Diablo III Catch-All 2.0

Actually my jerk comment was venting frustration. Numerous times I've gone to look at the #1 or #2 player on a leaderboard, just to see what they were using to see if it looked fun or get ideas for what to gamble, and been presented a half-naked paper doll. I had always assumed the game had just caught them while changing gear, or swapping gear to alts or something. When I learned they were doing this intentionally... it was frustrating to say the least.

The rest are my thoughts on the upcoming change Blizzard is making. I like it, and I don't think it's detrimental to competition.

FYI, there's a CTD of some kind in the PTR, the game I kept up with here and there visits and occasional playing all day long is now gone

My problem with it is that it limits creativity. Then 4 weeks into S4 you'll have the exact same build on every character running around and no one will change because they think that since the number 1 player is using that build that it's the most powerful and playing anything else is gimping yourself.

I don't know, maybe it's not a problem. There were two different DH builds in Season 3, so I'm not really sure where I stand on this one any more.

It is both good and bad I guess. The lemming effect on builds can exaggerate the build diversity issue and put more pressure on Blizzard to deliver better build balance.
Beside, even if you can't see other peoples builds, the same lemming effect still exists, as some people are more than happy to share their builds anyway.

For those who care about the leaderboard competition, I think it was fair that they could choose to hide exactly what they were doing (even if most might just do it to be jerks), but on the larger scale I doubt it will matter much one way or another. The best builds will pretty much always be available. And very few of those hiding their builds probably had anything worth hiding.

Played some of my Wizard yesterday on the PTR. All the builds focused around Aether Walker and Teleport/Calamity for stuns and activating the arcane meteor are crippled to the point of uselessness in grifts, and given that the new standard rift level will at some point be roughly equivalent to greater rift 45 it won't even be good for farming regular rifts.

The updated Vyr's could be fun and interesting to play but is currently crippled without access to the belt they're adding in the upcoming season and the updated version of the Swami wizard hat with the increased time bonus. As it is now the time spent outside of Archon is crippling.

And it's difficult to build the full count of stacks from the Chantodo's set because of a bug, but one would assume that will be fixed.

Vyr's in its current form probably isn't good for anything higher than maybe grift 40/Torment 9. Even then it's way squishier than it seems like it should be if they truly want it to compete with any of the other sets.

It can't deal the reliable damage of Tal Rasha's or Delsere's or the combo builds. It can't kite as effectively as Firebird's because of the way you're forced to play once you pop Archon, which is just getting in everything's face and trying to melt them.

So far seems like Monk (again...) and Crusader (yay!) got the better ends of the deal. I haven't read into the updated Witch Doctor stuff yet. A cursory glance says the big WD players are underwhelmed so far, but the PTR's still young yet. Plenty of time for all of it to change still.

WD ought to be able to benefit a lot from the cube, due to having some very gear dependent builds (Beyond just the crazy sets like everyone else).
SMK and Dagger of Darts, required for the two current pet builds. Super rare items. Now you only need a non-ancient one and the rolls does not matter.
Actually SMK might be out entirely, since the 2part set bonus now comes with a 80% cooldown reduction on Fetish Army.
And then for the 'pure pet' build they had two very important legendaries, the Mask of Jeram and Taskers & Theo. ~90% dmg increase and ~40% dmg increase. Which where difficult to fit in at the same time. No longer an issue.
Nor could pure pet build realistically use the Focus&Restraint rings. Might still be a challenge, at least solo, but way more realistic than before.

Of course other classes/builds have such gains as well, and WD supposedly was in the lower end of the power curve before, so they still might be.

Monk should be able to use both the Gungo bracers and the dmg reduction bracer at the same time. That looks interesting to me.

I was able to play a bit last night on the PTR. Now that they have us collecting more mats is there any plan to increase stacks for the older stuff? I have tons of current mats and will have to do some sever house cleaning to make room for all of the new stuff to feed the cube.

I got the cube but have not been able to gather enough new mats to be able to use the cube yet. Nothing much other than that. I liked Sescheron. I was only able to get a T1 game going so I can't say anything about the new levels. I do like the new Rift/Grift setup.

Bandit shrine is crazy.

