Before starting, below are the past 2 season’s threads for reference.
S4 PTR feedback:
Pre-S5 feedback:
For Season6’s PTR, we did the same: Got 5 people together, put in around 240 total hours to test everything across several classes and have a good mathematical understanding of drop rates & progression loops. Some of us started with zero paragons & some with normal paragons to compare time to proficiency.
Structure:
- Highlights & Key wins;
- Lowlights & Key challenges;
- Progression System (World tiers & leveling);
- The Pit;
- New Paragon System & Legendary Glyphs;
- Class Balance (Nerfs & Buffs);
- Drops & Itemization (Ancestrals, GA’s, Enchantments, Affixes) - The big one;
- NMD’s, Bosses & Mini-Bosses;
- Priority list proposal;
- TL;DR.
1. Highlights & Key wins - Top10:
- Doing PTR again & getting player involvement. (Insert FEEDBACK MEME)
- The new builds are great - Rogue takes the prize, fantastic development. Blizzard made a new ‘class’ with the creation of a single skill. The other class skills are also great.
- Never thought I’d write this in wins… NMD’s are in an almost-perfect state.
- The new passives are cool as well! I.E. CDR for Sorc? Yes please.
- Party finder - Yes. yes & yes.
- More world tiers with a higher intended split between them. Avoiding the ‘30mins in WT3 meme’. Strongholds also feel better due to xp boost.
- Level drop to 60 & Stat squish - Make things more readable & make it so it’s easier to implement things down the line in the leveling system. Good mid to long-term strategy.
- Wardrobe changes for character customization - Sorely needed. Missing the black dye!
- Runewords was a win. It’s not in its final shape but the idea of adding them to D4 is great. Once they are perfected, they’ll be a great system to play with.
- Overall, content takes longer to do, at least the first time around. We will be able to ‘level post-100’ with the new paragon system and it does take a while. Great!
2. Lowlights & Key challenges - Top10:
- Class balance is in bad shape. Druid & Barb don’t exist. They need to be buffed the same way Sorc was last season. Consequently, build diversity doesn’t exist. It’s either meta or DOA builds.
- Itemization feels terrible. As in, pre-s4 levels with ancestral drop-rate being too low. RNG rules D4 in every single itemization aspect, it’s too much.
- Affixes need to be changed and reduced, especially on Amulets.
- Missing armory/loadouts. One of the key things about seasonal Diablo is testing out different builds & classes. It’s an absolute hassle to change builds in this current state and consequently, how much players are willing to do more alts.
- Differences between Ancestral & non-Ancestral gear need to be revisited. As it stands, anything under Ancestral is exponentially weaker, to an extent of non-usable.
- The gap between casual & blaster is extremely large in S6.The time investment has increased 5x at the very minimum.
- RMT & inflation will be a problem, larger than S5, if Ancestrals go live in their current state.
- The combination of main stat + explosive additive/multiplicative damage sources are too high, making damage go through the roof. Easy to solve, though.
- Difficulty is slightly low and needs to be toughened by around 20%. More on this below.
- UX: Many easy, low dev-hours key wins that haven’t been taken & solved in 6 seasons now. Make vendors sell useful gear, stack all items to 999, increase an extra enchantment slot to the enchanter from 2 possible rolls to 3 (33% improvement), remove double rolls in a row both from tempers & enchantment, remove doors from NMD’s, uncap Whispers, make it so we can keep the previous roll on temper, etc.
3. Progression System (World tiers & leveling):
- Leveling to 60 seems fine, similar to how it is and with an appropriate timeframe.
- Fix the stronghold leveling strat, it’s not intended & shouldn’t happen. Keep the boosted XP strongholds give. Make players have a reason to complete them. We were fans of having strongholds drop legendary recipes or other useful rewards. XP seems to be good, as well.
- No reason to level-gate Penitent to 50. If players want to go there, let them.
- We wanted to avoid ‘spending 30 mins in WT3’, now we ‘spend 30 mins out of Torment3’. The difficulties seem redundant. Not a priority, but clearly not what was intended.
- The drops you receive while leveling don’t feel good. Too few & far in between. Rewards in torment tiers feel even worse as you get useless uniques from bosses, barely any GA items & the Ancestral Items you do get are 99% trash. Feels like a return to S3…
4. The Pit:
- Rewards must scale with difficulty. Higher pit tier = more Ancestrals drop%. Difference needs to be visible, not a change from 1% drop rate to 1.1%. Right now, drop from a pit100 boss feels the same as beating Uber Lilith… bad for a good accomplishment
- Making the Pit a source of Glyph xp is great. However, it shouldn’t be the only one, we should have NMD’s keep theirs. Give variety to players for better UX if there’s a game feature they don’t enjoy that they can move to another for a similar return.
