96 TZ Clear experience (new patch)

Last night, on a whim, I decided to clear a TZ game created by my 94 Warlock with my 87

Nova sorc (this took into the next day, sleep). I can tell you straight off, this was not a win for feminism. The number of times my man had to rescue me and pay for my merc was countless (somewhere around 2 million

Gold). Mind you, my Warlock doesn't do damage anymore, so these were the most painfully irritating times. I still have my immortal Hephisto, so he would just stand there and tank while i casted for a good 15 minutes to kill a

Herald.

I have 30 MF, for the record.

My best drops:
Act 1 jail t-5 Dark One @ 21:13

Latent Cold Rupture
Act 1 T-5 Carver @21:33

Latent Flame Rift

At this point, I'm thinking... wow, they really did up these drop rates.

I played until midnight, clearing A1, A2, and Kurast... nothing more dropped

Next day,
Act 4

Plains of Despair t-5 strangler @10:32,

Windforce
Act 4

City of the Damned t-5 Burning soul @ 10:41,

Arachnid Mesh

Finished clearing A4, A5, and most of A3 (didn't pop shard, as its 80% clear from the normal rotation) . No other finds to note.

Herald Spawn rate:

I don't know. How do you guys keep track of this? Do you really count the heralds and write it down? I can tell you that the shortest time between heralds was one pack of monsters in the flyer dungeon. The longest was the

Bloody Foothills, with just one T-5 for the entire section. However, I can say there were absolutely tons of these things. Multiple per area. This is way up from before. I never even bothered with shards last patch because they were hard to find, and you might not get a

Herald for an entire act. I could raise "ire" a million times, but couldn't find a

Herald. It's quite the opposite now, shards drop like hotcakes and heralds are a dime a dozen. TBH, i like this better. I don't feel bad when using a shard, therefore i use them.

Herald difficulty:

Some were extremely easy.. the Dark One type's (all acts) just fall down. The archers in act 1.... damn near impossible. I got a burning Soul in Act 4 that neither my sorc or my warlock could kill... so much damage, one hit from one monster in the pack dropped my sorc, dropped warlock to half health... i bounced. Mana burn was rough. In just about every fight, I had to keep my merc clear or he would die.

Experience:

Not worth it. P2, 6-7 hours got me from 87-89.5. All the deaths didn't help. I could have done this in half the time or less with

Baal runs.

Overall, it was fun... but I can't say if it was worth it. The price for sunders seems to have cratered overnight and

Windforce/amesh are probably worth

Ist each, maybe? These are my first sunders, but only time will tell if TZ is the place to be to find them, or if they will easily be found elsewhere (didn't find any in my 150 Chaos runs)

StoBeast wrote: 7 hours ago

Last night, on a whim, I decided to clear a TZ game created by my 94 Warlock with my 87

Nova sorc (this took into the next day, sleep). I

I think once swap to ur lvl 87 sorc, the game room will adjust the tz level based on ur sorc, not what ur lvl84 originally created unless u running multiple d2r?

if you play Warlock , try dropping Sigon:Rancor on the place where

Herald pack about to be spawned.
with one point invested it rocks. Don't want to respec - try it from the random looked book or

Dagger.
I am still learning Rancor but it works very nice on Heralds and spawned/Binded demons.

StoBeast wrote: 7 hours ago

Overall, it was fun... but I can't say if it was worth it. The price for sunders seems to have cratered overnight and

Windforce/amesh are probably worth

Ist each, maybe? These are my first sunders, but only time will tell if TZ is the place to be to find them, or if they will easily be found elsewhere (didn't find any in my 150 Chaos runs)

I think it's commonly accepted at this point that the new

Herald spawn rates are fine, Shard drop rates are so high that you can indeed use them without second thoughts, but the loot that comes around is garbage.

Herald fights can be exciting, which is not something that happens often for lvl90+ characters imho, but their loot seems to be even worse than before the patch. Most likely this is an overreaction to the complaints about too much

Herald loot in the PTR. If things stay as they are, most likely shards will see use to terrorize bosses again and again as nothing else is really worth the effort.

d2rppa69 wrote: 6 hours ago

StoBeast wrote: 7 hours ago

Last night, on a whim, I decided to clear a TZ game created by my 94 Warlock with my 87

Nova sorc (this took into the next day, sleep). I

I think once swap to ur lvl 87 sorc, the game room will adjust the tz level based on ur sorc, not what ur lvl84 originally created unless u running multiple d2r?

i don't swap anything. I have 2 accounts. the warlock is there to rescue the sorc when she dies a million times

Salid wrote: 6 hours ago

StoBeast wrote: 7 hours ago

Overall, it was fun... but I can't say if it was worth it. The price for sunders seems to have cratered overnight and

Windforce/amesh are probably worth

Ist each, maybe? These are my first sunders, but only time will tell if TZ is the place to be to find them, or if they will easily be found elsewhere (didn't find any in my 150 Chaos runs)

I think it's commonly accepted at this point that the new

Herald spawn rates are fine, Shard drop rates are so high that you can indeed use them without second thoughts, but the loot that comes around is garbage.

Herald fights can be exciting, which is not something that happens often for lvl90+ characters imho, but their loot seems to be even worse than before the patch. Most likely this is an overreaction to the complaints about too much

Herald loot in the PTR. If things stay as they are, most likely shards will see use to terrorize bosses again and again as nothing else is really worth the effort.

I feel like they take too much from the words of people who dedicate their lives to a game (either for money or otherwise) and not enough from people who, like many of us, used to play as a kid and love the opportunity to again, but don't have the kind of time we did back then. When a streamer says we need to nerf andy drops because if you hack the seed and play the same map for 24x7 you can find all the items in x days, that should be largely ignored. Personally, I would like to see more drops.... the bot community is literally what keeps the game going. If there weren't bots, we couldn't make all these builds the streamers come up with outside of a hero editor. I played this game when it came out for years straight and I never found an SOJ. I can't even iagine how long it would take to build an ES

Nova sorc with self weild Infinity.