Spent more time with the Crusader today myself. Still really liking the Blessed Hammer build, particularly when running lightning. I fiddled with both holy and fire but neither has as many options for add-on damage as lightning.

Tried various combos of actual weapon + weapon power slot in the cube. Ended up running an ancient Schaefer's Hammer with Johanna's Argument as the cube power. Was unquestionably more damage than any combination of things involving my non-ancient Furnace or using the other weapons with the Furnace's elite damage coming from the cube.

Still just melts enemies up through mid-high 40's in grifts. It's a bit squishy when playing with other people and Unity isn't an option, but I think that can be ameliorated somewhat. My first run at helping on that front was using the cube to take the legendary power from a Wyrdward ring and add a 1.5 second stun to my hammers. It helps, but may not be quite the best option.

It's fun to poke through my stash now and try to figure out what would be best getting sacrificed to the cube and what I should probably keep to actually equip.

You said before you think the Blessed Hammer set will get nerfed. Why do you think it'll get nerfed?

I played with the ptr last night also. I loved running through the new area to get the cube. Have not had a chance to test any of it out yet but it looks interesting. Also it seems there will be recipes to find and ones they will add later.

It is much quicker to start a game with an existing character than create a new game with a new character.

Regular rifts seem a lot longer to complete. And sets and legs are dropping like mad!

T7 is quite a jump up from T6, didn't try anything beyond that yet.

fangblackbone wrote:

I played with the ptr last night also. I loved running through the new area to get the cube. Have not had a chance to test any of it out yet but it looks interesting. Also it seems there will be recipes to find and ones they will add later.

It is much quicker to start a game with an existing character than create a new game with a new character.

Regular rifts seem a lot longer to complete. And sets and legs are dropping like mad!

Don't expect the drop rates to carry over.

AnimeJ wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

I played with the ptr last night also. I loved running through the new area to get the cube. Have not had a chance to test any of it out yet but it looks interesting. Also it seems there will be recipes to find and ones they will add later.

It is much quicker to start a game with an existing character than create a new game with a new character.

Regular rifts seem a lot longer to complete. And sets and legs are dropping like mad!

Don't expect the drop rates to carry over.

That is why I have zero plans to play on the ptr

Yeah I think it is pretty obvious that the drop rates are not carrying over. I played an hour or two last night and got about 15 legendaries and 20 set pieces.

2000% droprate buff. It better rain candy.

Yeah, I'm happy to actually not play the PTR. Assuming I could get past the long wait times that is.

But last night I jumped back into S3 and just played some normal t6 rifts. I'm farming as much materials, keys and bounty caches now so that when season ends, and 2.3 hits, my non seasonal character will have a large stash of things to instantly convert and play with.

I know I'll have to do it all again for season 4, but it's still fun to actually pick up stuff again.

I am getting the impression that finding set pieces that you can use will be harder. Even with the increased drop rate, finding stuff to use is rare. I think they are going to force you to use the cube recipe.

I don't think that will be a bad thing. It will be less stress when you get something with bad rolls or you get a set piece for another class. Plus if you start getting things for other classes that can be a bonus if it enhances your ability to gear up your other classes with your main. (especially if you are going for a specific build)

krev82 wrote:

T7 is quite a jump up from T6, didn't try anything beyond that yet.

Hammer build with a non ancient one handed flail and no ancient armor is T10 capable without unity.

ahrezmendi wrote:

You said before you think the Blessed Hammer set will get nerfed. Why do you think it'll get nerfed?

See above.

Wow.

ahrezmendi wrote:

Wow.

I ran a 46 Grift in 10:30-something first try using Unity. T10 is Grift 45. I had zero ancient pieces at the time. I ran a 47 or 48, I forget which, in 12:20 or so I think, shortly after. I think I had found ancient pants before that one, and maybe changed up my weapon setup to a weakly rolled non ancient furnace and I had cubed the Johanna's Argument flail or something. I forget. I had awful luck with pylons in this one, they were all in dead ends and the wrong kinds for the moment and generally useless, and still beat it without too much effort.

Point being... the build just seems less dependent on gear quality than anything else we've had with the Crusader so far.

I've refined my build with it some since then but have not tried a solo Grift. I started pushing more toward a pure lightning spec. Enough so to the point that running Thundergod's Vigor was actually a higher damage boost overall than running a Witching Hour. So super common everybody's found 1,000 of them belt > hard to come by maybe rarest belt in the game.

