I levelled a Crushing Hand SB in the PTR. I tried to follow S7 Maxroll guide (build is classified as B Tier). I played for around 30h. Made it to Torment 2, ending at Paragon 115. I said I tried because due to low drop rate of Legendaries, it was impossible to get any Aspect until moving to Penitent.
Levelling to 25 was OK, not much different from before when you are not all about efficiency. Gear is all blue and Yellow but is good enough. From 25 on, it started becoming more and more painful. The increase of the quality of the drops was not enough to compensate for the difficulty increase. Instead of getting stronger with my additional skill points, it felt like I was regressing. I even started imprinting Yellows but it didn’t really help. Made me wonder if it was worth going on.
Forced myself into Expert difficulty at level 45, after 8h. Struggled but it was the right choice. Drops became better and I finally started to see my build progress.
I reached level 60 after playing for 13h but without a single 750 item. I started investing in a Boss Power (Grigoire’s). It made up for the lack of quality gear and helped my build be comfortable in T2 otherwise I would have stayed in T1.
I managed to get in total 35 Legendary and 4 Unique Ancestrals in 30h, none really useful. Doing events in the open world gave me mats for Varshan and Grigoire from time to time, extremely rarely for Zir of Ice Beast. Could only do one run of each. The theme of the season is Bosses, cost to run them has increased, we should be getting more mats.
I finally paid a visit the PTR Goblins, boosted my character to 300, opened all those Caches full of Mythics, Ancestral ** items. I was gearing up my build but started thinking, what’s the point? I will never have all that even if I play till the end of the season. Left the PTR and closed the game.
I will probably give it another try when the season starts. Playing with the Boss powers could be fun but my experience in the PTR wasn’t enjoyable. We all have different expectations and appreciate different aspects of the game. Again, there is just my personal experience from one week in the PTR. I am sure some of you had plenty of fun.
This season is heading for complete disaster. Me and many frens have decided to skip season but I will have ready for the inevitable dad uprising that is coming to forums. First skip for me.
D2 players might like it as its skewing the game very far back in that direction and D2R is a big hit again so maybe this will actually work out for Bliz. (its joke!)
As a casual player who hasn’t played the PTR I feel its appropriate, nay, my obligation to assert this fact: I will play a Sorc in the next season, which we will refer to as S8. Furthermore, my expectations based on my biases and no experience with the content lead me to no other conclusion than I don’t know what to expect in S8. Will I play S8? Yes. Will I enjoy it? Based on completely subjective evidence…yeah, I probably will. Will I attain all of my pre-season goals? Harder to say but what I do know is this- every piece of gear that Im “locked out of” will be a piece of gear that I won’t get. Will that make me sad? On this I want to be clear, aint nobody gonna break-a my stride. Aint nobody gonna slow me down, oh no, I got to keep on moving. Thats right…deal with it Blizz
Sounds like you had a decent amount of time with the PTR. 30 hours to get to 115 paragon? That isn’t bad in all honesty. Does seem a bit slower by comparison to S7 now, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Of course this all comes down to player expectation and preference. If you enjoyed the much faster pace of S7, obviously S8 won’t be for you. Likewise those who didn’t enjoy the faster pace of S7 might enjoy S8.
There’s nothing wrong with either opinion. It would just be nice if Blizzard would make up their mind where they want the game to go. They pushed hard into making it more like D3, people obviously complained. Now they’re taking the opposite approach, and people are still complaining.
Just goes to show you can’t please everyone. The game shouldn’t be run by the players, because players, as a collective, can’t agree on what they want out of any video games and they never will.
While you’re on shift as Forum Police…
Please be sure to call out the ad nauseum usage in “nearly every post” of the following because it’s getting old.
“Make D4 a Candy Crush…”
“Cookie game …”
“D3-ification”
Etc.
And all the various unwarranted and unnecessary toxicity directed at people who are posting on a Game Discussion forum.
It’s really pathetic some of the passive aggressive nonsense. You’d be doing good work!
You have your work cut out for you especially with the last bit.
why should they tho? i mean really, its been a pretty long time where people tried to discuss things, and whenever there are certain things you like, you are an absolutele shill. Sorry magecraft, you know i can agree with you at times, and i doubt you arent a bad guy. But this is the price people pay in a forum when people put the credibility on the line. (not saying you did, but damn, many did by now if we are being serious)
so hey, yay for s8 to offer a little more friction
No idea why he responds to mah stuff as he knows he is ignored. Guess he likes wasting his own time. I will never respond, upvote, open, or view anything anyone on my ignored list has to say and my ignored list is getting rather large. Yikers!
oh, obviously because i know your ignores dont mean too much - as you read posts anyway. =) . the good thing is, you could ignore posts. The fun thing is that you wont =P
i mean heck, you’ve been running crazy about your ignore threats lately.
S8 will also be the first skip for me and several friends. For those who say “see you in S8” it just isn’t happening this time. I left D3 for 6 years when things weren’t going well.
This post confirms what I suspected from the patch notes. Less of the same useless drops making it difficult to nearly impossible to gear a character. 30 hours in game and the only thing that made a real difference is boss powers.
At least see the patch notes. It’s not like Blizzard won’t realize this is an extremely unpopular patch. I’m not sure they can fix enough in a month, but it doesn’t cost anything to see what they adjust.
On the other hand, if you’ve grinded season after season and need a break, couldn’t be a better time to do so.
So I don’t own the expansion, but does SB not have some aspects tied to dungeons like the other classes? I was in all aspects by the time I was 30something (on Rogue). But then the first thing I do is run the dungeons that have the essential aspects I need, or best ones possible. So what if they are the worst roll? And then I imprint them till I find better ones.
I also leveled on Hard and went directly to Torment 1. But I used MRAK at 50. Even in seasons where there is no MRAK, I never felt the need to use the other environments for progression.
My outline is literally, use aspect dungeons, use helltides/other colored area to level and TOW tasks, use strongholds to finish off to 60.
S9 looks like an in between season they dint know what to do and just threw something together with this dumb boss power damage on tuesday conditionals that were deemed bad as affixes so we will bring that back as boss powers???. Really hoping S10 fixes a major amount of bugs and we get some actual balance patches so more than 1 or 2 skills per hero are really good. Also have to wait and see how difficulty and loot changes flush out. I dont want to be the ginee (spelling???) pig on this weak S9.
I’ll presumptuously speak for D2 players & say that D2 progression was locked only behind leveling & the kind of RNG that was global & diffuse, with most of the “power” level-ups coming from unlocking the skill tree + tweaking base attributes, and much later requiring powerful runes for efficient farming.
Skill-enabling Aspects… locked… behind gear drops… . Lawd have mercy.
The devs have a giant spinning knob & a game built by committee without a strong vision. The results are predictable.
ready for the inevitable dad uprising that is coming to forums. First skip for me.
locked… behind gear drops…