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: 8 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: 7 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

Megademon bound demon attacks 8 times per second with flame jet, 24 times with multiple shot affix.
Easy cursed, well, easier.

Probably the GG demon to bind for physical warlocks, if changes become live. Cursed, Multiple Shots,

Fanaticism/

Concentration.
If you get him in Uber Izual's lair, they will be immune on top of everything else. Just dont count with them hurting anything. Flame jet is peewee league in terms of damage dealt.

But if you want the demon as a "hitter" and not just a curse/aura carrier (my case )
Demon Lord (or any monster with ranged attack or spells) is not a good choice

Queegon wrote: 1 hour ago

Pit Lord bound demon attacks 8 times per second with flame jet, 24 times with multiple shot affix.
Easy cursed, well, easier.

fredkid wrote: 1 hour ago

But if you want the demon as a "hitter" and not just a curse/aura carrier (my case )
Demon Lord (or any monster with ranged attack or spells) is not a good choice

Queegon wrote: 1 hour ago

Pit Lord bound demon attacks 8 times per second with flame jet, 24 times with multiple shot affix.
Easy cursed, well, easier.

Aye, pit lords kinda suck.
Plus they get themselves tele-locked on you. F that.
Though I guess if you're looking to purely keep them as an amp-stick for something with shorter range anyways (e.g. mirrored) then it might be worth a consideration.

Kakumba wrote: 5 hours ago

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

Maybe a partly agree to disagree. My experience the first and only time I searched for a Sunder was to TZ using shards the game. After X hours I walked away with an empty stash and a feeling of no longer wanting to play this game. I think you are spot on in saying there needs to be some reward for that investment, problem is RNG will be there to disappoint us.

I did watch that video, maybe kind of agreed on some things. BUT..this is a streamer whose interests are the opposite of players. Not getting into the semantics of his video, but part of the problem with the

Herald/Sunder hunt was that it was gameplay that just did not historically fit how people played the game. I was one who argued this was a design fit for streamers who want content for 8 hours. So in his video he focuses on the pointlessness that players need only enter TZ game, find the first two Heralds and then make new game. Well guess what? This is basically how people have been playing for 26 years. Pindle runs are just Pindle, they do not include clearing of all of Act 5. Meph runs are

Teleport as fast as you can to Lvl 3 and rinse and repeat. Etc. et Etc..

What I am trying to point out is that streamers just do a poor job representing the player community, no better than if I was elected to be your representative. Trust me, you would be equally as unimpressed and angered with my ideas . So the obvious solution is to find compromises and middle Ground. Herein lies the problem, I am just not seeing that from Blizzard developers. The pendulum is either stuck way too far to the right, or they "balance" by throwing it way too far to the left. This should not be a 1 week PTR. It should instead have been a PTR for this season for ROTW.

Worse, I have yet to see any feedback reaction or adjustments from devs to the glaring and obvious issues introduced in the PTR. Kind of the point to having it, find X, change X, see response.

Just randomly skipping through a bit, honestly, he basically lost all credibility when he started complaining about fixes and changes to miasma because "there was nothing wrong with it" when the entirety of it is so broken that you just keep going back and forth between "nigh unusable because the cast keeps breaking itself" (which still needs more fixing on the PTR) and "abuse to hell and back to insta-kill basically anything on P8". Even with the tick fixes, nerfing the cloud dmg was absolutely justified and it remains more than just viable.

Not worth bothering with the rest of it after that.

In either case, yes, a fair few things on the PTR still need adjusting/fixing. But that should certainly not be based on more streamer nonsense. After all, that's how we got absurdly broken warlocks and "anti-casual and anti-multiplayer"

Herald and shard designs to begin with.

Heralds specifically would be in a solid place IF they fix the bonus seemingly getting lost after the first zone/lower tiers. The change makes rotational TZs useful but if you rely on that, you still "waste" every other

Herald with regards to a more likely sunder drop. The bonus getting lost on the other hand makes shards counterproductive and a waste. Simply fixing that to preserve the bonus so it applies to a full sharded game, giving you the same 1-2 per zone, would still leave rotational TZs viable for it but would also still make shards the better and more worthwhile approach as you won't be wasting every other

Herald anymore. You'll simply keep plowing through them at a decent spawn rate, albeit with a bit more of a challenge as well (=good!) due to not leaving after T2 every time but properly farming T5s.
And from how the announcement notes were phrased, I dare say that was the intent, seeing how those say nothing about the spawn bonus getting lost after the first couple.
The bonus loot pool is a separate topic. Not paying enough to attention to drops to judge that atm. Though that should be an easy fix/adjustment either way.