Impressions PTR S8 (why?)

[Psirex-2935]

I took my time and tested the game yesterday and today to give a first feedback.

In my opinion, if the patch were to go live as it is, it would be the worst state of the game since the pre-Season 1 patch. Others might disagree, but that is always the case with opinions.

1. Level up journey

If you start the season with campaign completed, you will have to slowly grind your way up with leveling in Helltides and the new Season area. The new Season area gives awefully bad XP and loot and I only suggest doing it for the Season mechanic-XP and skills.
It’s a recolored Legion event except you only get 1 chest at the end instead of 3 and worse XP.

The alternative which I mainly saw some streamers use is just do the VoH campaign again, XP is 4-5 times better than Helltides.

The loot is bad either way, I am still struggeling to get the Aspects for a leveling build. We have no good source of aspects at the moment for leveling, HT chests give awefully few. So it is either through Season Journey or maybe new Season “Merchant” that will surely be implemented. Or Luck.

Either way it’s not fun and more like “work” for me. After 7 Seasons I don’t look forward to spending 10-12 Hours in Helltides to level up. S7 was muuuuch better and more fun.

2. Boss Loot

While I like the removed dependency on Rotas, I don’t like the new drop tables. It already was tedious to get the uniques you want with the right GA, but at least you were able to get the build enabling uniques in lower quality relatively easy. Now only 1 Unique from each boss is from it’s loot table (if you are solo, 2 in 4 man Group) it means you have to on average run the bosses 5 times as often as before…

That is just artificially inflating the Grind by 5 times to stretch the content. You have to grind 5 times more materials, then kill 5 times more bosses. And maybe if the god of RNG shines on you, you will be able to start creating your build before S8 ends.

3. PITs

We were finally in a good spot in S7 just to kill it again now.
Most good builds with a bit min-max were able to run PITs on a level that enabled you to grind your glyphs to level 100.
I was able to do PIT 100-115 at max Masterwork with 3 different Sorc builds and now they are in the Range of 70-75 and still take longer than before.

That will revert the D4 meta again to play the “Bug Build of the Season” like in the past because most “normal” builds are not even able to level their Glyphs.
I can’t imagine why the currently strongest Sorc build with 12/12 MW, max Aspect, 100% crit, 100% AS and 3 Mythics (and currently even all max Glyphs) should not be able to level their glyphs? Why is the content in the game then?

Or is the intent to make the classes crap and only enable them through Season powers to do content each season? I already saw Videos from ROB where the char itself is useless and does T4 content with Season power only, not what I personally desire…

That’s it for the moment.
TL:DR for me personally it seems as if Blizzard discovered that the whole “new” content this Season is 1 new boss and recolored Legion event and that this will result in that everyone is “done” with the season in 2-3 weeks again. But instread of new things to do they just drop XP and loot down to nirvana and stretch it out as much as possible.
The new Bosspowers are the same as Vampire Season and Witchcraft Season with a new name/graphics again.

[Brophog-1113]

@Psirex-2935

I am still struggeling to get the Aspects for a leveling build. We have no good source of aspects at the moment for leveling, HT chests give awefully few.

Unlike some seasons, crafting mats for imprinting and tempering are relatively plentiful. Dungeons arent too bad for XP, especially if you can catch one as a whisper.

The Season event should be avoided, however. What a boring, unrewarding “activity”.

@Psirex-2935

While I like the removed dependency on Rotas, I don’t like the new drop tables.

It’s nice they are free for unlocking the powers and that’s all the good I have to say. This change to their drops is being slept on. Hugely impactful to the one activity in the game we could use to meaningfully fight the gobs of RNG.

@Psirex-2935

We were finally in a good spot in S7 just to kill it again now.
Most good builds with a bit min-max were able to run PITs on a level that enabled you to grind your glyphs to level 100.

I don’t have any problem with them rescaling the Pits, but this method of glyph leveling has always been an issue. If anything, maybe the backlash to Pit scaling gets them to find another solution for the glyph issue.

@Psirex-2935

I already saw Videos from ROB where the char itself is useless and does T4 content with Season power only, not what I personally desire…

I built a character in S7 like this, just for funsies. S7 powers weren’t nearly as strong because they lacked scaling but you could play through T4 like this if you dedicated your build towards the season powers.

The issue isn’t so much the powers, it’s that everything is about one skill getting all of the multipliers to be effective. That goes the same with these seasonal powers. Most of the multipliers, especially the big ones, affect a certain skill or a category of skills or something similar. That means they don’t scale these seasonal powers. So you have to pick multipliers that do affect the seasonal powers even at the expense of your own skills. What was a meme build in S7 may be meta in S8.

I agree that it’s not good for the game. I just don’t know that it’ll be changed, though. They scaled it this way because these powers didn’t scale well into end game before. Kind of a catch-22 they’re in with how the overall game is designed.