Apologies, roughly the first 8-9 minutes has no sound, or very little and not-coherent. However I have written down the questions and answers, so nothing is left out. Enjoy.
Edit: Made a new video
https://youtu.be/tq4iie5NWJA
I basically just talk during the beginning up until the point when the audio kicks in and I show the rest of the recording of them talking.
Q: What is the design philosophy for Warlock?
A: At a high level the warlock uses demons as a disposable resource. We’re generally relatively happy where the Warlock landed as a brand new class. Obviously it’s being overshadowed by other classes and builds, but we’re looking to adjust things going into Season 14.
Q: Is there a new benchmark for class builds to hit. Previously Colin said they wanted each coherent build to hit Pit 80 to 85. Has this changed? If so what is that now?
A: Our goal is for every archetype to get to Torment 10 that’s where everything is unlocked. Past that it’s really how far you’re able to push your build. Ideally every class and archetype is within acceptable ranges.
Q: Any plans to make Warplans account wide?
A: We made some changes to warplans progression in S14, that should be reflected in the notes. We are investigating expanding the way warplans saves to not just per hero, but we don’t have anything concrete at this time.
Q: Will Realm Walkers be better this time around?
A: We heard the feedback from the first time of the Realm Walker. In general it was a cool big imposing boss, but we didn’t use it in the best way. I think the biggest offender was, we have that phase where he popped up and you had to follow him around for five minutes.
Now it’s more streamlined. When you encounter it, you go right into the fight, it’s a more elaborate fight, similar to a World Boss, as a surprise not just on a timer. He’s just kind of a bad A dude now, looking to wreck some folks.
Q: Can you elaborate on the new way Mythics work, and how they are similar or different from the existing Mythics?
A: The new Mythics are a way, to elevate existing Unique items that are either Generic or Class specific, to the level of Mythic. There are some Mythic items that just dominate the meta in terms of what they provide in the slots provided.
The way the new Mythics work, any existing unique item, can potentially become a Mythic. They can drop that way, or be crafted. What a Mythic means in this new world, all of its base affixes are at the max possible value. They aren’t GA, but they have max roll. The Unique Power has a boost of 30%.
Iconic Mythics is what we’re calling the old Mythics. A few of the exceptionally good ones have been brought down to be competitive with the rest. So we’re fixing the problem of not everyone is slotting the same exact item because its the only answer.
The new Mythics will be craftable or rather modifiable in the cube with affix modification, just like unique items are in Season 14. However Iconic Mythics will not be able to be modified in the cube.
Tie-In Question:
Q: With the new Mythic Uniques, will it have fixed stats, or random stats?
A: The new Mythics follow Unique rules, where they have one fixed base affix, and then three randomized affixes. In S14 we are adding in the ability to modify the affixes on Uniques and the new Mythic Uniques (Not the iconic Mythics).
Q: Will these Mythic Changes be permanent?
A: The new Mythic Unique rarity is permanent. Some of the loop in terms of crafting is potentially seasonal only, but new Mythics are staying.
Q: With Tower going out of Beta, will there be a ladder reset or purges when ever exploits are found?
A: (Heavily summarized) Just know conversations are always flowing with balance and integrity of the LB’s. We’ve already delayed the current Leaderboards to take care of some issues. We’re actively investigating and following up and fixing every single exploit that is out there right now.
Q: Anything we can share to the players regarding the Solo Self Found?
A: SSF has been a heavily requested feature, we’re really excited to finally give it to you guys. This is for the people who want the integrity in that competition if they’re pushing LB’s. Or they just want an experience where they just rely entirely on themselves. It’s a separate partition.
You’ll still be able to play in the world with other players in SSF. You’re not just going to be in a completely empty over world, and doing world bosses solo. You just won’t be able to group or trade or actually engage in active party play with anybody else in the partition.
(Yes this includes not being able to Dark Citadel, it will be disabled for SSF)
Q: After getting a Unique Upgraded to a Mythic, can I make it a Mythic Charm so I can use it together with a Unique Charm?
A: That’s a pretty cool idea. We’re not doing anything with Unique and Mythic Charms in Season 14, but it’s something we’re looking at extending support for in the future.
Q: Are you planning to expand the functionality of the Loot Filter? Allowing us to change the size of the text labels, color saturation, etc. as such as well as settings for conditions per torment level.
