It is actually easier to get some of the following across since even folks who are not in the closed beta, will be able to test/experience for themselves.
First of all, the systems within patch 2.0, are also what forms the foundation of Reaper of Souls (the expansion just unlocks the mystic, level 70, Crusader, Adventure Mode, and new class skills/runes from level 61-70 (including a 4th passive slot at 70).
The PTR is basically what vanilla Diablo III will become. And that aspect for those players who aren’t planning to upgrade to the expansion, will basically find themselves between a rock and a hard place. The PTR first of all, provides game play difficulty up to Master (Torment only becomes unlocked at level 70). The previous Normal through Inferno progression (along with Monster Power) is going away (monsters in the game now scale with the characters level; what Blizzard calls “dynamic difficulty”).
For many who are trying out the PTR, they’ve already run into one of the biggest issues the above presents if they already had characters with gear that trivialized the higher end Monster Power settings in Inferno difficulty. Basically, what this means is that the most difficult level of the game has seen a significant nerf. Master difficulty with a level 60 character does not translate equally to any particular Monster Power setting for Inferno difficulty, but one could extrapolate it is around MP6-7 at the most.
With many players having items that already trivializes MP10 scaling, Master (60) ends up feeling way too easy for these folks. The difficulty will likely see some final tuning before it goes live, but without more granular settings for Master difficulty, there pretty much is no point at all to Diablo III vanilla for those who are already decently geared. My best geared character is my softcore wizard, and it doesn’t have the highest end items by any stretch of the imagination. As a matter of fact, on live, the most efficient MP for that character was around MP6 using a perma-archon build. Since my main account isn’t in the closed beta, I decided to copy over my characters onto the PTR to see how they played on the new system.
To say the least, both my softcore and hardcore mains found Master difficulty, not very challenging at all. And my hardcore wizard is even more gear challenged compared to my softcore one. I’m writing this based on the December 13th live hot fixes which increased the monster density again in just Act I. There is basically no tactical game play/challenge involved though with the build I’m using. And it’s basically just a derivative of the kiting build I’ve been using before with some changes documented below.
One thing that is known is how incoming damage does not feel smooth at all. Damage over time effects are tuned way out of line when compared to other forms of damage. So one second, you are taking steady/manageable damage, but once you get some desecrator, poison enchanted, plagued, etc in the equation, shielding goes down now sometimes in large chunks (rather than smoothly), and it burns through your health pool fairly rapidly. The design of taking immediate damage from these effects was so that players take action. The problem is that it still doesn’t address the quantitative gear check that is involved. Mechanically, there is no difference in the AI when stepping through each difficulty setting. Torment difficulty is just going to make it seem like you have to be more tactical in terms of game play because gear won’t scale as well when it comes to mitigating damage and/or performing life recovery.
And this is one of the issues with skewing the entire difficulty aspect, towards the quantitative end of the spectrum (where the numbers in terms of monster damage and health pools, are the primary means of increasing the difficulty level where from the player perspective, it becomes a numbers game in terms of achieving ballpark damage and mitigation/toughness rather than the monster AI scaling and providing actual challenging combat mechanics/scenarios that scale based on the difficulty setting of the game in a more balanced qualitative fashion).
I’m going to go off on a tangent for a bit. I used my softcore wizard on Master and exchanged my life steal wand and Triumvirate for a Chantodo’s set (wanted to test without any life steal plus I needed some APoC). I took a large hit on sheet damage (down to 170k unbuffed). The rest of the items were as is with life recovery options only from life regen and life on hit on gear and from Paragon points (not much really). The following is what it looks like unbuffed:
Skill set I used: Shock Pulse/Power Affinity (to recover some AP), Scorch Orb, Blazing Hydra, Sparkflint, Teleport/Wormhole, Prismatic Armor. I went with Shock Pulse because my Force has 13% increased damage for it.
