The Dev update is over here are the highlights:
Season of Witchcraft
- Goes over all the things noted in the Blog, nothing new here yet, the Raven pet’s name is Dorian.
- Decided to use Witchcraft powers to help boost your alts. Unlock a Witchcraft power it unlocks for your entire account. Please Note that REPUTATION rewards are not linked, and you can continue to get those on your alts.
- There’s 4 lost powers of Withcraft that you can’t get anywhere else. Can be found in Dungeons or ‘other’ places. Wasn’t specific.
- Rootholds - Micro-Dungeons, contain concentrated population of Headrotten and their rewards.
- Require new Whispering Wood Sigil dropped from Whisper Caches and Silent Chests.
- Similar to Hellbreaches, you can do multiple rites and ceremonies for increased danger/rewards. (think of banes/boons in infernal hordes, you’ll come to an area that has you click on options)
- Heads + Gem Fragments will allow you to craft the Occult Gems to socket into your jewelry.
- They build on top of the Witchcraft powers, providing item and skill bonuses for certain Witchcraft combinations.
- Updated the Tree of Whispers ‘Town’. Tree of whispers is now farther to the right, anything you would find in any other town is at the tree of whispers.
- Raven of the Tree’s are found in the new Witchcraft Helltides so you can turn in your whispers on the fly without having to go back to the Tree of Whisper area.
- New Ancestral Caches guaranteed to have 1 or more Ancestrals.
Season Journey
- Early Chapters have been reworked to help more casual players get to the endgame.
- Later chapters, especially Ch. 7 have been reworked to provide more aspirational challenges.
- Earn Dorian the Raven from completing Chapter 7, first Flying Pet.
PTR 2.1
MP Headhunts felt overwhelming for new players.
- Targerted reduction in the number of Elites
- Reduced ‘bad luck protection’ for boss cocoon spawns.
- reduced the number of low value item drops.
- Reduced the number of active headhunt zones.
- Added a new Hud Element in 2.1.1 (roughly 2 weeks out from launch)
- Headrotten, especially Bosses, were not challenging enough.
- Increased Headrotten Barrier effect.
- Gave Headrotten a small percentage of damage reduction.
- Headrotten bosses were not rewarding enough.
- increased their rewards.
- Some players didn’t understand how to earn/upgrade Witchcraft
- Each Altar contains the same inventory.
- Rewrote certain Tooltip descriptors.
Class Updates
Ultimate Skill Builds
- Flashy and Fun
- Scaling was too high
Summons Update
- More consistently powerful
- They basically inherit all of your stats, crit, lucky hit, main stat, etc.
- Shadowclone should feel a lot more powerful
- Fixed several summon bugs
Crowd Control
- Too much incidental Crowd Control can make combat less engaging
- Wordly Fortune Tempering Manual
- Fists of Fate
- Found more people opting to use passive ways to crowd control rather then requiring the player to use an ability to do so.
- No change in Season 7, but this is on our radar for the future
Barbarian
- Performing Solidly, they are happy where it ended up
- Hammer of the Ancient Buffs
- Whirlwind Buff
- New Unique Chest - Hammer of the Ancients forms a seismic line, if that conects with an earthquake, the earthquake explodes.
Sorceress
- Weakest Class on PTR
- Many buffs on passive effects
- Searing Heat and Icefall - made some tweaks to allow them to be more generically applicable
- Firebolt enchantment - Dealing burning damage has a 10% chance to heal you for 4% max life and unleash a fire bolt at a nearby enemy. (rank 5/5)
- Two Unique Focuses, Foci, Focus’?
- Strike of Stormhorn - Ball Lightning splashes on impact, can also randomly turn into a Super Ball Lightning.
- Okun’s Catalyst - Ball Lightning Orbits you, more details in the blog.
Druid
- Bugged Build on PTR - Hilarious damage into the negatives
- Blurred Beast Rework to help improve the Shred builds
- Spirit Boon Updates - “big buffs to make them really powerful”
- Aspect of the Blurred Beast - Shred deals more damage and shred has a 33% chance to land an additional strike, up to 4 times.