A: We are definitely looking at extending support largely based on feedback provided by you guys. We’re not doing anything in Season 14, but keep sending us your feedback.
Q: What are things you would love to see people explore and venture off into when it comes to the PTR? (filthierich asked them this question as he searched for more questions from the chat)
A: Our main activity revolves around this new thing called Ruptures. I definitely want people to hop in and check out Ruptures. They come in three varieties. Standard variety that can appear anywhere, mostly in Helltides, helps with leveling and pushing the rep board.
Don’t get too bogged down on the standard ruptures. What you want to focus on are the two larger ruptures. The Surging Rupture those appear in Helltides, specifically in local event zones. Those are the ones that have a chance to spawn a Realm Walker. It pings everyone in the Helltide on that shard, so everyone can rush to it and take it down.
Largest size of Rupture, appears specifically in the boss Arena that’s southeast of Zarbinzet. That one is on a timer, every twenty minutes or so, and that one guarantees a Realm Walker.
I just want to get your feedback if the Ruptures are fun, you’re going to be doing a lot of them. So we need to make them as fun as can be. How this works, you interact with them, so they’re opt-into activity, there’s a circle on the ground that expands, and the circle starts to shrinking.
The idea is the opposite of a lot of activities where you want to close the thing as fast as possible. This is the opposite of that, you want to keep the Rupture open as long as you can, so you kill enemies inside the Rupture and close these tears that appear in the rupture, and it pushes the bubble back out as its shrinking. You won’t be able to keep it open forever, as the closure rate keeps increasing. That’s how you earn the most rewards.
The different versions are different takes on it. We have a version of these that appear in NMDs with the Rupture affix on Sigils. It spices things up as you’re in a more confined space. Closing Ruptures has a chance to drop NMD Sigils with the Rupture affix on them, which is tied to the Seasonal Questline, so you won’t be be able to get them normally in the PTR, so make sure to talk to Mrak.
Question in the middle regarding how the realm walkers work now.
Now you just focus on the Realm Walker, no following it out, it’s just a straight up fight with the thing.
Another exciting thing we’re introducing are Reapers into D4. Our new boss is a Reaper. This boss is highly mobile, let us know if it’s fun, looking for feedback.
I think the obvious thing we’re looking for feedback are going to be the new Mythics. How they feel, how are they affecting the overall build crafting across classes. We’re hoping we open things up a bit and be more options and more variety that helps you scale.
Definitely looking for feedback on the Warplans changes. We added party board synch which should help your party.
There’s a couple new activity nodes in Helltide. One is complete a full escalation sigil run, so the three dungeons along with Astaroth. One is spend a longer amount of helltide than the existing helltide activity node. They are activity tree experience and their war plans rewards are all scaled to the fact they are longer form activities.
This is to promote that that there are a lot of nodes in the activity trees in those that promote you, for example the escalation sigils there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff in these, but it’s hard to line up NMDs in a war plan. Similarly with Helltide, half the tree is about half the things happen during threat, and here’s a 666 cinder chest, and if the existing Helltide War plan node is to get in and out within 5 minutes, I’m never actually engaging with that.
This is meant to help engage with these activities and staying longer in the activity to compensate for specing into these nodes on their trees.
We’ve changed two of the Mythic Seals.
- The Mythic Seal that requires 1 less Set Charm has remain unchanged.
- We changed the minus 2 Charm Slots + 2 Unique Charms, we removed the penalty, so you can equip up to three Unique Charms. So the build path there would be a 3 piece set bonus, with 3 unique charms.
- The third Mythic Seal has been disabled while we come up with a better design for it. For Eternal, any existing copies of the one that has been disabled has been converted into the +2 Unique Charms one.
Bunch of cube updates, looking to get feedback on that.
Updates to dungeon keys, we made all of them salvageable for an appropriate amount of sigil dust. So there’s some player agency, I don’t need these key types so I can convert these into sigil dust and make a different sigil.
Note: The dungeon key salvaging thing is going into S14, but DID NOT make it to the PTR.
Q: Do you feel cube crafting hit the mark that you were going for? Do you plan on adding more crafting options for the future?
A: Honestly, yea in the big picture, I’m really happy where the cube landed, I love the community reception, that people are playing around with it. I like that people have figured out the little tricks and interactions with other crafting systems. I think that’s all very cool.
