Last night I played my Ice Shards Sorc from 90 to 93. Took me about 3 hours.
On my previous session I found a nice upgrade to my amulet, so I needed to farm a new wrathful heart, If there was any changes to the seasonal dungeons I couldn’t felt any.
All the things we dislike about it, remained unchanged. (killing the malignant elites twice, waiting around).
Afterwards I went into a Hell Tide that had about 30 minutes left, the packs of monsters didn’t felt larger, but the space between packs felt closer to each other, so I didn’t felt the need to mount up as often, and when I did I was dismounting almost immediately.
This was pretty good. I managed to get both chest of mystery and one additional armor chest. I think in the full hour I would get a bunch more chests.
But, the difficulty of the HT feel on the easy side, compared to NM because on NM dungeons we can target a specific monster level, and I’m gravitating to prefer monsters being 12-15 levels higher than me. Factoring in speed, challenge, fun factor and efficiency.
On this regard I don’t enjoy hell tides as much anymore because it’s only 3 levels difference.
The open world is much worse in this aspect because is lagging 5 levels behind, so, not only is boring but also the loot and experience feels like a “waste of time”.
I ended my session with NM dungeons. I was lucky to find a druid who was around and invited me to join him, we were doing NM tier 40 to 50, and even-though he was level 88, I think he was doing waaaay more damage than me, he was a werewolf with tornadoes, sucking every enemy in the screen and enemies were just kinda dying in a trail behind him.
He did got killed twice whereas me did not died once tho.
Some NM dungeons feel about the same, and some dungeons seem hugely improved.
Halls of the dammed, still feels pretty bad for the following reasons, one you need to go into the portals, and destroy a thing, AND WALK BACK, and repeat this process twice, which is a huge time sink, and second, the doors in the second half of the dungeon, take too long to open, and the monsters packs are not more numerous, I think in particular because it would be too difficult to deal with so many fast attacking ranged monsters.
I think that dungeon needs to be pulled out of the NM dungeon pull and be on the short list for a dev review and overhaul.
I think dungeons events need to start immediately after the player interacts with it, this would make the pace of the game feel more fun.
But in general, many of the NM dungeons feel a lot nicer to play, at least in the speed farming level range.
As for my experience with my class the Sorc. I have yet to try any fire or lightning spec, I’ll probably give it a try in the weekend, I think I have more gear towards lightning, but we’ll see.
Currently I’m giving a second chance to the unique item, “the occulus”.
For speed clearing I think I’m liking it, but for pushing I get the feeling the random element of evade will get me killed eventually. Not a fan of that.
I find it that you need to change the way you think about evade, considering we often need to evade out of a group of monsters we just teleported into and sucked in with Raiment of the infinite, sometimes you evade almost next to were you are, stunning monsters a second time, building unnecessary Diminishing Returns, and sometimes you evade into a different room, it’s just nerv wrecking. And then, some of the time it teleports you into stuff that is about to explode.
So yesterday, because I wasn’t pushing the difficulty too much, I managed to survive all the wacky things the occulus got me into, but, I must admit that sometimes it teleports you into a nice position and the shorter cool down of teleport is pretty darn nice.
But the thing is that evade, should be a reliable ability. You don’t want your escape ability to seal your fate and get you into even more trouble.
But again, yesterday, seeing the druid play-style, and that guy showed an unique item he got during our session, that doesn’t have any counter intuitive mechanic, it’s just a bunch of “nice to have” stats and effects, I don’t understand why so many Sorc unique items have all these negative effects.
Even Raiment of the infinite, which has a pretty desirable effect, doesn’t come with ANY damage mitigation affixes, so even-though the effect is pretty nice to have, you are very aware you are becoming that much easier to get killed. And considering that the way we equip ourselves prior to getting Raiment, is a chest with not only affixes such as armor, hit points and damage reduction, but we also include a legendary power that usually further mitigates damage, when we transition into Raiment, we loose a ton of damage reduction properties.
Anyways, I’m just ranting about this because yesterday I saw druids don’t seem to make any choice like this, is just, get more damage, and more utility and no sacrifice. lol
So far I’m very much liking patch 1.1.1. tho.