Passives: Arcane Dynamo, Dominance, Galvanizing Ward
Basically in any high density area that I tested in Act I, all I need to do is build up Dominance to it’s maximum shielding and then spam Scorch (with just 10 APoC, the mob density is high enough where I can just cast Shock Pulse in between to gain additional resources to where I can continually spam Scorch – which kills mobs and keeps my Dominance shield going). Dominance has already been nerfed from when it originally went live in F&F because it basically made the character invulnerable to most trash mobs even in Torment difficulty. I’m also NOT advocating for Dominance to be nerfed even further (because then it becomes an issue where it becomes useless in Torment difficulty); what I’m illustrating is a fundamental flaw in trying to achieve difficulty by basing it primarily on the quantitative end of the scale, as opposed to making the monster combat AI/mechanics, more smarter.
It isn’t much difference with most champion packs even though some DoT effects are still overtuned compared to other forms of damage within the same difficulty setting (as mentioned above). I hit up the cursed chest event in the Cathedral just to see and was basically in the middle of arcane/poison enchanted, thunderstorm, wormhole.
Thus I had to move around a bit more when it began chewing through my shield and pop teleport or use the columns in the area; but it was nowhere near the sort of strategic kiting/positioning style that I’ve been playing over on hardcore (and even that wasn’t necessarily a significant amount of micro; it was more about dancing around some of the cheap character control mechanisms that are utilized/disguised as challenges) since all I had to do was take out the wave of trash monsters to constantly keep my defensive shielding up. The following is some game play using Frozen Orb instead (and as exhibited, I’m rarely kiting and just more or less trying to manage AP). It’s a slight contrast to how I have to play on live using a similar build.
Before, my usual play style (how I play on my hardcore wizard for example) was to utilize Diamond Skin/Crystal Shell as that meta-shielding (and used in conjunction with Critical Mass to quickly reset the cooldown). And as mentioned, doing that dancing around in terms of managing game play to deal with some of the cheap affix mechanics that tries to cause you to lose control of your character. The following is an old clip of my previous hardcore wizard (the one taken out by a disconnect) illustrating that play:
Since Critical Mass has been removed, there are other mechanisms within the game such as cooldown reduction gear (percent cooldown and/or items that reduce/eliminate cooldowns on specific skills) and Paragon points put into cooldown reduction. Since I haven’t found replacement gear yet, I ended up eliminating Diamond Skin completely from my skill bar. Why?
IMHO, Diamond Skin (with the exception of Shards for it’s damage component) has been made mostly useless with patch 2.0 (it just isn’t compelling with it’s long cooldown/shortened duration compared to how I can quickly build up Dominance and keeping it going by taking out stuff in high density areas). But Dominance isn’t necessarily the end-all-be-all either since it too suffers from the same scaling issues that Diamond Skin has on live. Thus at higher difficulty settings like Torment for example, the passive won’t scale upwards at the same percentages (again, difficulty based more on the numbers since it will mitigate a lower percentage of the much higher incoming damage that occurs at that particular setting).
Once again (and just as I thought they weren’t going to make the same mistakes they’ve done in the past with vanilla), the development team is exhibiting this very binary line of thinking to where their attempts at creating build diversity, ends up resulting in players not even wanting to use a skill period. Some skills have cooldowns associated with them; so they included Critical Mass as a means to reduce those cooldowns. But once gear trivialized the ability to stack critical hit chance, CM became too good at reducing those cooldown times. I personally have no issues with its removal even though their going with this option again reveals how they haven’t addressed the underlying root cause design of the class’ skill synergies.
Take archon as another example. I personally no longer see it even being compelling for its short term burst damage because 2 minutes of cooldown is just too long (and you’d need a sizable percentage of cooldown reduction to get that to something more reasonable). Did perma-archon need to be addressed? Of course it did; because the 1 second addition for each enemy killed was only exasperated with the increase in monster density. And this is the exact same thing I’m seeing on the PTR using what is a basic no frills build with the test increase in mob density in Act I when it comes to how Dominance works.