Obviously there’s some stuff that has been busted with the cube. People hacking and crafting literally impossible items. Gem Strength bonus is a clear outlier, it was never intended to be that strong, it was never intended to scale with 2-handers. We fixed that in Season 14. So Hopefully there’s no major outliers in power and people aren’t doing really really awful game loops to try and hit gem strength bonus and not unmodifiable at the same time and hating their own lives for it.
The other part of the question, yes we are obviously adding more crafting options in the future. We obviously just added more stuff in Season 14. You can expect the cube to be a platform for more crafting stuff in the future and we have lots of cool ideas.
Q: Are we expecting to get any buffs for Infernal Hordes?
A: In PTR, we’ve doubled the base experience of IH, you now get 50 exp base for doing a Horde run, which on top of the general later Torment experience boosts to activity experience, should make leveling your IH significantly faster.
On the rewards side, I don’t think this made the PTR, we made the IH chests better. The Equipment Chest, the War Plans Talisman Chest, Materials, and Gold chests scale way better with Aether. I don’t think those changes made the PTR.
Something that did make the PTR, when you do an activity in War Plans, the amount of reward that you get, is scaled per activity to account for the time each activity takes. So IH was already getting a bonus in terms of non-activity exp rewards. We’ve increased that bonus further, so when you do IH, not only are you getting double the base amount of exp now, all of the rewards are now scaled more than they were before. Hopefully that should make it a much more equitable choice in warplans.
Q: There’s a lot of questions about War Plans being account wide, which we discussed earlier. Questions about Stash Space. Questions about Mephisto, such as being able to cut away the scenes. If we have anything to add on, please feel free to share, otherwise just want to acknowledge the community and their questions. So if we don’t have anything today, I’m sure we’ll have something for you in the future.
A: No additional comments on the war plans things, other than what I said earlier. As for Mephisto, I don’t think it made it to the PTR, but we are making the cutscenes and stuff skippable. Nothing about Stash space, but we are aware of the problem.
Q: In regards to LB fishing (finding the right layout, mob types, etc.), is there anything you’re doing to resolve these problems of trying to find the ideal mapset?
A: The goal is to make sure the variations and permutations of things that can happen in the Pit, none of them are too egregiously spikey in either direction. So the need and desire to fish is diminished. Obviously to some extent it’s RNG, it’s a random based game, there are lower rolls and there are better rolls. Fishing is a problem we’re always looking at.
Q: Are there any new unique charms coming in anytime soon? Also commenting that not every Unique can be turned into a Unique Charm.
A: First of all, it is intended that not every single Unique can become a Charm. There are some interactions and some things that are problematic and they were never built to coexist at the same time, and the mutual exclusivity needs to be there. As a whole we are looking to expand the roster of Unique Charms in future seasons, and also generally charms and talisman as a system, we’re looking to keep building on it.
Q: Echoing Hatred, can it please stack so you don’t lose the chance to run it? And please do not close the Echoing Hatred run when have a dungeon open and the dungeon is closed.
A: That second thing is a bug, I definitely remember seeing that in the database, not sure if it’s been fixed yet. As for Echoing Hatred in general, we’ve increased the rate at which you can find the key to EH just from kills, pretty significantly. It’s still meant to be a rare bonus activity. So don’t expect to see a key drop every couple of hours, but the drop rate did go up quite a bit.
Q: You mentioned new mythic uniques will have an aspect that is 30% more powerful, but unfortunately the blog does not reflect that, so maybe we can clarify over here the function of the change from tier up to mythics and how they affect aspects if you don’t mind.
A: A new mythic unique, the affect it has on the unique power, is that the unique power is max rolled, and has a 30% bonus on top. There are some very specific exceptions where the unique doesn’t quite scale in that regard. In those cases, it’s being scaled appropriately, but generally you can expect a 30% multiplier on the max roll of the unique power, is the affect of a mythic unique.
Q: When a mythic unique drops in the game, can we alter it in the cube? I’m not sure if he’s referring to the new mythic unique or the iconic mythics.
A: The old Mythic Uniques, what we’re calling the Iconic Mythics, those CAN NOT be modified in the cube. New Mythic Uniques and Regular Uniques, can be modified in the cube with chaotic and focused reroll. This costs an additional resource for the base recipe.
Follow Up Question:
Q: Will this persist around the season?
A: The ability to craft on uniques is eternal, that’s staying in the game. The new mythic rarity and the way it works that’s also eternal and will be staying in the game.
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