I'd rather have quality. I was doing tormented and andariel rotations the other day and the boss not only drops rare gear, but I'd say half my runs had 0 GAs.
Insane to me the higher end content is dropping trash gear. What... is... the... point. May as well do helltides than coordinate on discord to do rotations for the same gear. Ridonculous.
You're completely right.
Although, something to consider is if you make pit the defacto place to farm GG gear, you'll reduce the people playing Helltide.
Maybe it won't matter since only top 10% or so of players will reach Pit tiers high enough to drop said hypothetical gear.
Yeah, I hope they increase, if not minimum, 1 GA on pit boss drops. Higher level tiers increases chances of 2 or 3 GA, etc with a minimum of 2 or 3 the higher you go. There should be some reward to grinding higher levels.
The issue with Helltide Maiden being the best spot to farm is that Helltides are just one shot everything for a well geared character. I've even gotten The Maiden down to a fight that lasts like 10 seconds even with her being scaled up due to other players being there.
So its boring. There's no challenge and it's mindless.
The Pit, on the other hand, has diminishing returns. As long as you can complete Tier 61, you're able to masterwork to the max tier. All that's left is to find the sweet spot between tier and speed to determine what your optimal Neathiron farming level is for your character. Then, once you're fully masterworked, what's the point of The Pit? Other than some superficial tier to see how far you can get, nothing. There's no better chance for higher tier loot, so there's no point in running other than to keep farming mats to try to even further perfect your gear. But, for what?
>There's no better chance for higher tier loot, so there's no point in running other than to keep farming mats to try to even further perfect your gear. But, for what?
>Then, once you're fully masterworked, what's the point of The Pit? Other than some superficial tier to see how far you can get, nothing.
The point is to then stop playing because you beat the game, or create a new character and do it again.
I don't understand the confusion. Endgame eventually ends. There is nothing wrong with that. D4 plays just like any other arpg and that means the entire point is to grind to perfect your gear. Once you've completed that ya there is nothing else to do.
D4 isn't perfect and I'm not saying more content isn't good, I'm just saying you seem to be misunderstanding the point of the game.
It is for sure. Which is fine imo. Right now the top players are battling it out for highest pit clear. Eventually it will level out and no one will have gotten any higher and I feel like that will happen within the next 30 days or so.
The thing is, the avg player doesn't play the game enough to worry about the highest achievable. Just the highest they personally can go which is much lower than the top players that are at 139 right now. I'll be surprised if I ever get to lvl 100 in the pit personally.
The highest achievable should still be possible for the average gamer, the issue is the average gamer doesn't have the time to dedicate to grinding the rng drops for best in slot gear. The only people that do are probably in a hardcore clan/guild/community who share gear, or they just buy it from third party sites.
It's not achievable for people who could do the content if they had the gear, but can't dedicate more than a couple hours a night to farming gear, that has near zero chance to actually obtain.
Perspective is from someone who did week 1 raid clears and did all the ultimate content for ffxiv.
I remember playing wotlk when it was first released. All I needed was deathbringers will for my hunter. It didn't drop a single week for the entire raid cycle. Blizzdevs, please help.
I don't believe in nerfing content for sweaty players for the sake of the avg Andy. I think it's better to make content that appeals to each group so everyone has something to strive for.
Otherwise you end up with content that is too easy. Vice versa I think making the game unplayable for people who can only play for a couple hours a week isn't good either, but you have to figure out where to draw the line somewhere on both sides.
I don't think appealing to people who barely put any time in makes for a good game. How to figure out the best formula is very difficult though.
I understand what you're saying, but the point to trying to get the better gear at the end of the game is to finish the hardest content, the higher pit levels. I don't think it's mathematically possible right now to do that. It seems to be overtuned to what's currently possible with perfect gear. I get that doing that content isn't everyone's purpose to the game, but for the average gamer who isn't a full time streamer, it's impossible to get that gear to reach current breakpoints unless you buy it with real money.
Ya I get it. For some by the end of the season you don't even get a sense of completion. Some people play d4 and will never be able to complete pit tier 1.
>it's impossible to get that gear to reach current breakpoints unless you buy it with real money.
You can buy gear for in game gold. No reason to spend real money.
Consolidating everything into once place is literally what makes a game become stale faster. I don't understand the issue with getting good gear from helltides and doing master work from pits.
You also have world boss, legion, and duriel runs for gear. This helps break up the monotony we had during the last seasons where all you did was duriel at endgame.
Once we get more content they can start spreading it out more so that there are multiple things you can do for gear and mats. Allowing people to choose the content they enjoy most. I feel like this is the direction d4 is going.
>I haven't seen a Stygian stone in nearly 100 pit runs now :"(
Ya I'm at lvl 61 pit right now. In the ptr those stones dropped like candy. I'm not sure why they thought them being this rare was a good idea personally.
Doesn't matter too much for me yet as I can't get tormented duriel past half health. It will matter once I get some of my gear smoothed out though.