Rogue
- Strong class on PTR
- Rain of Arrows was even stronger, scaling was brought down a little bit
- Shadow Clone, one of the biggest updates in the season, now uses all your legendary affects along with you
- Example - Twisting Blade aspect that makes your blades circle around you applies to your Shadow Clone when they cast their own twisting blades copying you.
Necromancer
- Scaling Bug with ultimates - was doing too much damage
- Summons Update - had the biggest benefit by far with minions inheriting basically everything you can think of, ‘minion stonks high’
- 2 New Blood Wave Unique Pants
- Indira’s Memory - Blood Wave is additionally a Bons Skill, spawns a bone prison at its end point and increases your Blood Skill damage. Bone Spear is additionally a Blood Skill.
- Kessime’s Legacy - Blood Wave now forms a wave on each side of you, both waves converge at your feet, pulling in all surrounding enemies and exploding. Each wave causes enemies to take more damage from your Blood Waves.
Spiritborn
- Very Strong on PTR - fixed bugged interactions, but still very strong, brought other classes up to that level
- Minimal Changes
- Razor Wings
- New Unique Sunstained War-Crozier - Focus Skulls benefit from all their upgrades and increase damage of your Potency Skills.
Occult Gem Updates
- Various nerfs, buffs, and tweaks, check the patch notes for details.
Witch Power Updates
- Big buffs across the board on a lot of these powers.
- New Witch Power - Force of Will - When you kill an enemy your next Overpower increases damage up to a maximum. At rank 4 the damage bonus extends to the next 2 Overpowers instead of 1.
Armory
- Gives you the option to Save, Load, and Name your favorite builds
- Loadout Slots are Character bound
- Changing Loadouts does not cost gold
- Armory can be accessed through - Sanctuary, Citadel, Tree of Whispers, Training Areas
PTR Updates
- Improved button clarity from PTR
- Easier loadout deletion in next patch (not on launch of S7)
Gameplay Updates
- Paragon migration - All Paragon XP obtained during the season added to eternal at the end of each season
- Unique power roll updates
- Power roll floor increased per GA
- i.e. the more GA’s on an item the higher the starting roll of the unique power
- No more finding a 4 GA Rod of Kleptomaniac with .1% Unique Power
- Ancestral items
- Drop the top end of aspect rolls
- i.e. Aspect has 1-10% max, Ancestral Aspect will start at 8% instead of 1%
- Baseline drop rate increased, should find more than you did before
- Gem Fragment Conversion
- Use gem fragments to craft jewelry
- You can craft Jewelry at the Jeweler now - Amulets and Rings
- Randomly rolled item, not based off the gem fragment used
- Small chance to be Ancestral
Early Game updates
- Class Quest Unlocks
- Rewards unlock at level 15 and 30
- Class quest can still be completed (optional now)
- Requires a character who has completed the quest previously on your account
- Archetype Caches
- Themed goodie bags
- From Class Quest
- From Season Journey
- Greater Caches will be rewarded later on
- Every class has its own theme, Fire sorc items were used as an example that would be in the goodie bags
Q&A - just quick summaries
There will be a mid-season patch. We haven’t looked at it yet, as we need to gather data from when the season launches. In general for midseason patches we’re primarily looking to bring up the underperformers or fix things. We don’t want to nerf the top builds. Rare exceptions when they are literally breaking the game, and we’ll address this when we need to.
Caches will scale to the level that you find them, but they have a finite supply.
If you think it should work it should when it comes to minion interactions, such as thorns.
Plans to reduce visual clutter such as an opacity slider? Something we’ve been grappling with, currently no changes planned, but they’ll be keeping track of it.
Sorc Conjurations are included with the minion changes.
Armory will be continuously looked at. No plans to put items into a separate armory stash space, but it is a topic of discussion.
