Game Update Discussion
Ladies and gentlemen, in a herald of all ages, it’s happened: we had our second and final stream talking with the developers about the changes to the game that will be happening before season 2, and well, it’s pretty major. They talked for about 90 minutes, so I’m going to condense all the important things they said down as short and concisely as I can for you all, and I’ll talk a bit about my current thoughts too.
Patch Notes and Overview
At the end of this stream, we also had the full patch notes for season 2 drop, so I will be diving into those properly tomorrow. Then, we’ll have a much fuller picture of what is to come. That said, the stream itself was more of an overview of the more significant changes, an explanation of the ideals of the dev team that led to those changes, which should help us predict how they will treat the game and update it in the future.
Elemental Resistances
Going in order, the major sections here are elemental resistances and updates to them as a concept. Up until this point, resistances have been inverse multiplicative, meaning the amount that you gain from resistances on your gear goes down the more resistance that you already have, sort of making a weird scaling to the system that broke the whole thing.
Resistance Mechanics
In season two and onwards, resistances will be additive. So, 20% on a piece of equipment is actually always going to be plus 20%, but it caps at 70% reduction for each element, aside from a few specific ways that will let you increase the cap up to 85% in the new system.
Resistance Elixir and Armor Values
An example they show is the resistance elixir, which now increases your resistance cap for that element by 6%, which is a really big increase. Armor values will now only be for physical damage, trying to get you to think more about your resistances. However, to even it out, rings will now, like amulets, give you bonuses to all resistances as a baseline, as well as having a bonus singular resistance increase too. Their goals for this are for most people to reach the base cap around level 80 for most of their resistances but also to make it not the most necessary thing to focus on in your build because of the baseline.
Uniques Changes Overview
From then, we had some talk about the uniques changes being made to them and the concepts of why. Of course, this is only a few of the actual uniques that are going to be shown here. The first thing that they say immediately is their goal is to make uniques feel genuinely exciting across the board.
Strategy for Unique Changes
They implemented a four-fold strategy: new stats on uniques that don’t exist on other types of gear, larger versions of existing stat ranges that you would find on other pieces of gear, overriding slot rules like putting cooldown reduction on a weapon as an example, or just changes to the unique effect itself to actually make them more desirable and less weirdly ineffective.
Specific Examples of Changes
For example, Ancient Oath for barbarians used to slow enemies when they were hit by Steel grasp, but that didn’t really do a whole lot, so instead, they’ve changed it to a short-term damage increase against enemies that are hit by this move to make it stronger in a way that players will actually seem to care about.
Introduction of New Uniques
legend
Developers talked briefly about how they will also be adding in a number of new legendaries and uniques, specifically 18 of them coming in with season 2, and gave us three proper examples. One of these new uniques, for instance, reduces your ultimate skill cooldown by 2 to 4 seconds depending on the roll when you dash through enemies, introducing a very intriguing concept that some builds will absolutely thrive on.
Game Enhancement Overview
I absolutely love it; it makes boulders that you cast during Hurricane actually get caught in the rotation of the hurricane and just rotate around you like a wrecking ball, which honestly completely makes Boulder builds way cooler and potentially stronger too. I’ve always loved the concept of Boulder build with some of the legendaries that they have in the game, but it never quite worked, and I’m hoping this might actually be the thing that changes that.
Target Farming and Unique Bosses
Past this, they simply showed the full target farming list for uniques in relation to the new endgame bosses. These aren’t guaranteeing drops by any means, but they have higher drop rates from these bosses than they do from anywhere else in the game. Examples of these bosses include Greguar Varon, Lord Zir, the Beast and Ice, and the new Big Boss Durial.
Class Improvements and Adjustments
Moving on from that, we had some talks and examples about class improvements being made here. One significant change is that “Fortify” is being modified to work off of maximum health instead of base health, which will absolutely be a major buff to that aspect of the game as a whole.
Capping Infinite Scaling
They’ve made major changes, like putting a cap on anything that theoretically had infinite power scaling possible before. For example, “Supreme Wrath of the Berserker” for a barbarian, or “Rampaging Beast” for Druid, and its insane crit multiplying ability. These things now have caps on them to prevent ludicrously broken infinite scalers.
Miscellaneous Changes
They also made some changes to pre-existing Paragon nodes as well, trying to find some of the weaker or lesser-used ones and buffing them into actually mattering for certain builds. Additionally, they made the berserking bonus damage for barbs a multiplier instead of additive, which will become a much bigger deal starting in season 2.
Game Update: Changes and Enhancements
of the Ancients rather than creating a second explosion on top of this. I should mention on the Paragon glyphs, they seem to have added an extra two Paragon glyphs for every single class in the game, so 10 total, two per class. These will have differing effects depending on the class, but they’re trying to expand around what types of builds you can actually build with using your Paragon node specifically.
Sorcerer Changes
Then we move on to some sorcerer changes: they lowered the ramp-up time for incinerate. It still does the same total damage but should just be more comfortable and fun to play around now. Enhanced Frozen orb now has more single Target applications as well, and they adjusted both the winter and electrocute Paragon glyphs, so that you can, you know, actually activate their effects finally if you want to on your Paragon board.
