S6 overall feedback after playing for a bit

PC General Discussion
1

Overall i’d say the season has some ups and some downs. I’ll list them, but overall I’d consider it mediocre.

  1. Spiritborn
    a. Class design - Fairly well designed class overall. most of the skill synergize and it’s something that actually uses the ults well. the spirit halls are moderately balanced with each having their own design that works well enough. though centepede may be a bit restricted by game design not favoring damage reduction on enemies in a stacking manner.

b. tuning - we all know the tuning of this spec is wild. The majority of it is from some obvious interactions that never should have made it past beta stages. resolve stacking, viscous shield, block not being capped at 100, evade speed etc. There are uniques directly correlating to each of these, and make builds around those interactions so intuitive that testing would have been done. So those not being addressed prior to release has SB in such a strong state that it’s overshadowing everything else. Game balance as a whole is out the window when something is this out of hand. It’s like the victimize bug but feeding off another equally strong bug exponentially.

c. overall impressions - obvious interactions being nerfed is something that’s needed. both for the spec and for class balance as a whole. However I’m concerned they’ll overnerf aspects of the tree, and also nerf all of the paragon stuff that’s making it broken which would leave it in a fairly poor state. That said the spec plays pretty fluidly, and will be a success barring overners to core aspects (cdr on ultimates) once it’s brought down to earth. but will be likely be plagued by this season.

  1. Torment tiers -
    a. Levels - The torment levels jump pretty heavily in pacing. you can speed instakill everything on one torment to barely scratch another. If the goal is for t4 to be higher end and t1 to be lower. then that may cause some issues. As the jump from one tier to another is fairly jarring and not fluid. unless that’s the intent and then it’s probably fine overall.

    b. loot - drop rates going up per tier is also solid as a concept. However it’s come with a few very direct problems. First is that ancient gear is a very rare thing with GA. That in isolation is probably fine, as your chase items are GA regardless. However that runs into an issue when we can no longer upgrade the aspects on our gear without that. The rarity of GA drops, then needing that aspect (and an item we don’t want), and then needing a high roll on top? that isn’t realistic to obtain in most cases. It’s pretty extreme

    c. Masterworking - the general concept of this I do like even from season 4. However, something needs to be done about the raw materials cost. Either we can only go down to the previous tier (instead of resetting to 0, reset to 4/12 or 8/12), lower the amount of raw hide/iron needed, or substantially increase the amount dropped. As it stands the disparity here is very high. It’s the reason I’m ending this season early. I simply don’t have the time available as an adult to farm the required amount to reroll and MA gear.

    d. rerolling substats - This is pretty harsh, but it’s only on 2-3 items in most cases. Specifically when you need cdr, or skill modifiers. the gold cost at 1.5m will run you hundreds of millions for a single item, easily. Not to mention the already limiting factor of rawhide and iron chunks that are also pinched by masterworking. Either lower the gold cost to a max of 750k or something (could even be lower), or balance the odds to actually be equal. 10 sub properties? each should be 10% not the skill modifiers being considerably lower. that would make the cost of the reroll acceptable. Though it would still be nice to remove raw hide and iron from this, if masterworking won’t be changed.

  2. Undercity - Thematically I like the concept. It heavily favors pure speed builds that can move fast as well. Which is pretty limiting when some classes need very high end gear to make a speed build for this content at all. mostly due to crit rate, or cdr breakpoints which are difficult to reach without masterworking or greater affixes. If everyone has a relatively cheap but not overpowered speed build then this content is probably enjoyable. but overall the concept is good, after some tuning

  3. runes and runewords - I know the intent was to make something d2 reminiscent. and even some of the same rune names were included. In some sense it has that feel to it, but with sockets limited to only 2, and not having actual unique interactions for individual pairs misses the mark a little. Don’t get me wrong, I like them and their functionality. they shore up weaknesses in some builds, especially resource heavy ones. Some even offer nice defensive benefits. The balance will need to be looked at on resource generation though, as that’s not equal across the board.