- Using the Pit as reference for World tiers is fine, if it acts like a capstone. One of two things needs to happen, stretch out the tiers, i.e. Torment 4 to pit 75 or increase the overall Pit difficulty. Either way, Pit needs to be ~20-25% harder.
- The bosses stacking mechanic doesn’t seem necessary if the difficulty is well scaled. Consider removing it. Keep the shades but not the stacks. The difficulty of the bosses compared to the rest of the Pit is spot on, don’t change it.
- We have a diverse boss pool, why not use them for some renewed Pit content variety? The campaign bosses which were amazing, world bosses, butcher, the unique overworld bosses, stronghold bosses, quest bosses. Copy paste them into the Pit with the corresponding hp/damage. The Pit is very repetitive & it seems like we are going to need to do this for many hours, it would help refresh it a bit.
5. New Paragon System & Legendary Glyphs:
- It took us 25 hrs average for Paragon180 with near-perfect boosted gear. Using the same progression trend, it will take around 170 hrs for Paragon300. This seems like a good threshold for the season but it’s a guess. If it’s 150-170 hours it’s feasible, higher will alienate casuals without a need.
- It’s great to have a leveling system post-100 to feel like we’re working towards a goal. It would be great if different activities in the game would grant glyph xp (NMD’s, etc.) so we’re not stuck doing Pit alone as it’ll become repetitive and stray players away from it.
- Legendary glyphs are great with a caveat. The increased main stat, multiplicative and additive damage they provide scale too high. Currently, the difficulty levels in Pit, etc. don’t require this, so it’s an added reason to increase Pit difficulty and also consider this for the upcoming expansion features. The Pit difficulty can just be increased without nerfs.
- The board limit is reasonable! Adding 1 Legendary Glyph/ 6th board would be a huge boost, despite certain Sorc & Druid builds favoring Legendary nodes. We considered cap the usage at 5 Legendary Glyphs and either 6 or unlimited boards, but 5 does seem simpler.
- The new Headhunter Glyph is a neat idea, reminiscent of TOB Glyph. Good addition to the game increasing versatility of builds (tank, support, etc), now that group content & mercenaries are coming.
6. Class Balance (Nerfs & Buffs):
- Druids need an urgent buff. There’s no good builds that aren’t reliant on unwanted interactions. All players want is to be able to compete in a close-to-equal setting with other classes and Druid as a class falls too low. Sad considering how cool the builds are.
- Barbarians need to be re-balanced as they are no longer usable for high tier content. The nerf to the key passives was too much.
- Core skill builds in general need help. I.E. Whirlwind doesn’t do damage, dust devils do. Barrage doesn’t do damage, poison does. Many builds just flat out stop scaling like Fireball.
- Nerf needed on the builds that do quintillion damage, item interactions (i.e. umbracrux, heir, etc.) & do the usual bug fixes.
- It seems like there’s no middle point in balancing, either a build is completely in the dirt, or one of the meta builds. There’s no in between, causing players the feeling that either they play a meta build or they’ll be cut out from 90% of the game’s content.
7. Drops & Itemization (Ancestrals, GA’s, Enchantments, Affixes) - The big one:
- Ancestral (GA) drops are too rare, no matter how you carve it. We did 100x 90+ pits today, got 13 GA items. Not a single usable one. Lets say 6 mins average per pit, 600 mins, that’s 10 hours gone for absolutely no return. It doesn’t make sense.
- The above is further aggravated by the fact that there are simply too many useless affixes in several slots. We might go endless hours without a useful GA. There has to be a loot grind in an ARPG, yes, but a logical one, not in its current state. A possible solution would be to do something with resistances as they constitute ~40% of possible rolls. Remove life per sec, healing received & impairment reduction. Empty affixes. For context, in PTR we had unlimited Ancestral rolls and not even then, was I able to find a good amulet. Every other slot took some tries, amulet was impossible, as always.
- Hordes will have to equate into this logic as there’s a GA chest. If Pit boss chests, hordes chests, NMD’s drops, HT drops drop mostly useless items & together with the fact bosses no longer drop max IP legendaries, we’re looking at a huge income of useless loot paired with many sources of max IP loot disappearing. This will feel terrible.
