As per my previous posts with Q&A’s, I’m going to display the question and the answer given, no extra commentary in between, I will clean up answers, provide a Tl;Dr, or a summarization where relevant though. If you wish to see the video version:
Timestamp is at 1:25:49 in case the link doesn’t work.
The Q&A was hosted by:
Adam Jackson - Lead Class Designer
Adam Fletcher - Community Lead
Daniel Tanguay - Lead Seasons Designer
Names will be abbreviated of course. Without further ado here we go.
Are there any new class buffs coming to Season 5?
:
Adam J.
Heavily summarized
Short answer is yes, we hear you, and we’ll be looking to beef things up. Barbs are tougher to balance because of their arsenal system. We’ve updated the combat math in S2, and itemization in S4, it’s a lot more difficult to get everything exactly perfect balance wise.We’re looking at Class Mechanics, for example Necromancer’s Book of the Dead makes the Necro feel really cool, special, and unique. We’re going to try and catch that up so to speak to the arsenal system of the Barbian. It won’t just be by numbers, but we want to overhaul the system to make them way better and more thematic to classes.
We don’t have anything to annoucne today for Season 5, but this is a long term goal. In the short-term we’re looking at fixing the issues with these various classes, buffing them accordingly, and trying to keep that parity, as well as bringing down the Barbarian to be more in line.
Will the Infernal Hordes be available for Eternal and Seasonal Realms?
Dan T.
With Season 5, we wanted to build out the endgame and because we’re building out the endgame, we wanted to make sure that any of the endgame things we’re putting in are on both Seasonal and Eternal. In this PTR you’ll be able to test out the Eternal Version of Infernal Hordes. Any rewards you get from it, all that’s Eternal, so all players are going to benefit from it.Adam J.
As Dan mentioned it’s a new endgame feature. This will be continous beyond Season 5. Players can expect to jump into Infernal Hordes going forward which is pretty cool. The feedback is going to be completely important during this PTR.
Tl;Dr - Infernal Hordes will be available to both realms upon S5 release.
What is the equivalent Pit level, NMD, or Monster Level of the 8th Tier of the Infernal Hordes?
Dan T.
Tier 8 of the Infernal Hordes is going to be equivalent to about monster level, I think it’s 180 to 200. So it goes up pretty high.
Do you foresee changes in grouping in The Pit to allow group play to be more efficient?
Adam F.
There will be changes, it won’t be something present in PTR. We’ll talk more about it at the Season 5 launch, but the team is very aware of it. We will have an update before Season 5, and it will be live, whatever change we have, going into Season 5.
What’s the teams philosophy on power gain, with tempering players gain to much power too quickly really removing the tension from the leveling up experience. Any chance to add more friction to tempering, materials costs, etc.?
Adam J.
The leveling experience has been sped up quite a bit. We want people to level quickly to get to the ‘fun’ of the game as quickly as possible. We don’t want there to be a ton of friction.When we first launched the game we had the idea getting to level 100, alone was a big accomplishment. We’ve learned that players really want to fulfill their power fantasies, get to the part where they’re actually incrimenataly increasing their characters power and finding things to use that power against. They enjoy that endgame a lot and we want to get them there in a reasonable amount of time.
We have heard the feedback and kind of agree with it that the early tempering recipes are really really strong. That was by design when we launched S4. Before S4 your item stats weren’t interesting enough, didn’t matter, weren’t very impactful, and just didn’t feel good. So we juiced them up and made them a lot stronger. Same process when tempering an item, you can feel the difference when you temper an item.
We don’t want players to ignore stats on items and just slap on a tempering affix, but we are going to be looking at that leveling process and streamlining it quite a bit. Not a lot will change in Season 5 though.
Tl;Dr - They have heard the feedback, they’ll be looking at changes in the future, won’t be a lot of changes for S5.
Are you open to letting us imprinting affixes on Uniques?
Adam J.
Right now no. I’m not going to say never in the future. It’s the obvious thing we could right now, but we want them to have an identity that is very different from legendaries. One of the concerns with that is that the more you give uniques manipulation the more that they just turn into legendaries with a different item color when they drop on the ground. They’re actually not different in how they work if we’re able to manipulate stats.We’re open to the idea, but we do want to try this first, of double downing what makes a unique unique. You build around it, there’s a little bit of friction, rather then just turning it into the item you want everytime.
How is the Dev team feeling about the reception of S4, is that making them rethink any plans for future seasons?
Adam F.
Obviously season 4 has been really great, we’ve been hearing a lot of great feedback from players. We’re very well aware of how everone’s been enjoying it. I think one huge thing that’s helped with that as well is that we had a PTR for S4. We know having that moment where players can jump in and provide feedback, is really beneficial. Especially when we have new huge features, like what we did for S4 with the itemization overhaul, the Pits, Helltides, etc. as well as all the features coming in S5.Adam J.
The design team is very pleased with how Season 4 (S4) turned out, especially with the help of the Public Test Realm (PTR) which was crucial for balancing and design improvements. Despite the significant disruptions due to updates in core math and items, the team successfully navigated these challenges. Looking ahead, the focus will shift from major changes to fine-tuning aspects like itemization, balance, and design. The team’s excitement stems from the impactful Quality of Life improvements in S4, such as the codex of power, which significantly enhanced the player experience by resolving item hoarding issues.
What is the Seasonal Theme?
Dan T.
We haven’t announced a name for this season yet. As far as I know, but the seasonal theme seems fairly obvious. We’re going back to Hell, so the theme is pretty much returning to Hell. While the Infernal Horde is just one part of that, the rewards are another part, and when we have our S5 Live Stream, we’ll go into all of the rest things we have planned.Adam J.
This stream is for people to hear about the content they’re going to be able to play in PTR and we want people to really hone in and focus on that, so we can actually get that feedback for the team here and make any changes we may need to.
We’re geting a lot of questions about loadouts.
Adam F.
We’re very well aware people want this feature, but it takes a lot of time to implement.
Also this has come up a lot, the Auction House.
Adam F.
There are currently no plans right now for something like that, but we hear you guys.