So what happens say once I’m able to stack resource reduction gear/points or add in another APoC source? More so will I be able to sit there and spam a button like there is no tomorrow. Just continually nerfing proc rates/the numbers doesn’t address the root cause of the underlying design issues with the class in this case. And that is something that they obviously have not addressed when they mentioned the following last October:
That said, skill synergy isn’t where we want it to be for wizards at the moment, and we’re looking at ways to improve that for the future. The sort of changes we’d like to do are more involved than simple numbers-tuning, though, and they weren’t able to make it in with this patch. But we are absolutely working on them.
For example, they nerfed the proc coefficient for Living Lightning from 0.2 to 0.042 during F&F because it was working too well with Paralysis when it came to stunning stuff (Paralysis itself had its stun chance reduced from 20% to 15%) http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10702630310. This however also affects LoH returns with Living Lightning (even with prior nerf bats, this is why I’ve been using it since forever since it was a great way to proc LoH as well as CM). Now I’ve just moved the pointer a bit to Power Affinity (formerly Lightning Affinity which last I know, had a .8 coefficient plus also now returns 5 AP for every target hit). Point being is everything is still this “simple numbers tuning” as opposed to actually having gone in, and fixed the root cause design issues with the class. So when they nerf something into oblivion, most will just move on to the next best thing (and thus this cycle will continue).
Since many of us had Diamond Skin as a defensive staple even at max level, they also felt the need to make it feel less mandatory by reducing it’s duration (while maintaining the same cooldown length). But without a bunch of cooldown reduction stacked, and taken alongside with these newer shielding abilities that actually work far better for the time being (until they too end up getting nerfed into oblivion), they’ve once again turned it into the other extreme where many aren’t going to end up even touching it once they’ve hit level cap.
I’m not saying many of the skill changes made to the class are bad. They are nice and fun to play (like I’ve tried Blizzard, Meteor, and Energy Twister/Gale Force for example). But none of them are really offering any real game changing play from a tactics point of view. And when it comes to level 70 and Torment, the current design is once again, mostly a gear check to deal with the bigger numbers.
Digressing back to how Master difficulty will feel unchallenging for those with higher end items, patch 2.0 is actually tailored towards leveling from scratch and letting the systems work for your character. Thus there will be this general feeling of progression and rewards; a direct contrast from bringing in an already geared character that is at max level for vanilla. And because there isn’t any higher level content to tackle (without access to the closed beta), it is unsurprising that some will feel the PTR changes as being slightly underwhelming. This actually isn’t surprising though; the full 2.0.1 patch is actually tied heavily to the expansion content; vanilla is just a gutted version of that UNLESS you basically start over from scratch and re-level/re-gear using the new system (then it will be fresh and challenging again).
The other aspect that will probably annoy some folks (especially those who have no plans to upgrade), is the marketing spin you will have to read; basically “Upgrade to Reaper of Souls” if you want greater difficulties and challenges. It’s actually right there on the beta client (if your account is not in the closed beta) just like how it is with the Starter Edition. And I need to be completely honest about this (and this is coming from someone who plans to upgrade regardless because as I’ve written before, there’s much to like); it looks seriously tacky if that is what they plan to do on the full vanilla game client.
The expansion should sell itself; the vanilla game client shouldn’t even serve as a constant advertising vehicle showing features that are expansion only with a nice upgrade button at every opportunity (not especially after the state that the vanilla game has been since release). But that is exactly what it looks like:
All of this should be contained in that “What’s New” icon below the Switch Hero button (which shows the following and is more than enough IMHO).
Myself, my main account is not in the closed beta (but a mule account which had only level 1 characters was selected for closed beta, plus one of my hardcore only mule accounts was part of the pre-beta test; only one max level character there though which I’ll have to farm better gear for). Thus I’m just testing the leveling progression in terms of pace and gearing (as well as the relatively crappy configuration that got that system profile flagged for inclusion) – and will document the results later.
But right now, I can’t tackle the real meat of the closed beta which is Torment (70) in addition to seeing how my main characters transition and progress from what they currently have to level 70 (I can only test those on the PTR like the above). And after maybe 4 hours tops of Master difficulty play on both softcore and hardcore on the PTR, there really isn’t nothing more to try.