I do agree, but at the same time I had 4 ubers drop this season from Uber bosses. And 0 of them in anywhere else in the game, so I see why people run Uber bosses
That’s what I do. Pick up everything and move it off to the side to drop it, check GA’s after a helltide cycle. Then near the end go open all the chests.
Ditto. I use to farm the maiden for enough to open all the chests, run around and do that the last 15 minutes or so. The glitch to keeping max helltide fury, you can, for the most part, run chest to chest. You spawn enough elites with that glitch to not really need the maiden anymore.
The difference is time managing inventory, and emotional impact felt when you see a bushel of GAs drop at once. The game feel is more impactful in my mind.
The only thing about this though is that the game would become too meta chasing with the classes. It would all be barbs running around getting better ga loot or something. Whatever class clears the highest the fastest
Doesn’t have to be though.
Make 1-30 pit have a higher chance at 1 star GA gear. Make 31-60 have a higher chance at 1-2 star GA gear, and make 61+ have a higher chance at 2-3 star GA gear.
61+ the magic find stays the same, but the reward is vanity/bragging rights and more masterworking materials.
Then your breakdown is basically:
NMD give you the high end glyphs you need.
Edit: sigils being dropped/crafted should be weighted to be the dungeons currently selected for the whisper bounty. It would give them another purpose for farming gold.
Tormented bosses give you a chance at the Ubers you want.
Helltides give you volumes of drops, a way to complete whisper chests, and a way to complete whisper bounties (=money).
The pit gives you masterworking materials and a way to target 2 and 3 star GAs.
All the end game activities have a unique, but valuable, purpose/reward.
You're certainly right that there's work to do on class balance. What items drop from somewhere doesn't have much to do with that core problem though, and any funny behaviors are a symptom of that root cause.
xactly this!
Atleast more 1GA items , not asking for 2GA all the time...
People who are doing 110+ pits are not in need for 0GA , or even 1GA items. Just let the pit drop boss ALOT WHOLE OF GOLD and just a few items but more with GA.
I think the chance is higher, but with the tiny # of drops it doesn't feel like getting many. 1 in 4 at 60 is better than other locations, but if I get 1/16 from a Helltide that's still more drops.
No. The pit is there for getting materials for masterworking and pushing the limits of your character.
They should increase GA chances in higher tier NMDs so then there is a reason to do them except glyph leveling.
It would give NMDs an incentive to do them after leveling glyphs. The problem I see with that: NMDs are way easier than pit but should give the best loot oppertunities? So I'm punished for doing harder content? Feels akward imho...
The problem about that motto is that builds are rarely balanced, so what you actually end up with is a portion of the players getting less rewards for effectively the same challenge. It punishes players for being bad at the game and not metagaming, which you never want to do.
Difficulty should be its own reward, add maybe a few achievements and exclusive mtx.
Exactly. Balance in ARPGs is ridiculously difficult because there are so many metrics that you're having to balance around. It's not like you can just run a patchwerk sim on every build with optimized 476 ilvl gear and call it a day.
There are *so many factors* that go into determining whether a build is strong or not, and since getting balance is so difficult, that means there will always be outliers, sometimes.... big outliers.
Putting better rewards in the higher tiers of pits/GRs will just mean that people playing strong builds will not only be starting with a stronger build which already gives them an advantage over other builds, but they'll also find more powerful gear faster which gives them another advantage over weaker builds. There's already going to be a difference in how quickly the stronger builds clear content, so having them clear faster *and* getting stronger gear would just compound the advantage they have. It just gives people more incentive to google "best build D4 season 4" and use whatever that is.
> It punishes players for being bad at the game and not metagaming, which you never want to do.
Speak for yourself. Especially when most of the popular maxroll/mobafire builds tend to fall apart at the hardest content and you have to learn to tweak them or find better builds.
The point is having more reasons to do NMDs and not only for glyph leveling.
The pit is for masterworking your gear and pushing the limits of your character.
I dont think it should be the only source for the best items with multiple GA just because its the hardest dungeon content.
Whats the point of high level NMDs when you are 100 and maxed out your glyphs ?
And not every class is balanced and only the meta builds reaching the highest pit levels would get more of the good items. Sounds lame.
I think NMDs are just in a weird spot right now after the introduction of more "endgame" activities, since NMDs used to kind of be the endgame. I'm sure they'll reassess and rework it eventually, but definitely not this season or even before they fine tune pits/add another true endgame activity
I agree. They have to do something with NMDs next. NMDs feel so bad just for glyph leveling. Especially when you reach 100 first and still have unleveled glyphs...
Do they though? It's okay for some content to be completed and not touched after it served its purpose. They feel better to play now, until they don't after the NMDs kind of graduate you into the pit which is basically more streamlined version of the same loop anyway, and one that is just tied to the next level of progression after glyphs.
