragon is relatively low multiplier, some ballbark figure like 2x power for 10x more time invested for otherwise equally good players. It’s just about relative power of two players.
For 150s the reason is that there are so many multipliers same time, and some of them real big. Some 100x multipliers and lots of 2x-10x multipliers and some 1.5x on top of that. If multipliers were a little more reasonable, nobody would do 150s even with max paragon.
Something that tool doesn’t factor in is keystone farming time which is fine if you’re farming keys while you’re sleeping… *cough cough*
I did once suggest to wudi that the tool should show how many keys we’d need to achieve that and he liked the idea but obviously it never got added. If I was at my PC I’d do the maths but I’m busy doomscrolling instead of sleeping.
Farming never seems to gets factored in when these guys try so hard to promote fake scenarios that no one does.
So much possible scenarios yet, not probable for a game this old and plagued with cheaters.
If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, doesnt mean it has the probability of being a mastadon, its a duck gents. No sugar coating needed when spotting a cheater in D3.
We finally saw legit players get rank1, so I would argue it was the best D3 season for competitiveness ever.
Go in game, lookup SSF barb rank1, then get back to reality. Max is a true pro and surpassed the botters. You need to do research before you continue your allegations buddy, it looks petty and not sure what your angle is anymore if you continue to ignore facts.
Yes botters can be beat if we are given an environment to do so like frequent bans or paragon caps. So far, only the paragon cap has worked since the bans are basically non effective or frequent enough to matter.
Looking at it objectively, the comment you made was that legit players get rank 1. Depending on the format others play, they may not see exactly what you are seeing. If you tell a PS player that the top on the boards are legit, they’ll probably raise a brow to you, unknowing you play on a different platform.
Ya, this has been a problem with the game since the middle of Vanilla.
My solution is to add a follower only legendary gem that would the follower’s power to scale with the player’s power. This way, they will actually be useful in combat and not simply walking, talking buffs.
If you look at the Rank 1 Barbarian, who isn’t even paragon 5000 yet (though close), he still is averaging 15 hours a day, every day. That’s completely unrealistic for like 99.99% of players (job, other responsibilities, etc.)
Groups are getting the same experience in roughly 75 hours faster (about 13 hours/day, every day).
The solution Blizz gave us was SSF so you could compare yourself to other players who didn’t have the ability to group up or cookie bot. I think that’s a fairly simple solution rather than trying to make the apples and oranges comparison an equality.
I like blues and jazz. I like pretty much every music genre other than R&B and death metal.
yeah it’s a fave tactic of botters LOL.
You gotta remember that we, the solo/SSF players are heavily outnumbered by group players who’s only concern is protecting their divested interest in keeping the game balance in their direction.
A good idea. Works for me.
As I called them, “no lifers”.
Yes, true, although it would have been nice to have “solo” and be able to still play with friends sometimes without the paragon disadvantage hurting my solo pushes.
In the scenarios I used, each GR was done with 3 minutes for the run, and 30 seconds in town between them, i.e. 3.5 minutes per run and they played for 12 hours each day.
GR130s = 21.43 days @ 12 hours per day = 15,429.6 minutes. Divided by 3.5 = 4,408 runs / keys.
GR140s = 13.16 days @ 12 hours per day = 9,475 minutes. Divided by 3.5 = 2,707 runs / keys.
GR150s = 8.08 days @ 12 hours per day = 5,818 minutes. Divided by 3.5 = 1,662 runs / keys.
Assuming those keys were farmed with full altar / follower with bonus key set that means you can get between 3 and 8 GR keys per NR. Let’s assume 5 per NR and it takes 90 seconds per NR + town time. So…
For GR130s, at 4,408 keys required, that’s 881.6 NRs / 1,322.4 minutes = 22.04 hours
For GR140s, at 2,707 keys required, that’s 541.4 NRs / 812.1 minutes = 13.535 hours
For GR150s, at 1,662 keys required, that’s 332.4 NRs / 498.6 minutes = 8.31 hours
So, it’s between 8.5 and 22 hours to get enough GR keys to do enough GRs to get from Paragon 1 to 5000.