PTR findings and first impressions

Figured we might as well keep track of some PTR findings here for reference. Especially those that aren't in or disagree with the original announcement. Feel free to add more below.



--- Chaos Skills ---
//

Ring of Fire
- Seems to still hit for about twice as much as

Frost Nova so the announcement was a bit exaggerated there.

//

Miasma Chain
- Can still get blocked by terrain, your merc, your demon and so forth so casting it remains a royal pain in many a situation.
- The bug causing the chained target to not take any damage still exists.

//

Enhanced Entropy
- The tooltip for EE has been updated so that all gains

Cap out at lvl 20, regardless of hard vs. soft points. >20 simply does nothing.
- Soft points in EE do now work for all 3 affect skill's tooltips as those get their radius and duration updated accordingly.
- Soft points do seem to work for

Miasma Bolt's miasma duration.
- Neither soft points nor hard points work for

Miasma Chain's duration. The tooltip gets updated (see above) but the chain duration is always the same and always acts as though you have 20 pts in EE, even with 0.
- Only hard points work for

Abyss' radius, soft points do nothing.



--- Demon Skills ---
//

Demonic Mastery
- Demon count does now require hard points.
- Skill level requirements for higher demon count were lowered to 5 for 2 demons and 10 for 3.

//

Bind Demon
- Tooltip says nothing about the new lvl requirement based on target type though a (very rough and quick - grain of salt!) first test with Hephasto suggests you can indeed not bind him with too low a lvl anymore.
- If you have an existing demon bound, their aura gets updated automatically as you load in (confirmed with might ->

Concentration). So no saving your

Conviction demon through the patch.
- Affix bonus remains based on soft points (wasn't stated to change but there seemed to be some confusion about that).
- Not sure about the health

Cap details but based on some first tests, even normal, non-elite bound demons (lancer) seem to still have no problem face-tanking most things (up to and including DC, no uber test yet).
- Chance to bind along with the shift to late frame only is annoying as all hell. By the time you finally manage to bind your target, your merc would've cleared an entire screen even on P8. So to actually reliably get the mob you're after, you're basically stuck removing your merc's weapon (or killing him entirely), figuring out some way to hurt the mob without outright killing it and then running for like 10 minutes trying over and over to bind it without accidentally killing it or it killing you at some point (since you basically can't defend yourself and can't have a merc tanking it, it'll just slowly widdle you down if there's no terrain to abuse). Imo that entire mechanic is just exceptionally annoying and bad design. Bind chance should simply be 100% with the challenge being to find the right mob to begin with and not whether or not you remembered to kill your merc before it got close.
- The reduction in chance for a cursed bound demon to proc

Amplify Damage seems to also apply to damage auras (

Holy Freeze). Additionally, it seems per tick and not per target. As a result, even when parking your bound demon in the middle of 100 mobs, there's still a very high chance that amp won't proc for a few aura ticks/attacks.

//

Blood Boil
- Range isn't great but dmg is solid. Works quite well for tele-stomping.

//

Blood Oath
- Damage transfer still seems uncapped, at least on the tooltip (showing 67% for me right now).



---

Terror Zones / Heralds / Shards / Sunders ---
- Heralds spawn a LOT more often now. Getting 1-2 per zone so far. Massive improvement! Though you can absolutely still go multiple zones without seeing one as well so don't get too excited.
- They do indeed seem to now also spawn off of normal mobs so there's finally a reason to kill everything.
- Kills now trigger a spawn directly without any need for exploration to convert your previously earned ire (ires just don't exist anymore).
- When a

Herald spawn is triggered, they will no longer spawn 2-3 screens away. Instead, they and their entire pack will spawn right on top of the mob you killed to trigger them. This adds a whole new challenge, especially for melee builds as you can absolutely get yourself immediately surrounded by an entire

Herald pack with no way out.
- When a

Herald spawn is triggered they will not spawn immediately. Instead, you get a "

Herald is hunting you" message, a glowing ball starts hovering over the dead monster that triggered it (see image below) and after a few seconds, the

Herald pack will spawn on the location of that glowing ball. So you do get some warning and a grace period to get out of the way. - From a P1 perspective, shards drop significantly more often now.



--- Build impressions so far ---
// ES
ES definitely got nerfed quite massively, no question there. But we all know that was more than justified. In the current state, given decent (but not great/optimized) gear, it doesn't feel OP anymore but remains perfectly viable for P8 TZs and all that jazz. On the low end of the gear curve, it does feel rather weak atm so maybe that side got hit a bit too hard. Then again, that is true for most physical/weapon based classes and builds.

// Lancer Link
Amp proc rate dropping to 5% is VERY noticeable and tones that build down quite significantly. It remains perfectly viable but if you get an unlucky stream of no amp procs, it might just make you cry as you remember the good ol' days of instantly deleting everything. Still beats other summoner classes by a clear mile.

// Chaos (Magic)
The nerfs/fixes to bolt and chain are definitely noticeable and raw dmg output has certainly gone down because of them. Though the chains now getting a 5 count limit with a removed cast delay does feel more entertaining imo. The biggest pain point atm is probably lack of skills as you require more for a better demon companion. This wouldn't be a problem if they had actually fixed EE and made it work with soft points but at the time of writing this, they haven't (see further up), meaning you still need 20 hard points in there (and it remains a pointless staff mod).