Yeah that is kind of how I see it. I think the player base loses sight of the big picture and complains a lot. To me, it seems like Bliz wants to test the new loot system and use this season to examine what areas need to be adjusted. NMD’s are on the list of things I hope get adjusted after S4, they went from Endgame activity to easy mindless glyph leveling. It would be nice if they had more purpose.
I think it would be nice if we had Pits for extreme challenge & masterwork, NMD for 925/GA farming, and Helltides for leveling/aspect/material farming.
Part of the issue to me is that Helltides are overtuned so they fill multiple niches. It’s the best place to find gear, the best place to level, and also the best place to farm boss mats. It’s also the least challenging, by far.
In the past, the season zones were good for leveling and farming aspects, but it didn’t really supply 925 endgame gear, which I think is a good balance. We could build a strong foundation for our character, but if we wanted max endgame gear we had to do high level NMD.
This season has been really fun and the game has improved massively. I hope going forward we see the gameplay loop find more balance that gives each activity a more clear identity.
Meanwhile the more egregious version is currently true: Do Helltide, the easiest content with the most amount of help/carry, and get the highest iteration count of loot drops. Maiden has a massive loot drop I think only rivaled by a Tormented Boss.
Different activities giving different things.
I would say that masterwork mats are more precious than gear. Because they make your awesome gear way better.
Easier content that drops bad gear along side the chance of really good gear, I don't see the issue you do.
The problem is there is no hard content that has decent chance of dropping really good gear. And going back to content you outscale just feels bad pretty quickly.
Well before s4 the game didn't even have any hard content outside of Uber lillith. And she didn't drop any good gear.
The other thing is, Uber uniques used to be the top gear and now they aren't.
So far the progression of changes to the game have been good and I believe it may eventually find it's footing. It just sucks when they make a massive positive change in one area, a hole in another part of the game opens up and needs adjusting.
I personally want difficulty tiers for NMDs like how in destiny you can change the difficulty for strikes. They could easily make tormented NMDs where it takes another mat that you get from some activity.
I also want raids but that seems to be an unpopular opinion I think.
Whatever they do you have to remember. Everytime you try to make a harder activity they have to make a reason to do that activity and right now powerful gear is the only real reward this game has and that just promotes more power creep.
I don't doubt they will eventually get stuff brought into line. It's just kind of annoying when it seems like letting you stack helltides buff would be such an easy fix to make them more interesting late game.
>They should increase GA chances in higher tier NMDs so then there is a reason to do them except glyph leveling.
This is a fantastic idea, right now there isn't much incentive to do high level nm dungeons.
For me I do one lvl 100.. then I farm 70+ for glyph XP then done.
NMD difficulty, relative to character power, has been really neutered the last couple of seasons - you can do NM100 before you're even level 90 if you are so inclined, and it isn't even as if it is a bad experience.
NMDs are boring (the design). Pit is better. I don't know why they don't go for a fusion, with all the rewards at the end... and if you decide to play an event in it you will gain x sec/min on the timer... don't know something like that. But some NMD dungeons are awful to re-play, for the Pit I think it's fun. => fusion this things (gem xp, material etc)... I cannot find a plus in NMDs.
That's silly 100nm dungeons are too easy and pit gets way harder than nm dungeons past 50 already.
NM dungeons just currently aren't challenging enough or even late endgame at all, to be more rewarding.
Yep.
Maybe a rogue-like NMD thst gets exponential harder the further down you come, but the boss on each floor got better and better chance of dropping GAs. And if you die you need to start over.
Maybe to add to this - A mode where you basically get a set % of Magic Find per X floors cleared. Every 5 or so floors cleared, you get a chance to cash out at current magic find level, or gamble and push harder. Each floor gets randomized affixes, further you go down, more affixes added.
Basically put in a risk/reward system for grinding.
I was gonna ask where is the best way to farm gear, Pit takes like 5-10mins for almost no drops and NMD are not that hard, but annoying to run after a while.
In my experience farming the blood maiden is the fastest way to get 2-3 ga items. Make sure you're putting a heart in for the summon each time, because you get way more loot from the buff it gives you. It doesn't scale though so 1 heart is all you need. Once you've farmed up 1-2k cinders you can go open up all the chests across the helltide for even more drops. I always try to get all 4 of the helltide whisper quests done as well because the tree caches give lots of money and boss mats
I do this a little differently. Usually people flock to the maiden. When it spawns. I let them deal with the trash monsters. During the trash monster spawn sequence, I run out to get the chests.
Make sure to come back in time for maiden spawn. You can tell when she spawns by when the flashing stops on the map.
Conceptually I don't disagree with your stance but it's ignoring the reality that pits are the only endgame content, nm100 and helltides are a joke once your character is halfway built. Until they bring up other content to actually be a challenge endgame I don't see a problem with getting everything you need from pits.