When they brought the Warlock out and took our money, I really thought they were doing something good for the community... give us a character that can farm anywhere, and play with mild gear that can be upgraded by the ability to farm everywhere. Someone who used to play super heavy but now has kids and so on and gets just a few hours a week could actually have something decent in the Warlock...

Oh well.... but yes, in short, I agree... the new drops suck... but IMO, everything they did outside of increasing the sunder/shard drop rate was crap. I am not sure if I will ever buy another blizzard product after the rug pull they did for the likes of llama and marco.

edit: i guess what i am saying is that you can make a crappier build or use lesser items@p8 or whatever if you want it to be harder because you play all day. You cannot choose to make it easier so that you can have fun around your life... the warlock gave you both options.

One major disagreement, among our community members, is that how easy/hard the game should be. Back in the days 20 years ago, even going through hell is a huge task. The game now is much easier compared with what it used to be. I played the game as a teenager 20 years ago with many sleepless nights: finding a

Windforce was even a major achievement. Now I am not young any more, and I still quite enjoying the non-ladder (don't have the time to compete in ladder). I My experience is that we can now trade for any end-game gear easily (at the very beginning of my non-ladder play, I collected many tokens and traded for

Ber and

Jah, and made Infinity and Enigma without too much grinding). With this in mind, I feel ok not to have lucrative drops. On the other hand, the heralds do have better drops: the drop of Griffon's Eyes from heralds is comparable to act bosses and better than

Nihlathak and

Pindleskin (according to Maxroll).

One thing I agree, the devs probably overreacted to the PTR complaints about the drops. A possible way out is probably to have the heralds increase drop rare items instead of uniques, and grant more experience. I am not sure if this works. In the end of the day, with players around the world having very different backgrounds and motivations, any modification will result in both praises and complaints.

I used to play this game night and days, when I was a young teenager and the Hustle to reach gg items was real. Some stuff I never found and it always be my friends who either dropped it solo or snatch first in a 6 players

Baal run. But today I feel I kinda get a revenge on this game, with runewords and easier trades. Sometimes after couple weeks of grinding I even give up and buy an item for 1-2$ online. Fuck yeah... I dont have that kind of time anymore. I don't buy GG gear or max roll, just a unid here or there to complete a hero... but yes after a couple months it doesn't feel as satisfying, but when I play I feel like I get the most out of it and I can try broken builds for once!

So, I just dared to try playing the patch with my fire warlock for the first time...

Logged into see my Heph

Conviction aura changed to fanat. Sad.

Dare to check how many points I have in

Demonic Mastery - 9, not bad, I'm one away from 10 and I can at least cast and

Consume a

Tainted. Unbind my defiler so I don't accidentally summon 3 and kill Heph (someone said this can happen).

Figure I'll just try playing as is before swapping out Insight on my merc for Infinity, and then somehow figuring out the mana issues.

Start playing the current TZ, spider jungle...

Not noticing any difference. Stuff seems to be dying as fast as it was before, most stuff in one fire

Nova blast. Ok how about champions..no problem, can't tell the difference. Ok, a

Herald spawned. Bam, gone in 3-4 seconds from fire

Nova.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA. This shit is still OP as fk. Better than my

Nova sorc still that has 50

Jah of GG gear. I don't even need apocolypse, fire

Nova (

Ring of Fire) still obliterates.

Try some other zones, same thing. Try a

Baal run. Same thing - with the exception of

Baal himself. I did notice a difference on him, it definitely took me longer to take him down.

I guess I'll probably just keep running without

Conviction...

Gear: Flickering Flame, nigma, mang song, ars diablo, arachnid, dual fire

Opalvein,

Magefist, 2-10 WL ammy.

Loadead wrote: 1 hour ago

I used to play this game night and days, when I was a young teenager and the Hustle to reach gg items was real. Some stuff I never found and it always be my friends who either dropped it solo or snatch first in a 6 players

Baal run. But today I feel I kinda get a revenge on this game, with runewords and easier trades. Sometimes after couple weeks of grinding I even give up and buy an item for 1-2$ online. Fuck yeah... I dont have that kind of time anymore. I don't buy GG gear or max roll, just a unid here or there to complete a hero... but yes after a couple months it doesn't feel as satisfying, but when I play I feel like I get the most out of it and I can try broken builds for once!

I'm with you there. I paid for a handful of characters, though I paid a lot more than you. I didn't realize that some sites price gouge like crazy and it didn't seem like a lot at the time, but I got wayyyy ripped off. But same philosophy. I paid to gear some characters like Ice bowazon for fun. I also geared a warlock to be the character that would find the rest of my items... and that worked pretty well.... even still, drops are hard and I have to do my Chaos runs at work lol. I played as a kid too.. like 1.02... and i REALLY liked 1.02... ww barb was amazing and drops were awesome. There were some colors that just don't exist anymore too. They did a 'correction' back then too and then you couldn't find shit.... and remember what happened? Dupes.. everyone was just wearing the same items because they couldn't find anything and the good shit just plain couldn't drop anymore.... I feel like that's bots today... can't find it, so pay a botter. I don't think it crosses peoples minds (the ones that want it to be harder) that it's only as 'easy' as it is now because thousands of bots inflate the amount of items in the pool, allowing you to find items worth 15

Jah, 20

Jah, so on. Most people probably haven't found a single

Jah and if not for the bots, those 'godly' rare items wouldn't be worth a tenth of what they are... and therefore all your characters wouldn't have Enigma.