PTR findings and first impressions

If you import a character w/ a bound Super Unique @ Rank 1

Bind Demon, do you still get to keep said demon?

A YouTuber with a lot of D2R content is not impressed with the patch (I find his videos informative, having not played D2 since before runewords didn't exist.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOQEMdrYPcY

Blackluck wrote: 3 hours ago

A YouTuber with a lot of D2R content is not impressed with the patch (I find his videos informative, having not played D2 since before runewords didn't exist.)

He raises some good points, definitely looks like still some bugs to work out, and some tweaking to the balane changes. But, and this is kinda minor, he still falls into the streamer trap of not understanding why anyone would want to be able to get a sunder charm without playing 12 hours straight every day. Some of us have jobs that arent playing Diablo. So agree things probably need tweaking, but a lot of the changes are in the right direction, IMO.

weegee wrote: 1 day ago

i've heard they gave you an

Eth

Thunder Maul fort for testing, is this a joke?

They probably want people to actively feel (suffer) the change (ES causing durability loss), so that they don't get surprised by it in the future.

But people playing the PTR are usually more of the attentive kind. The unattentive people don't play the PTR, don't read patch notes and will be very surprised when their

Eth ES weapon falls apart.

Some people definitely don't read patch notes at all. There are people trying (and failing) to make Mosaic on ladder regularly, after all. Of course, it doesn't help that the "patch notes" for anything 3.0+ are a bit all over the place (some changes are not described anywhere at all, some are mentioned in blue forum posts, some are mentioned in actual patch notes...)

Queegon wrote: 1 day ago

[..]
Where have you been? This is the biggest news that have come since D2R announcement!
You can finally stop saying "just testing, not optimized yet" as you can create optimized GG real items in planner and export a whole char with merc as an offline char. It's done by clicking on "export", unsurprisingly.
[..]

Fascinating. I made Peace with maxroll not having a proper export and having to use a 3rd solution for that ages ago. Guess I should've re-checked that at some point...

The "just testing, not optimized yet" is intentional though, seeing how I'm looking to also get a feel for the "not absolute top-end" impact of the changes.
(Or in some cases simply didn't have the time yet to fully evaluate different combinations/options I guess)

Kakumba wrote: 2 hours ago

He raises some good points, definitely looks like still some bugs to work out, and some tweaking to the balane changes. But, and this is kinda minor, he still falls into the streamer trap of not understanding why anyone would want to be able to get a sunder charm without playing 12 hours straight every day. Some of us have jobs that arent playing Diablo. So agree things probably need tweaking, but a lot of the changes are in the right direction, IMO.

Well, for me the bottom line is that the

Herald/Sunder mechanic and drop rate needs further tweaking. I think he is absolutely right, that it is now pointless to go after Heralds above T2 which makes the sharding of acts pointless, too. Despite that, it seems some skills should be tweaked further or restored (I did not get why they changed the magic skills, too. Apart from the bugs like

Miasma Chain ticking too often they seemed fine to me). But above all I really hope they stick to removing the FOMO mechanics which seems hard to understand for many "fulltime" streamers

Yep, further tweaking for sure. I wouldnt even have minded if they made sunders still TZ only, and even only droppable by uniques/ champions in TZ (at low odds) and by heralds at slightly higher odds, and then just increased the

Herald odds a bit. Like, increase the ire from 2% to 4%, and the spawn from 1% to 2%. Tweak the numbers as needed, but you could get to a point where you can reliably get heralds. Also just have a gradually increasing drop chance. Like a tier 2

Herald has slightly higher odds, tier 3 slightly higher again.

As I say, he raises good points, and so even the changes I broadly agree with need to be fine tuned. I like the idea of doing all 5 acts as TZ using shards, there should be some reward for that, when I get time one day to actually do it