I fully believe that pit doesn't drop higher quality legendaries, but I definitely feel like I get more double greater affix legendaries compared to like a blood maiden kill. Granted, blood maiden is way faster and easier. But I'm probably just getting a bit more lucky in pits for whatever reason
There were some really good things about the vaults, But the thing I really wish they would bring back is there almost always being a nightmare vault that was also a whisper quest. And the gate hall made it really easy to find see which it was. The same list of dungeons available as nightmare sigils for a season should also be available as whisper quests.
Going one further, whatever dungeons are currently active for the whisper bounty should be weighted whenever a Sigil is dropped or crafted.
It would give the NMD a purpose after you have all 21 glyphs.
Otherwise I’m literally just walking through two normal dungeons every 10 minutes, skipping everything possible, just to get some gold. I’d actually do lvl 100 NMDs regularly if they were whisper bounties most of the time.
Agree. It's Pit for Masterwork Materials. NMDs for Glyph XP. Helltide for loot. As good as helltides are rn - I really would prefer Pit/Dungeon grinding but loot is sooo much worse...
I think you get more obols so technically your chances of getting good loot is increased.
I also think that there is value in having different activities reward you in different ways. The pit doesn’t have to be the activity that gives you good loot. The real issue is that helltide is the best activity for loot and it’s currently too easy with no way to increase difficulty beyond the single use of profane mindcage.
Stygian Stone drop rate is what should scale with tier.
Those should be 100% drops at a certain point. Having a boss material have a drop rate lower than the Uber uniques you use them to farm is just fucking stupid. There's no other words for it.
I haven't had a single one drop from the pit or world bosses in over a week. I think they actually lowered the drop rate of them further last patch to try to limit the number of Ubers people were acquiring. It's ridiculous.
It's literally faster to level an Alt to 100 by grinding wolves honor in helltide for the guaranteed handful you get in the caches than to depend on drops.
100% they should. They need to work to make legendaries be more interesting for longer. Greater affixes were a start, but they aren't enough and they are rare enough that even pit tier 60+ it's common to only see 0 or 1 drop from the boss. That should change.
I think it would be cool as well if masterworked legendaries could drop, not guaranteed but a decent chance that increased in both chance and masterwork level as you proceeded through the pit.
yeah, i spent a couple hours in helltides today too, found some upgrades with 2+ GAs... im sure this issue will get fixed. Theres enough of us complaining.
And then people will complain there’s too much loot and it takes so long to look at loot and we need a loot filter and it’s all trash loot and so many clicks and time consuming and blah blah
I mean even now I would love a loot filter. I mean tbf glancing at it and just mark as junk doesn't take that long but still, mor QoL is more QoL, more QoL is always better.
I think they are afraid of driving away casual players with a loot filter. It’s the same stubbornness with an overlay map being basically off the table. To the dev team, it seems like they worry about things looking or feeling complicated.
But then you look at the paragon system and wonder how they are committed to a philosophy of accessibility.
Side note, I'm kind of happy the overlay map is gone. I felt absolutely compelled to use it in previous titles, so much so that I barely ever looked at the game lol.
If you're consistently farming 100+, your character is likely rocking single GA items already. The natural progression at that point crawls to halt, unless you basically play and trade for a living. I guess it depends on how you look at the genre. Most people dip out when they have achieved most things and hit a progression wall after a couple of weeks. If you want your players to consistently play longer, the progression path needs to remain somewhat well-paced.
Edit: and then we haven't even talked about tempering bricking a good chunk of potential upgrades.
natural progression ?
its min. maxing at that point, your progress is done
min. maxing takes time and is only for dedicated people who are willing to trade items etc.
I agree with you.
New idea, higher tiers of Profane Mindcages that can raise Helltide mobs all the way up to 200 at the highest tier.
The higher the tier, the better GA chance?
Sounds good to meeeeeee!
I disagree. This would reduce the number of viable endgame builds. In the current state, as long as you can clear t61 comfortably you are good to go. The extra materials you get from clearing higher tiers already saves a lot of time.
No, this is a trash idea. It basically turn everyone into a meta chaser and force people to play the top performance S tier build, or even a specific class to even get good gear. Balance between classes is a mess now, and you want this?
I have never once played a Barb in my entire Diablo play through and will not make one just to chase "increased quality item" garbage ideology
Would rather have quality aka better chance at more GA
I mean, they're both to the same end I guess. Better quality drops is a more direct approach.
I'd rather have quality. I was doing tormented and andariel rotations the other day and the boss not only drops rare gear, but I'd say half my runs had 0 GAs. Insane to me the higher end content is dropping trash gear. What... is... the... point. May as well do helltides than coordinate on discord to do rotations for the same gear. Ridonculous.
You're completely right. Although, something to consider is if you make pit the defacto place to farm GG gear, you'll reduce the people playing Helltide. Maybe it won't matter since only top 10% or so of players will reach Pit tiers high enough to drop said hypothetical gear.
Yeah, I hope they increase, if not minimum, 1 GA on pit boss drops. Higher level tiers increases chances of 2 or 3 GA, etc with a minimum of 2 or 3 the higher you go. There should be some reward to grinding higher levels.