// Chaos (Fire)
Still works perfectly well. Not much more to say about that one really. Add Infinity to merc to replace demon's

Conviction, add one of the many leftover points fire has int hex:siphon for solid free on-kill regen, no mana issues whatsoever, despite losing Insight.



Disclaimers:
- Build impressions especially tend to still be very early and rough first impressions, prior to any true related re-optimization and the like. So take those with a massive grain of salt. Probably a bit of a downside bias in there.
- The above is by no means a comprehensive and all-encompassing list. It is merely a collection of the bits that I happened to spot that feel worth pointing out.

Reworked the OP for a bit more readability and to act as a more central repository.

Will keep expanding as I do more testing and discover more things worth noting.

Fun fact:
Blizzard f'd up the PTR setup..doesn't pull from the PTR folder saves but instead uses the normal live saves.

Thanks for making me break all those for testing Blizzard! -_-

Bisu wrote: 2 hours ago

[..]
Does Blizzard provide any decent channel for all the testers to give their feedback directly? Or they will just rely on their own "analysis" from the server side and do who knows what?
[..]

Doesn't seem like it.

I feel like there was a "submit bug" type thing in a previous PTR but in this one, I can't find anything of the sort. Definitely a missing feature..here's to hoping they have at least 1 internal tester who spots things like EE still not working. ~~

Haven't gotten around to

Blood Oath and such yet.
Currently busy taking a closer look at the

Herald changes which I am absolutely loving so far!

fredkid wrote: 1 hour ago

Did you already test the

Amplify Damage Proc with a demon with

Holy Freeze aura?

Schnorki wrote: 4 hours ago

// Lancer Link
Amp proc rate dropping to 5% is VERY noticeable and tones that build down quite significantly. It remains perfectly viable but if you get an unlucky stream of no amp procs, it might just make you cry as you remember the good ol' days of instantly deleting everything. Still beats other summoner classes by a clear mile.

Was going to before the "using live instead of PTR saves" killed that prepped test char. ~~
Gotta go hunt down a new frozen one for that.

Still on the list.

justinman114 wrote: 1 hour ago

Heralds spawning on you randomly sounds like one shot deaths just waiting to happen. Seems a bit much, maybe they should still spawn a bit further away?

Nah, it sounds worse than it is.
You get the sound and the glowing indicator and then have a few seconds to get out.
Definitely manageable, it'll merely require some getting used to.

Initially, until people figure out that glowing ball, yes, a lot of folks will get insta-killed by their heralds.

Bisu wrote: 2 hours ago

[..]
One skill that I am particularly curious about is

Blood Oath. Currently the tooltip for this skill is wrong, and only hard skill points count; the damage reduction is capped at ~40% (or maybe 43%). Did this change? The blue post mentioned something about the new

Cap of reduction being 50%, which in turn imply this could become soft points based -- if that is the case, then it could become a major survivability buff and make this skill a new one-point (or a few points) wonder.

Added a note on that.
Seems to still be uncapped, at least as far as the tooltip is concerned.
Showing 67% for me right now at skill lvl 32.

Drakenden wrote: 1 hour ago

Schnorki wrote: 1 hour ago

justinman114 wrote: 1 hour ago

Heralds spawning on you randomly sounds like one shot deaths just waiting to happen. Seems a bit much, maybe they should still spawn a bit further away?

Nah, it sounds worse than it is.
You get the sound and the glowing indicator and then have a few seconds to get out.
Definitely manageable, it'll merely require some getting used to.

Initially, until people figure out that glowing ball, yes, a lot of folks will get insta-killed by their heralds.

Is it similar to what happens in

Chaos Sanctuary when you open the seals?

because if so, seems reasonable enough, assuming you're not already boxed in.

Kind of.

Two main differences:
1) In CS, you know when you're triggering it as you're actively hitting the seal. For heralds, you have no idea which kill will trigger the next one. So you definitely have less control and it is more surprising.
2) In CS, you get that little glowy thing but more often than not, the mobs spawn in some other random place (from a list of standard locations you get used to). For heralds they seem to spawn exactly on the orb which in turn spawns exactly on the dead mob that triggered it. No guessing as to how far offset the

Herald is gonna end up spawning. So you can reliably set up your traps/Bone walls/whatever beforehand in exactly the right spot.

fredkid wrote: 1 hour ago

Did you already test the

Amplify Damage Proc with a demon with

Holy Freeze aura?

Schnorki wrote: 4 hours ago

// Lancer Link
Amp proc rate dropping to 5% is VERY noticeable and tones that build down quite significantly. It remains perfectly viable but if you get an unlucky stream of no amp procs, it might just make you cry as you remember the good ol' days of instantly deleting everything. Still beats other summoner classes by a clear mile.

Alright, finally managed to get a cursed/freeze bind (those bind chance/frame changes are annoying AF...seriously).

Added a note to the OP.
Seems the aura ticks are still "all or nothing" and subject to the same reduction in chance.
So it helps, yes, simply by adding the ticks as "extra attacks" but it is still not great as you'll only get amp off of the probably also 5% of your aura ticks (but then on all mobs hit by it, same as now).

That'll have to do for today though. Getting tired of the endless testing.