  4. story - surprisingly decent. a bit of a slog in a couple spots from it being repetitive, and possibly too long. but you only need to do it once so that’s fine.

  5. Overall - the season would have been pretty good i think, but a few things plague it

    a. bugs - bugs always exist this is the nature of things. but when they’re as game breaking as those with spirit borne it’s not fun for anyone else. Many of which were even pointed out in beta, but the game was rushed in it’s present state before any of those were addressed. And given no nerfs mid season, that puts an impossible situation forward.

    b. balance - as mentioned in bugs this is out the window. SB doing pit 150’s when most others are at 100-110’s or so if not lower? that’s a hard pill to swallow. especially when you consider how many magnitudes of difference that is, both power and survival. Even within the other classes they’re wildly different and only have 1 or 2 good builds. some of which require nearly end game gear to even function (sorc).

    c. considerations - add in something so everyone knows what the highest pit clears are for each class. doesn’t need to be a ladder, or even the name of the one who cleared but at least something. . . a ladder would be nice though. If anything it keeps the devs honest on having the balance a lot closer. Also consider having individuals from core build developing comunities test builds outside purely ptr but with a NDA. Having the eyes of people whose lives are finding broken interactions, and play at a very high level, could be benefitial. something like SB gap wouldnt’ have occured if they had adequate time to properly test outside a short ptr cycle. even in that short timeframe they noticed most of these interactions, what would they do given a week on a test realm? you’d know the relative balance long before even ptr. and be in a position to address it without any potentially negative publicity.

2

Assuming you meant S6 yes?

3

fixed . . (because I need 20 characters)

2 Likes
4

Good on ya…and good feedback.

5

If separate DLC content from seasonal content, then Season 6 have two mechanics:
Slow realmwalker with realm, that gives nothing and opals, which give us 15% exp (other bonuses don’t work). And that’s all folks.

6

Since day one it has been terrible for the rerolling. They just keep it goin with masterworking. They do this all the time. They talk things up like they are sliced bread and then after it’s released, we are able to get a good look at it. We find out it sucks because it’s just another slot machine.

Sorry I am grumpy. Cheers.

7

true, realmwalker is a thing and I’d entirely forgotten about it. but I don’t know how you would address it. there are various options but I’m not sure if any are good.

  1. it’s something you farm to get a timed buff that increases farming elsewhere. but takes a fairly long time to do. not from difficulty of any sort, but because he just walks so slowly that it arbitrarily takes longer and can’t be sped up. so it’s often best to wait for it to start, go do a nmd or something and then come back purely to the portal once it’s up. when it’s so poorly paced that you actively want to ignore it, it’s poor design.

  2. the opals aren’t balanced. boss mats is realistically the only ones you’d use. If you were to make equipment boost the drop rate of ancestrals, and gold actually gives you a substantial increase in gold drops considering the many hundreds of millions we need. would also go a long ways

  3. they don’t apply everywhere. opals only apply to the boss kills in pit, and don’t apply to whisper caches or end of infernal horde caches. NMD and helltide are the only place for them really, or when doing repeated whisper farms. If they had a more universal application like this then their overall value would go up several fold. to mandatory levels at that. Which I wouldn’t suggest doing unless you reduced the time commitment to obtain them. Either by slightly more opal drops per run, or noticeably faster event time. Paired with #2, it would also give you good options on usage for each one depending on what you need. . . boss mats to get boss runs, equipment when doing boss runs and/or infernal horde, gold for infernal horde etc. Would amp up the entire thing to a solid level.

alternatively - they could just delete the entire system. as it’s adding another thing to farm when our time is already stretched pretty thin. since base mats are very rare, ancestrals exist but not very frequently, etc. having something else added to all of that only over complicates it more than it probably needs. But if it was to stay, it would need to increase the farm rates of your chosen area of focus (the opal you go with) by a considerable margin to be worth the time. and not just boss mats and that’s it.