Rogue Adjustments
For rogue, they said they were relatively happy with how it was at the moment, aside from everyone just using puncture as a basic skill with very little exception. So they applied a bunch of buffs and changes to the other four basic skill options, which should in theory incentivize their use, especially when considering the damage bucket changes that we will talk about in a moment.
Druid Enhancements
A nice buff to the impetus passive that will make it much more usable for Druids. They once again gave a massive buff to Ravens across the board. Will this one be enough? We’ll have to see. Then they applied another notable damage bonus to rabies; again, their previous buffs to these skills didn’t do quite as much as they wanted, so they just sort of did it again.
Necromancer (Necro) Modifications
Moving on to necro, this first one actually does also affect Druid, and it’s the death defense passive that necro had before is now just a baseline part of how minions and companions of all kinds within the game function now. So now no summon with a health bar can be hit for more than 30% of its health in a single attack, which is a pretty solid change as well. They gave Golems a pretty big damage increase, increased the damage values on various minion Paragon nodes as well, and adjusted the coldbringer aspect.
Game Mechanics Revamp
Mages and they consolidated the various Thorns minions legendary aspects into only one aspect that makes Thorns apply to all necro minions at once as well. Shields now have armor on them because, well, they’re shields, and they probably should have armor. Past that, we get into the real meat of all of this: damage buckets are getting heavily reworked, and it is going to shift the entire way that we think about how to make builds within this game.
Damage Buckets Reworked
A lot of people are going to be upset at that statement as a concept, but having thought of a lot of different ways that they could have gone about changing damage buckets to try and fix it, I think this is an extremely strong choice that they’ve gone with. Yes, significant changes can make it feel like we are beta testing the game again, I know a lot of people feel this way, but we can all agree that the game in its current state before this patch is fundamentally broken.
Fundamental Changes
Which means that they have to change fundamental parts of the game in order to fix it. This is a major starting point to me: previous to season 2, vulnerable and crit was just the required way to play at a high level within this game. Nothing else could create these same damage numbers than overlapping those effects due to the specific way they multiplied each other.
New Season Adjustments
In season 2, bonuses you get from gear and such that add damage to these multipliers will not actually multiply; it will just count as additive damage. If an item now says plus 30% crit damage, what it means is plus 30% damage when you get a critical hit, not that it adds to the crit multiplier, with the only multipliers being the base 50% for a critical hit, the base 20% from an enemy being vulnerable.
And then they’re also making some changes to overpower which will make it on a similar level in the future too, which is pretty cool as a whole. All of this means that our numbers in-game will be lower, and again, people will be upset about the concept of lower numbers, and I get it, but this is a major change and according to the devs as well, they’ve gone through and rebalanced.
Game Improvement in Season 2
The entirety of the game, every monster, revolves around the new expected output of players. The idea is that high-end builds in season 2 should feel equal to or stronger than high-end builds did in season 1, but also to remove the massive punishment that existed for not going full in on crit and vulnerable beforehand, in an effort to make more builds, things that would have been considered lesser before, actually be a lot closer to high-end now.
Damage Bucket Changes
Personally, I think these damage bucket changes are actually really healthy for the game. Less infinite stacking things means a more controlled environment, which means that they can create more purposeful fun through other interactions or new builds that just wouldn’t have functioned around without those previous parameters. The intention is to make the fun come less from just being good at applying math to a game and more about just finding cool things that synergize well together.
Upcoming Patch: 1.2.1
Then, the last planned section that they had was just a couple of tidbits about the first major patch coming after the start of season 2, which is patch 1.2.1. They only told us two things here, but both of them are pretty neat. First up, there will be a training dummy added to the game so you can actually practice with builds, check out differences between pieces of gear in an actual properly controlled environment.
New Features and Q&A Revelations
As someone who makes a lot of builds, wants to test a bunch of synergies between abilities, between powers, seasonal effects, I absolutely love this. But hey, who doesn’t enjoy having a training dummy to just beat up sometimes, right? Then, the second thing is that they will be adding a refund all Paragon nodes button to the game within patch 1.2.1. Definitely a very long requested feature. I would have loved to have it sooner, but I’ll take it when it comes rather than just never getting it. Of course, then we just have some slight revelations from the question and answer section that are a bit less organized. One big thing that they mentioned was that they want to fix things like barbarian builds requiring all three shouts.
Game Adjustments and Changes
To perform properly, adjustments are necessary, like sorcerers using four defensive skills at once, but they aren’t quite sure how to do that right yet. So, they are heavily looking into it, but that won’t be fixed as of season 2, sadly. Then, they specifically mentioned that there are actually no new Uber uniques being added within season 2; all the new uniques that will be added are in the regular rarity pool, which is nice to see for sure.
Monster and Boss Rebalancing
Then finally, they mentioned that along with most monsters being rebalanced for the new player power threshold, they are also heavily nerfing Uber Lilith as a boss. They want her to be an achievable goal for an average build at level 100, not something that only ridiculously perfectly made builds or bugged builds can achieve, so that will become much easier in the new season for sure.
Concluding Thoughts and Reflections
What do you think personally? I think that well, they have made some pretty major changes here that will likely need adjusting in the future to really perfect it properly. They’ve all been good decisions that they’re making here, as much as I hate to say it, for the long-term health of the game, this is really good.
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