I’d like to take a moment to share some constructive feedback on farming living steel that arrived in Season 2. I’m not here to beat on the game or any given mechanic. Hopefully the devs see this and something good can come of it.
For some background, I’m a working dad who gets to play at night once everyone has gone to sleep. With that said, I’m not a casual but think of myself as pretty avid gamer. With the limited time I have to play, I’m only focusing on one character that is already close to lvl 100 for season 2, maxed out all vampire powers, battle pass, etc. I’ve beaten all the new bosses already (I like the fights, thank you for adding those in there) and would like to start farming for those uber uniques to min/max my build even further.
The issue I’m facing comes in farming Living Steel and how it’s tied to time gated helltide events. I generally like helltides and am pretty efficient at farming cinders. The issue stems from the following:
- You can only get 2 chests of living steel for every 1 helltide.
- Given that helltides arrive ~2 hours or so, that makes farming them really slow. At worst I only encounter 1 helltide a night, at best 2.
- Add to it that I need 5 living steel to fight Grigoire, that means I can usually fight him once a night after I get both chests. This usually nabs me 1 Shard of Agony.
- I need 2 Shard of Agony to summon Duriel. Getting 1 shard from every Grigoire fight, it means I can only fight Duriel once every 2 days (Maybe once a day if the timing is right and I get 2 helltides in a single play session and all the stars align).
This makes farming slow. With other bosses, their resources are ones that are not tied to a timed event and I can actively work to farm. Even if some materials don’t have a guaranteed drop rate, at least I can work towards them (i.e. Whisper drops, NMD drops, etc.).
My ask
Can we please have living steel be dropped from other sources. I think it be OK if a smaller number of them dropped from other sources such as Whisper, legion, NMD drops…even other helltide chests. It doesn’t have to be the same amount as the living steel chests, but at least some amount to help make progress.
Otherwise I this gameplay loop rewards people with a lot of free time and punishes those who want to play the game but have to contend with life and timed content at the same time.
Thank you for your time.
28 Likes
Thats wrong though. New chests spawn after like 30min.
i have no problems with those… i do helltides for the mats and these are just extra (at this point i don’t care for loot anymore)
the distilled fear on the other hand is a real PITA (if it wasn’t for leveling my glyphs i wouldn’t even touch nightmare dungeons)
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Isn’t that the case if the helltide crosses the hour boundary? I know that was a thing before seasons started…that if a helltide started at say 12:30pm, at 1pm the chests would respawn (or something like that)?
But I will try the next time I’m in a helltide. I still think the feedback about improving the drop rate would help.
That’s wrong though. New chests spawn at the top of the hour.
farming l8vong steel is an ectremely boring process. thay shal add drop of living steel at NM boss, h8gher the level higher the droprate.
2 Likes
Yes it’s a slog, but you don’t get any material from that encounter to summon Duriel. But you’re right, after my initial fight to experience the encounter, I’ll likely not farm it and only do so when I get enough distilled fear from organic gameplay.
2 Likes
New chests only spawn when the helltide would start at for instance 10:30 and at 11 the chests respawn. If the helltide starts at 11 the chests never shift so that would be a 2 chest helltide. Please don’t tell people they are wrong when you are indeed the one wrong and giving bad information.
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you wrong, chest are not spawn after 30 min, it reset after reach 00.00 time, or multiplicative 60 min. if you lucky you can get 4 which 2 from regular, 2 from clock reset , super lucky if a map have 3 which is 6 if reset, but this is very competitive vs time, which not very enjoy for me
its so tired and not anjoy farming the steel, or at least drop 5 or more per chest or other boss / nightmare can have a change to drop steel, else majority player will go to helltide for priority
I think the respawn is always at the full hour.
The the stupid thing is that there is always 1h 15min between Helltides.
HT starts at 9:30 → You have 30 min. to farm 600 cinders. At 10:00 the chests respawn at other location. You have again 30 min. to farm 600 cinders.
In the end you can farm 4 chests.
BUT
HT starts at 9:00 → There is no respawn. You have 60 min. to farm the 600 cinders but can only open 2 chests.
So, PLEASE let HT start at every full hour. No break needed in between. And raise the amount of Living Steel.
Yes. I find it odd that there are several posts about how annoying farming living steel is compared to so few about the nightmare that is acquiring acceptable levels of distilled fear which is FAR worse than getting living steel. I suppose it’s likely because people just want to farm Duriel all the time. Getting lots of living steel is a cake walk compared to farming distilled fear.
Wouldn’t be an issue if Helltides were constantly up like the Vampire zone and the chests were guaranteed to drop 5 living steel.
3 Likes
No argument there, especially given that it’s not a guaranteed drop at the end of a NMD. I was keeping this thread scoped to living steel, but there are definitely other opportunities to improve the drop rate of other materials that I hope they will address this season. Really hope they don’t wait until season 3+ to address this.
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The part of the whole living steel thing that makes no sense is you can literally farm summoning material for Varshan non stop. Also summoning him is 1 of each material that you basically have unlimited amounts of. Living steel needs to either be lessened to summon the boss or they need to come from other places outside of helltide. This season was honestly named wrong, instead of season of blood it would have been better suited as season of helltide. I am so burned out in helltide that I don’t give a crap about Duriel or Uber uniques. At this point they can keep them because once the season ends and the character moves to eternal I’ll never touch it again.
3 Likes
You were so polite about such an awful mechanic. Nice post. But no I refuse to believe a game designer is sitting at Activision in a meeting right now saying to his peers “well actually I really think the helltides are a big hit!”. Why not nerf drop rate again and get rid of mats. After a 100 and pretty optimized character, it is nothing but a chore to farm boss mats
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Thats what i do. Some areas spawn 3 chests though.
True.
At this point I think Blizzard knows helltides are bad and keeps highly desired materials like forgotten souls (nearly exclusive) and living steel (exclusive) to helltides only. Either make helltides enjoyable / always active or give us other avenues for these materials.
The part that makes it even worse is you can’t just go into a helltide and target farm living steel and come out with a wad of forgotten souls. You either get your living steel and some souls or a bunch of souls and no steel. Given how fast you can blow through forgotten souls on 1 unlucky item rerolling, its ridiculous. Hell even season chapter rewards or the vampire sht bags giving us forgotten souls would have been way more useful than anything they gave us.
You are wrong also, they respawn at fixed time always. This is probably due to how cluster zones are made.
Theres a huge difference though. You can farm nightmare dungeons whenever you want to. Theres certain ones you can blast through in literally under 60 seconds. Theres no timer working against you in how fast you can or can not do what you need to do.
For you, distilled fear is a mental block. Helltides just suck. I’m sitting on like 40 distilled fear just from mind numbingly blasting through dungeons like Ghoa ruins, tormented ruins and some others in 1-2 minutes to get all my glyphs to 15 fast.
Nightmare dungeons at least give you other things you may be working towards as well. Helltides do not… besides what… experience? whoop.
I would make these suggestions personally regarding helltides.
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Helltides on permanent rotation like blood harvest (24/7 uptime)
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Helltides always start at xx30, therefore chests always reset at 30mins
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For gods sake fix the living steel chest bug so we dont have to tp in and out to try and get it
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Thats it. Leave the drop cinders on death. Leave cinders disappear at end of hour if you dont use them. Leave the amount dropped from the living steel chest.
I think the simple changes alone will help greatly. There doesnt need to be a huge revamp, just simple revamp and they have shown they can do it with blood harvest.
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