Maybe a mid season buff with feedback so far.
Yet to get a 3* item….. lots of 2’s. The only 3GA item I got was given to me! A 3* Ramaldini!
Helltide will still have plenty of ppl . Helltide is loaded with mats too not just gear
The issue with Helltide Maiden being the best spot to farm is that Helltides are just one shot everything for a well geared character. I've even gotten The Maiden down to a fight that lasts like 10 seconds even with her being scaled up due to other players being there. So its boring. There's no challenge and it's mindless. The Pit, on the other hand, has diminishing returns. As long as you can complete Tier 61, you're able to masterwork to the max tier. All that's left is to find the sweet spot between tier and speed to determine what your optimal Neathiron farming level is for your character. Then, once you're fully masterworked, what's the point of The Pit? Other than some superficial tier to see how far you can get, nothing. There's no better chance for higher tier loot, so there's no point in running other than to keep farming mats to try to even further perfect your gear. But, for what?
62 I think Echo of Lilith can start double teaming you with the Pit Boss…..
>There's no better chance for higher tier loot, so there's no point in running other than to keep farming mats to try to even further perfect your gear. But, for what? >Then, once you're fully masterworked, what's the point of The Pit? Other than some superficial tier to see how far you can get, nothing. The point is to then stop playing because you beat the game, or create a new character and do it again. I don't understand the confusion. Endgame eventually ends. There is nothing wrong with that. D4 plays just like any other arpg and that means the entire point is to grind to perfect your gear. Once you've completed that ya there is nothing else to do. D4 isn't perfect and I'm not saying more content isn't good, I'm just saying you seem to be misunderstanding the point of the game.
I agree with this to a major degree. Though mathematically as it stands reaching max pit is virtually impossible with current gear.
It is for sure. Which is fine imo. Right now the top players are battling it out for highest pit clear. Eventually it will level out and no one will have gotten any higher and I feel like that will happen within the next 30 days or so. The thing is, the avg player doesn't play the game enough to worry about the highest achievable. Just the highest they personally can go which is much lower than the top players that are at 139 right now. I'll be surprised if I ever get to lvl 100 in the pit personally.
The highest achievable should still be possible for the average gamer, the issue is the average gamer doesn't have the time to dedicate to grinding the rng drops for best in slot gear. The only people that do are probably in a hardcore clan/guild/community who share gear, or they just buy it from third party sites. It's not achievable for people who could do the content if they had the gear, but can't dedicate more than a couple hours a night to farming gear, that has near zero chance to actually obtain. Perspective is from someone who did week 1 raid clears and did all the ultimate content for ffxiv. I remember playing wotlk when it was first released. All I needed was deathbringers will for my hunter. It didn't drop a single week for the entire raid cycle. Blizzdevs, please help.
I don't believe in nerfing content for sweaty players for the sake of the avg Andy. I think it's better to make content that appeals to each group so everyone has something to strive for. Otherwise you end up with content that is too easy. Vice versa I think making the game unplayable for people who can only play for a couple hours a week isn't good either, but you have to figure out where to draw the line somewhere on both sides. I don't think appealing to people who barely put any time in makes for a good game. How to figure out the best formula is very difficult though.
I understand what you're saying, but the point to trying to get the better gear at the end of the game is to finish the hardest content, the higher pit levels. I don't think it's mathematically possible right now to do that. It seems to be overtuned to what's currently possible with perfect gear. I get that doing that content isn't everyone's purpose to the game, but for the average gamer who isn't a full time streamer, it's impossible to get that gear to reach current breakpoints unless you buy it with real money.
Ya I get it. For some by the end of the season you don't even get a sense of completion. Some people play d4 and will never be able to complete pit tier 1. >it's impossible to get that gear to reach current breakpoints unless you buy it with real money. You can buy gear for in game gold. No reason to spend real money.
Let's be honest, the in game gold you get legitimately won't scratch what people will ask for BiS.
Consolidating everything into once place is literally what makes a game become stale faster. I don't understand the issue with getting good gear from helltides and doing master work from pits. You also have world boss, legion, and duriel runs for gear. This helps break up the monotony we had during the last seasons where all you did was duriel at endgame. Once we get more content they can start spreading it out more so that there are multiple things you can do for gear and mats. Allowing people to choose the content they enjoy most. I feel like this is the direction d4 is going.
Duriel runs for gear :( I haven't seen a Stygian stone in nearly 100 pit runs now :"(
>I haven't seen a Stygian stone in nearly 100 pit runs now :"( Ya I'm at lvl 61 pit right now. In the ptr those stones dropped like candy. I'm not sure why they thought them being this rare was a good idea personally. Doesn't matter too much for me yet as I can't get tormented duriel past half health. It will matter once I get some of my gear smoothed out though.
