The discussion surrounding the Season 15 Public Test Realm has been dominated by the new Challenge Dungeons and the sudden arrival of Torment 15 difficulty scaling. Many content creators are comparing T15 to pushing deep into Pit Tier 130 or 140, which means this content is designed strictly for the top fraction of a percent of the player base. However, looking closely at the mechanical scaling reveals a massive issue that is going to severely hurt build diversity when the patch goes live.
To clear Torment 15, you can no longer choose between a high-damage glass cannon setup or a tanky defensive build. The math forces you to completely maximize both systems simultaneously. There is absolutely zero room for error or casual stat choices on your gear.
On the defensive side, simply hitting your basic armor cap and seventy percent resistances is just the entry fee to get into the dungeon. A single basic attack from a Torment 15 elite will instantly one-shot you through standard defensive layers. To survive, players are forced to stack multi-layered multiplicative systems. This explains why everyone on the test server is running the exact same combinations, such as pairing the Splinter of Pain for a flat forty percent damage reduction with massive maximum health multipliers to scale up indestructible barriers. If you do not have these specific independent defensive layers active at all times, you cannot play the game.
The real problem arises because you cannot just build a pure tank either. The monster health pools at Torment 15 scale into the trillions, meaning if you sacrifice too many offensive stats to stay alive, you will fail the dungeon timer completely. You need an absurd amount of consistent, multiplicative damage flowing every single second. This forces players to rely entirely on broken multipliers like the Splinter of Hellfire to double their total damage output without needing to waste gear affixes on critical strike chance.
When the game balance requires you to max out every single defensive cap while simultaneously demanding perfect offensive multipliers, ninety-nine percent of legendary aspects, uniques, and paragon configurations become completely unviable. You cannot run a fun, creative homebrew build at this level. Every single gear slot and masterworking upgrade must be perfectly min-maxed into a hyper-specific meta template just to survive the math of the encounter.
While it is great to have a brutal endgame challenge for players who want to test the absolute limits of their characters, the current tuning of Torment 15 feels like it is pushing the game into a corner where only two or three specific builds per class can even participate.
Are you planning on attempting the Torment 15 grind next season, or do you think this level of scaling is bad for the overall health of build customization?
They’re trying to “fix” the problem of the game consisting solely of the Pit when done with the rest of it (i.e. post-Mephisto phase if you like)
However I think the better move would’ve simply been
Reduce Paragon and Glyph cap down (Paragon @200 and Glyphs @100)
That way the game is less about Pit and excess of Pit reruns, rest of activities are still “in” and lastly but not the least even if not perfect the game would be far more balanced
IF they wanted to add a “premium” content for the best of the best - it could’ve been just some static bits like say Uber-Strongholds with same Mephisto difficulty level, i.e. @T13
But no I don’t really care about getting to the top of everything. I also don’t think build diversity matters at the very top of the scale.
What I enjoy with this game is building my own builds. Figuring out which abilities work and which don’t and working to make something as strong as I can. I don’t mind that some skills aren’t as good, that’s part of the enjoyment is figuring it out for myself instead of reading a build guide.
So naturally with that builds are going to be a pyramid. The builds at the bottom will struggle with even low end content and as you work your way up the level less and less builds can push further. And only the top build will be able to do the top content. And I’m fine with that.
The better question is which level of the pyramid should we consider to be the base. T5? T8? And where is the mid point where there’s still a decent amount of viable builds, t10?
get ready for “noone is making you play this content” and “this is for us pro’s who grind all day, not casuals” and “stop asking to make the game easier”
The problem is the game has to sacrifice too much for this to be a thing
Back at S1 it was only Lillith (give or take) and instead of scaling down her HP but nerfing what already beat her, they did the opposite
The game hasn’t recovered ever since, literally
Let’s say you play something of your own - a Meteor build with Overpower and then use those overpower stacks to summon the GoaT Hydra you can
WHEN you finally hit a wall - say at T10, it’s just better for the “next phase” to be 4x-5x DPS away (or even 10x) than 100x
They allow too much player power, that’s the problem.. Scale everthing down
It’s fine if there are challenge dungeons, and in fact I encourage it, BUT - why add 150 Pit levels and then add T150 dungeons to the menu than just reduce Pit to 100 ?, that way P115 becomes the “goal post” for most competitors which lines up relatively well with Mephisto as well (and P120 becomes the “cap”, give or take)
B.T.W. as is challenge dungeons will be P135 (+15, not +30)
I will play whatever class I am playing (very likely the one people are complaining is the weakest)
till I am not bored.
When I am bored I will play something else. I used to care about “how to make the game better”, but the people on the other end don’t care about making the game better.
If what he is calling T15 is the 3 wells on the PTR where you pick +5, +10 or +15 and then go fight one boss. It is dumb. It is not even an entire dungeon. As I did them I just kept thinking “why?”.
You don’t seem to understand the reality of the game. Every season Blizzard nerfs and buffs. Every season a new meta forms. Many players look forward to each season and discovering the new build. They look forward to playing a new class and pushing it to the limit. Why play a non S tier class? Because it is not as fun as playing a powerful build. Why choose to be weak?
I get that some people only want to play their favorite class. Some seasons they are strong and other seasons they are weak. Even playing a weak class, one can make that classes leaderboard, and demonstrate their skill. I can respect that however. If you choose a weak class than you have to accept the consequences.
Casual dads can choose lower tier levels to test their builds. Advanced players have their tier levels as well.