If your goal is to test your item generation and our patience, then mission accomplished.
I spent hours—hours—standing around in town, opening boxes full of garbage and salvaging all of it, and then even more time tempering and masterworking and running back to click Grant All Materials a hundred more times, just to get even remotely close to the gear I have on the live server. I still didn’t end up with a usable amulet after all that, which is one of the most important items for scaling my damage. This was all to try to test one version of one build.
If I’m standing in town needlessly rolling dice over and over, then I’m not playing the game or testing anything that matters.
If you want people to test builds with very specific gear requirements, we need a way to get that gear in a reasonable amount of time. Randomly generated gear is fine when you have months to slowly work your way up to ideal gear, but a week is almost nothing, and most people are going to have very limited time within that week to test anything.
We should be able to just directly create gear with the stats we need, including tempering and masterworking, as if we were using a build planner. It should not take more than 10 to 15 minutes to put a build together on a test server.
9 Likes
Agreed. As it stands they only get feedback from people willing to grind dozens of hours. Even then those individuals can’t truly experiment to delve deep into endgame balance of classes/builds so the feedback is lacking. Making it easy to put together a full ancestral build will only increase the amount of viable, helpful feedback. Itemization and drop rates have barely been changed from last season so what are we even accomplishing by doing this? It’s mind boggling that they seem to insist on needing to grind everything out just to TEST. It’s an absurd way to approach a test realm.
Also based on how garbage gambling still feels I’m betting ancestral drop rates are still horrible. I got to 300 in S6 without finding a single viable 3-4 GA item. Best I got was two 2 GA items. The fact that’s possible is ridiculous. Ancestral drop rates will almost definitely still be horrendous and it will be largely be because they can’t get the proper feedback from this terribly designed PTR system.
2 Likes
Agreed. It was ridiculous trying to actually get a good new Druid amulet to test, on top of all the other hoops I had to go through.
2 Likes
They don’t grasp the concept of seasonal content let alone a 1 week test. Yet they still wonder why there are so many bugs/dupes and patches are a predictable disaster. This is what you get when you manipulate the game to give you the metric you want vs common sense.
3 Likes
It does seem logical that in a limited time testing environment, that all the necessary gear and materials to masterwork are made readily available near immediately unless the character testing required is from zero.
2 Likes
Why you want to salvage the gears? Just leave it on floor to save your time so you can roll more.
You can click the mats hundred time first before masterwork to save time too.
Stash space is what limit how many times we can roll the gears. More stash please, dev…
Agree. It takes too much time to get character in a decent shape to begin testing.
1 Like
Ancestrals may as well be non-existent this PTR just the same it was S6. Not sure what the point is in totally nerfing Ancestrals drop rates to the point where I can’t max out my Aspects and I’m already at P275 in S6. Don’t think they “fixed” the ancestral drop rates in PTR so it’s an really uphill battle.
If by being able to spam caches for free loot as fast as you can click buttons and it is hard for people to get Ancestrals etc., imagine how painful it will be when that is cutdown 1,000x over.
Like i said before, a PTR is supposed to test everything, close of the most possible “pinnacle” power of our characters.
P200 is just “endgame build” start for a majority.
P250 - P260 is where build are at 99% of their potential.
But Blizzard think it’s funny to leveling a character on a PTR “one week” when we already must do this on live.
Grinding on PTR is an abomination.
3 Likes
They need to buff ancestral drops by at least the amount they nerfed my boy Rod Kepeleke. (600%, if you’re wondering.) Think I wrote about a dozen bug/feedback reports saying this in case some of you weren’t.
1 Like
I agree too. I was tired after opening caches and applying my points that I had to log out and come back another day to start testing.
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My “favorite” experience with PTR was yesterday. I finally got a decent starter set of gear after opening hundreds of boxes. Then I looked at paragon and became sad - too few. I dug into Mrak’s menu and found “Paragon 200”. OOOHHh, I thought. I’ll click that!
And when I pulled up my character screen, al the gear was erased :(. And that was it - all inspiration to continue testing was gone /logged off
2 Likes
I actually leveled a character while Mrak wasn’t working, and I had the same thing happen with all his gear, plus all the boss mats, runes, and keys he had on him. I used the paragon 200 boost, which deleted everything with no warning whatsoever.
Fortunately, in my case it was mostly only 750 gear still, but that was what forced me into opening boxes all evening to try to re-equip him. If all his gear hadn’t been deleted, I could have at least played a little bit and worked on the gear incrementally instead of one long, exhausting stretch.
If that would have happened to me after all the time I spent getting ancestral gear, I would have just closed the game and uninstalled the PTR right there. As it was, by the time I got him (partially) geared out, I didn’t even want to play anymore—on the PTR or live.
I feel you. I had all my gear set and clicked paragon 200 then lost it all. I knew full boost would do that but I didn’t know clicking the paragon boost would. Painful!
2 Likes
i did test drop rates extensively at different tiers in different game modes. my conclusion is that it is clearly improved from S6, but not quite where it was in S5 except in seasonal content where it feels about like s5. This should be fine in a three-month season.
It is not fine in a one-week test. i had way more that i wanted to test than what i was able to get to due to the issues pointed out by many in this thread.
Why not just give us the tools to make the builds we want quickly and easily in the test realm? I still want to know if all the other content works and i will still test it even if i can make a perfect build in 15 min instead of 5 hours. if anything, i will test more content on more builds at more power levels because I can quickly and easily make any build to the power level i desire to test.
I did this as well. i spent all of day one leveling a toon from 0 to T3 with grinded gear solid enough to open Tier 4 and start to test late endgame and try more builds… then i went to Mrak to cheat my paragons and all of my equipped gear went poof along with all the items in my bag for other builds i wanted to test. this is what led me to ask for XP scrolls instead of xp/paragon boost in this post War And PTR - warning very long
1 Like
Yes, agreed. They should give only Ancestral items with any caches and at least make a Paragon LVL boost to LVL 275.
1 Like
I agree we need easier access to ancestral, but I think they need to just separate legendary and ancestral caches. not replace legendary with ancestral cache. If it was ancestral only, then if I wanted to see how a particular build performed before getting GA items I would have to go farm it.
I would also love to see level and paragon boost replaced entirely with XP scrolls OR more set options, or even just an option with a slider where the floor is the current char level and you can slide it up to wherever you want. It is very hard to test everything if starting points are min level or max level and you have to grind to get anywhere in between. I want total control of character power to be able to test as many areas of content as possible on as many different builds as possible at as many levels of character power as possible.
I get that some people only play PTR to work out builds for the next season or to play a character with all 3/4 GA and perfect tempers and MW, but that is not everyone’s only goal in a PTR 
My whole view here is that we would be most effective at testing given the ability to create any power level from “just attained this world level” to “no way you realistically get this in a season”, quickly and easily.
2 Likes
I would change all ‚normal’ legendaries into rares/yellow. Since they don’t drop at Torment it would be win/win - less beams/more quality drops and ofc rares importance at early game. Ancients would be Legendaries only.
Edit: i would redesign legendary powers. They should be separated from items, they should drop themselve similar to glyphs and they should be imprinted onto item slots instead of items - codex of power would stay at it is, we could freely change items because powers would stay, only became inactive whenever uniq would be inserted.