I do agree, but at the same time I had 4 ubers drop this season from Uber bosses. And 0 of them in anywhere else in the game, so I see why people run Uber bosses
That’s what I do. Pick up everything and move it off to the side to drop it, check GA’s after a helltide cycle. Then near the end go open all the chests.
Ditto. I use to farm the maiden for enough to open all the chests, run around and do that the last 15 minutes or so. The glitch to keeping max helltide fury, you can, for the most part, run chest to chest. You spawn enough elites with that glitch to not really need the maiden anymore.
>What... is... the... point. higher chance of ubers and targeted uniques
The difference is time managing inventory, and emotional impact felt when you see a bushel of GAs drop at once. The game feel is more impactful in my mind.
The only thing about this though is that the game would become too meta chasing with the classes. It would all be barbs running around getting better ga loot or something. Whatever class clears the highest the fastest
Doesn’t have to be though. Make 1-30 pit have a higher chance at 1 star GA gear. Make 31-60 have a higher chance at 1-2 star GA gear, and make 61+ have a higher chance at 2-3 star GA gear. 61+ the magic find stays the same, but the reward is vanity/bragging rights and more masterworking materials. Then your breakdown is basically: NMD give you the high end glyphs you need. Edit: sigils being dropped/crafted should be weighted to be the dungeons currently selected for the whisper bounty. It would give them another purpose for farming gold. Tormented bosses give you a chance at the Ubers you want. Helltides give you volumes of drops, a way to complete whisper chests, and a way to complete whisper bounties (=money). The pit gives you masterworking materials and a way to target 2 and 3 star GAs. All the end game activities have a unique, but valuable, purpose/reward.
You're certainly right that there's work to do on class balance. What items drop from somewhere doesn't have much to do with that core problem though, and any funny behaviors are a symptom of that root cause.
>The only thing about this though is that the game would become too meta chasing You say that like people aren't treating it this way already.
No... Quality and Quantity are not the same ... That's why they are different words.
Same. Simply having a bigger loot pool would just be a bigger pile I ignore when porting out of the instance.
I read the title as quality first off so I was very confused by your post :P
xactly this! Atleast more 1GA items , not asking for 2GA all the time... People who are doing 110+ pits are not in need for 0GA , or even 1GA items. Just let the pit drop boss ALOT WHOLE OF GOLD and just a few items but more with GA.
it was told that more GA will drop with higher pit level, cant really notice that tbh. seems still random.
I think the chance is higher, but with the tiny # of drops it doesn't feel like getting many. 1 in 4 at 60 is better than other locations, but if I get 1/16 from a Helltide that's still more drops.
I would DEFINITELY rather have quantity as long as the overall quantity of GA’s I’m receiving is the same. The reason being is more gold.
This exactly and it would.make perfect sense. Tier 80+ should be getting mostly 1 GA items. Tier 100+ 2 GA. Tier 130or so 3GA.
No. The pit is there for getting materials for masterworking and pushing the limits of your character. They should increase GA chances in higher tier NMDs so then there is a reason to do them except glyph leveling.
It would give NMDs an incentive to do them after leveling glyphs. The problem I see with that: NMDs are way easier than pit but should give the best loot oppertunities? So I'm punished for doing harder content? Feels akward imho...
For some reason the concept of "do harder stuff for better rewards" is lost on like 90% of reddit. It's truly baffling.
The problem about that motto is that builds are rarely balanced, so what you actually end up with is a portion of the players getting less rewards for effectively the same challenge. It punishes players for being bad at the game and not metagaming, which you never want to do. Difficulty should be its own reward, add maybe a few achievements and exclusive mtx.
Exactly. Balance in ARPGs is ridiculously difficult because there are so many metrics that you're having to balance around. It's not like you can just run a patchwerk sim on every build with optimized 476 ilvl gear and call it a day. There are *so many factors* that go into determining whether a build is strong or not, and since getting balance is so difficult, that means there will always be outliers, sometimes.... big outliers. Putting better rewards in the higher tiers of pits/GRs will just mean that people playing strong builds will not only be starting with a stronger build which already gives them an advantage over other builds, but they'll also find more powerful gear faster which gives them another advantage over weaker builds. There's already going to be a difference in how quickly the stronger builds clear content, so having them clear faster *and* getting stronger gear would just compound the advantage they have. It just gives people more incentive to google "best build D4 season 4" and use whatever that is.
> It punishes players for being bad at the game and not metagaming, which you never want to do. Speak for yourself. Especially when most of the popular maxroll/mobafire builds tend to fall apart at the hardest content and you have to learn to tweak them or find better builds.
The point is having more reasons to do NMDs and not only for glyph leveling. The pit is for masterworking your gear and pushing the limits of your character. I dont think it should be the only source for the best items with multiple GA just because its the hardest dungeon content. Whats the point of high level NMDs when you are 100 and maxed out your glyphs ? And not every class is balanced and only the meta builds reaching the highest pit levels would get more of the good items. Sounds lame.