I have an ancient Schaefer's Hammer now, plus ancient gloves, pants, and boots. The legendary affix on the hammer ticks for between 50-100 million per second, just by standing near things. Hammers hit for 2+ billion if I keep the Focus+Restraint bonuses going, and they get thrown out super fast even running the 2 hander because of the cubed +100% Blessed Hammer attack speed from Johanna's Argument.

On T8 playing with a friend since Unity was useless I ditched that in the cube and harvested the affix from a Wyrdward ring and gave my hammers a very nice fairly reliable 1.5 second stun on top of all the damage. T8 at this point is as easy or easier than T6 used to be with basically any completed build. Elites and Champions just melt and you grab the orbs and keep moving. You're almost never in any real danger unless you just aren't paying attention. You just spam hammers and jump around a bit with falling sword and giggle at everything.

Like, you need some specific things to put it all together, a shield, the flail, the bracers, etc, but you have a lot of options and don't have to worry as much about stat rolls on some of it because you can just cube something if it rolled awful stats and then use some other thing. For instance, I'm running an ancient pair of Reaper's Wraps that I already had in my stash from porting over my characters. I just cubed the ability from an awful pair of the Gabriel's bracers that I found.

So for an initial weapon choice as long as you find a Johanna's Argument flail, even if it's awful, and you find at least one 4000+ damage ancient 2 hander as those tend to not be overly hard to come by... You're set to start speed farming some reasonably high difficulty. Cube the ability from the Johanna's, throw on whatever the random 2 hander is. Done. Congrats. Run 35-40+, depending on variance in whatever other gear you've accumulated.

It will take longer than it does on PTR, but still be easier to gear IMO than Roland's and sure as hell a lot easier to gear than any of the old Akkhan's based builds.

That sounds fantastic. Even with expected nerfs I really like the flexibility, especially for Crusader. As much as I love the class it was frustrating to be so gear dependent.

Thin_J wrote:

So super common everybody's found 1,000 of them belt > hard to come by maybe rarest belt in the game.

Best part, IMO. I totally get that there's fun to be had in varying rarities, it's a huge rush to see that perfectly rolled Furnace or whatever drop. But from a gameplay standpoint it's so much better to have the more common items be the best (or at least very strong). In my perfect world all items would have the same drop rate, and it'd be entirely up to the player what to use based on the build they want to run. The design of the game as it is progressing is moving towards this, so I hope their long term goal is something along these lines.

+1

T7? T10? I haven't paid any attention to the upcoming patch notes (All I know is they're adding something like the D2 cube). How are they planning to change the Torment levels, and will that replace greater-rifts?

They're expanding them up to T10. It won't replace any of the rifts, but it scales similarly to them. As Thin_J said, T10 is approximately grift 45.

Plus you do not need stones for rifts or greater rifts.

fangblackbone wrote:

Plus you do not need stones for rifts or greater rifts.

They removed trials, and removed regular rift keys. You still get greater rift keys from rift guardians, they're just a generic key that lets you run any grift level up to the highest you've finished plus one level higher.

So what's the point of bounties if you can just run rifts?

Xeknos wrote:

So what's the point of bounties if you can just run rifts?

Bounties give you the materials required to use the cube for all its various functions.

They also hugely boosted bounty rewards. Every bounty set has a boss fight now and there's always a huge "diabolic hoard" chest afterward. No idea if it's a guaranteed drop of some kind on higher Torment levels, it's hard to tell right now with the 2000% drop rate skewing things.

I'm going to bet there's a solid chance of drops from those chests.

Thin_J wrote:

They removed trials

Yes! Yes! Yes! Awesome! Thank you Blizzard! Can this patch come out right now? Please??

It better not come out right now seems like it is in a very rough state.

Mostly regarding some CC changes.
And supposedly the "nerf" to Reflect Damage is instead a large buff, oneshotting people right, left and center.

Tried the PTR today actually. Got the cube. Couldn't bother to start farming crafting materials to test it however.
I couldn't really feel the supposed destruction of CC abilities, but then I were on my pet WD where the pets are acting like the CC, and they are of course unaffected.