- Drops overall feel worse as at least before you could drop them at max IP and use them even without GA. Right now, especially for weapons (DPS), anything short of 800 will lagg behind a lot. This is felt especially in uniques, as the most consistent source were bosses and now you can only use the GA ones. We don’t see the reason for the change, seems like we’ve gone back on the S4 improvements.
- Tempering non ancestral gear needs to be sequenced instead of only 4/12. The disparity between Ancestrals & every other piece of gear is brutal. More IP & 8 ranks of masterwork + 1 extra temper different. It’s light years above any non-ancestral item.
- Remove blues & yellows (auto-salvage them) from every Torment tier. It’s useless clutter. Add Fists of Fate as a possible drop from all the Tormented Bosses.
8. NMD’s, Bosses & Mini-Bosses:
- NMD’s are in a good state in terms of boss mat rewards, don’t change that, it feels great! It’s good that we also now have a lot of different maps to go through + new Nahantu dungeons.
- Remove the doors in NMD’s. It’s so easy & would improve the experience so much. It slightly takes a bit of the immersion but realistically players want to blast not open doors. Also, events need to give proper rewards, i.e. a guaranteed ancestral or more boss mats to bring players to do them. For the first time, I did every single event across hundred NMD’s and the rewards were just plain non-existent. Not a single item saved.
- NMD’s should be a source of either Glyph xp or some other reward apart from Obducite. Make it so, together with the Pit, players have a choice in the type of content they’d like to do. D4 doesn’t have to have the exact same system as D3 did with gems & GR’s. Let’s change and diversify.
- Open World bosses (unique mini-bosses) currently serve no function. It would be great if they could be much stronger & have a special drop or feature to propel people to do them. Also adding a more classy arena to them for ambience would be a quick win. They could have their lore as faction leaders and serve as actual overworld bosses.
- Bosses overall need a boost to drops. There was the issue of dropping too much loot, but removing it doesn’t serve a purpose as it’s losing a source of previously max IP items which was useful and fostered grouping & carrying. The potency & amount of their legendary & unique drops should be revisited. As the strongest bosses in the game, having them basically drop nothing for many kills feels bad…
9. Priority list proposal:
- Buff the classes that need it (Druid mostly, Barb also), make them playable, especially their key builds. Make the balance ‘balanced’, so builds don’t go from 100 to 0 in one patch and builds are diverse & usable. I.E. Make it so players can play full Werewolf Druid, or Whirlwind Barbarian, or HotA Barbarian, etc.
- Review Ancestral items, their drop rate & the affixes of each item. As it stands, RMTers will have a field day in S6 & casuals will have a very hard time. In addition, review whether Ancestrals should have 8 MW ranks, 1 extra temper, GA capacity & 50 more IP over the next item in line. Revisit what the drop rate should be from all sources, not just per world tier. Have a look at possible affix stats for all the items and remove useless ones like mentioned previously. Make it so the Ancestral drop is actually something we can work around even if not ideal vs how it is now which is 99% likely to be unusable.
- Review Pit and Torment difficulties, increase by ~20% or have the last levels of pit (90-100) increase difficulty exponentially. Also, review how the Pit tiers correlate to Torment tiers. If hard to balance, perhaps increase requirements per world tier. Remove level gates & auto-salvage blue and yellow items in any Torment tier. Make rewards meaningful and different when world tiers are changed by the player.
- Make core skill builds usable. It’s very hard to understand why we keep needing to resort to indirect damage using core skills as support skills.
- Small UX & UI changes can go a LONG way like Mythic colour change was. For example - re: point 2.10: Better tempering interface, more enchantment options, uncapped whispers, black dye, less useless affixes like life per sec on all items or resistances on amulet, etc.
10. TL;DR:
PTR’s new builds were a hell of a lot of fun. The new paragon post max lvl system was great to have a goal to reach and the new systems, world tiers & content feel like a good addition to the game even if, as expected, aren’t fully fleshed out yet.
There are, however, changes to itemization that counter the improvements Season of Loot Reborn (4) brought to the game, bringing back many useless item drops, big item power disparity & need for time spent for virtually no usable reward which will affect player UX negatively while also messing with the games inflation, making RMT shoot up.
Overall it was quite a positive feeling because S6 & Expansion are bringing virtually so much content to the game, it’s clear that players will have a lot to do for an extended period of time, a lot of variety & also a lot of new things to try out.
Players forget there’s a PTR for a reason. The game as is WILL NOT be the game on launch. If Season 6 gets the same post-PTR treatment & improvements as Season 5 did, D4 will be an absolute success & great game to play come October 8th.