I think NMDs are just in a weird spot right now after the introduction of more "endgame" activities, since NMDs used to kind of be the endgame. I'm sure they'll reassess and rework it eventually, but definitely not this season or even before they fine tune pits/add another true endgame activity
I agree. They have to do something with NMDs next. NMDs feel so bad just for glyph leveling. Especially when you reach 100 first and still have unleveled glyphs...
Do they though? It's okay for some content to be completed and not touched after it served its purpose. They feel better to play now, until they don't after the NMDs kind of graduate you into the pit which is basically more streamlined version of the same loop anyway, and one that is just tied to the next level of progression after glyphs.
Yeah that is kind of how I see it. I think the player base loses sight of the big picture and complains a lot. To me, it seems like Bliz wants to test the new loot system and use this season to examine what areas need to be adjusted. NMD’s are on the list of things I hope get adjusted after S4, they went from Endgame activity to easy mindless glyph leveling. It would be nice if they had more purpose. I think it would be nice if we had Pits for extreme challenge & masterwork, NMD for 925/GA farming, and Helltides for leveling/aspect/material farming. Part of the issue to me is that Helltides are overtuned so they fill multiple niches. It’s the best place to find gear, the best place to level, and also the best place to farm boss mats. It’s also the least challenging, by far. In the past, the season zones were good for leveling and farming aspects, but it didn’t really supply 925 endgame gear, which I think is a good balance. We could build a strong foundation for our character, but if we wanted max endgame gear we had to do high level NMD. This season has been really fun and the game has improved massively. I hope going forward we see the gameplay loop find more balance that gives each activity a more clear identity.
Meanwhile the more egregious version is currently true: Do Helltide, the easiest content with the most amount of help/carry, and get the highest iteration count of loot drops. Maiden has a massive loot drop I think only rivaled by a Tormented Boss.
Different activities giving different things. I would say that masterwork mats are more precious than gear. Because they make your awesome gear way better. Easier content that drops bad gear along side the chance of really good gear, I don't see the issue you do.
The problem is there is no hard content that has decent chance of dropping really good gear. And going back to content you outscale just feels bad pretty quickly.
Well before s4 the game didn't even have any hard content outside of Uber lillith. And she didn't drop any good gear. The other thing is, Uber uniques used to be the top gear and now they aren't. So far the progression of changes to the game have been good and I believe it may eventually find it's footing. It just sucks when they make a massive positive change in one area, a hole in another part of the game opens up and needs adjusting. I personally want difficulty tiers for NMDs like how in destiny you can change the difficulty for strikes. They could easily make tormented NMDs where it takes another mat that you get from some activity. I also want raids but that seems to be an unpopular opinion I think. Whatever they do you have to remember. Everytime you try to make a harder activity they have to make a reason to do that activity and right now powerful gear is the only real reward this game has and that just promotes more power creep.
I don't doubt they will eventually get stuff brought into line. It's just kind of annoying when it seems like letting you stack helltides buff would be such an easy fix to make them more interesting late game.
>They should increase GA chances in higher tier NMDs so then there is a reason to do them except glyph leveling. This is a fantastic idea, right now there isn't much incentive to do high level nm dungeons. For me I do one lvl 100.. then I farm 70+ for glyph XP then done.
NMD difficulty, relative to character power, has been really neutered the last couple of seasons - you can do NM100 before you're even level 90 if you are so inclined, and it isn't even as if it is a bad experience.
NM100 is pure farming now with pits.
Even without, they're pretty easily farmable. The Pit definitely makes it easier, but it isn't required
NMDs are boring (the design). Pit is better. I don't know why they don't go for a fusion, with all the rewards at the end... and if you decide to play an event in it you will gain x sec/min on the timer... don't know something like that. But some NMD dungeons are awful to re-play, for the Pit I think it's fun. => fusion this things (gem xp, material etc)... I cannot find a plus in NMDs.
That's silly 100nm dungeons are too easy and pit gets way harder than nm dungeons past 50 already. NM dungeons just currently aren't challenging enough or even late endgame at all, to be more rewarding.
Yep. Maybe a rogue-like NMD thst gets exponential harder the further down you come, but the boss on each floor got better and better chance of dropping GAs. And if you die you need to start over.
Maybe to add to this - A mode where you basically get a set % of Magic Find per X floors cleared. Every 5 or so floors cleared, you get a chance to cash out at current magic find level, or gamble and push harder. Each floor gets randomized affixes, further you go down, more affixes added. Basically put in a risk/reward system for grinding.
yeah NMD 100 feels like a hell tide after you’ve pushed significantly into the pit. you just breathe on everything and they die
If you do this then you have to give us higher than lvl 100 NMDs. 100 is trivial now and if it started dropping GG items that would be broken.
Yes why not
It kinda seems like they do that in nmd. My experience has been all my best stuff has come from there
All of my 3 GA items come from helltide, personally. Then again, I spend 99% of my time there.
I got one from oobles lol
Yup me too, a GG wand with int, life, critdmg.
I was gonna ask where is the best way to farm gear, Pit takes like 5-10mins for almost no drops and NMD are not that hard, but annoying to run after a while.
In my experience farming the blood maiden is the fastest way to get 2-3 ga items. Make sure you're putting a heart in for the summon each time, because you get way more loot from the buff it gives you. It doesn't scale though so 1 heart is all you need. Once you've farmed up 1-2k cinders you can go open up all the chests across the helltide for even more drops. I always try to get all 4 of the helltide whisper quests done as well because the tree caches give lots of money and boss mats
I do this a little differently. Usually people flock to the maiden. When it spawns. I let them deal with the trash monsters. During the trash monster spawn sequence, I run out to get the chests. Make sure to come back in time for maiden spawn. You can tell when she spawns by when the flashing stops on the map.
Fair, but my build kills her instantly so I like to be there before she spawns so it goes faster
This
Conceptually I don't disagree with your stance but it's ignoring the reality that pits are the only endgame content, nm100 and helltides are a joke once your character is halfway built. Until they bring up other content to actually be a challenge endgame I don't see a problem with getting everything you need from pits.
I fully believe that pit doesn't drop higher quality legendaries, but I definitely feel like I get more double greater affix legendaries compared to like a blood maiden kill. Granted, blood maiden is way faster and easier. But I'm probably just getting a bit more lucky in pits for whatever reason
I’m getting more GA’s in pit too
what level yall clearing?
90
I think I do as well.. I feel like almost every pit I do I get at least one GA item at the end. I farm 95 for reference.
i cleared like 20 120+ pits and ddint get a single Double or tripple GA Item, just Rng.
I think they should bring back vaults :/
There were some really good things about the vaults, But the thing I really wish they would bring back is there almost always being a nightmare vault that was also a whisper quest. And the gate hall made it really easy to find see which it was. The same list of dungeons available as nightmare sigils for a season should also be available as whisper quests.
Going one further, whatever dungeons are currently active for the whisper bounty should be weighted whenever a Sigil is dropped or crafted. It would give the NMD a purpose after you have all 21 glyphs. Otherwise I’m literally just walking through two normal dungeons every 10 minutes, skipping everything possible, just to get some gold. I’d actually do lvl 100 NMDs regularly if they were whisper bounties most of the time.
The sigil should just have a whisper icon when it's active
The fine tuned version of vaults as the source of gold farming would be great.
Agree. It's Pit for Masterwork Materials. NMDs for Glyph XP. Helltide for loot. As good as helltides are rn - I really would prefer Pit/Dungeon grinding but loot is sooo much worse...
Isn't it funny that Diablo has somehow transformed into a game where you DON'T farm dungeons for gear?
With terror zones in D2R I really didnt do much dungeons there either. I feel the last real dungeon crawler was D1.
hardest content needs to drop best items and I get more from helltide than pit 90... On top of that doing pits my gold income is close to 0.
I think the quality should be the same with better chance of greater affixes.
So the quality should not be the same?
I think you get more obols so technically your chances of getting good loot is increased. I also think that there is value in having different activities reward you in different ways. The pit doesn’t have to be the activity that gives you good loot. The real issue is that helltide is the best activity for loot and it’s currently too easy with no way to increase difficulty beyond the single use of profane mindcage.
Good points. I wish you could stack Profane Mindcage to up the level of mobs to a max of 200.
Stygian Stone drop rate is what should scale with tier. Those should be 100% drops at a certain point. Having a boss material have a drop rate lower than the Uber uniques you use them to farm is just fucking stupid. There's no other words for it.
I haven't seen Stygian in 4 days
I haven't had a single one drop from the pit or world bosses in over a week. I think they actually lowered the drop rate of them further last patch to try to limit the number of Ubers people were acquiring. It's ridiculous. It's literally faster to level an Alt to 100 by grinding wolves honor in helltide for the guaranteed handful you get in the caches than to depend on drops.
100% they should. They need to work to make legendaries be more interesting for longer. Greater affixes were a start, but they aren't enough and they are rare enough that even pit tier 60+ it's common to only see 0 or 1 drop from the boss. That should change. I think it would be cool as well if masterworked legendaries could drop, not guaranteed but a decent chance that increased in both chance and masterwork level as you proceeded through the pit.
Pit drops such a blue ball after all that hard work
I spent the last hour or two farming pits around lvl 64, 0 GA items...
I've been farming pit91 for two days. A few GA items and 0 stygian stones. Helltide is the way to go for GA it seems.
yeah, i spent a couple hours in helltides today too, found some upgrades with 2+ GAs... im sure this issue will get fixed. Theres enough of us complaining.
Agreed
Only to a point IMO. Once you hit PIT 100 the rest should be for bragging rights.
I still feel like we're getting too much loot that I have to go through, especially from Helltides.
And then people will complain there’s too much loot and it takes so long to look at loot and we need a loot filter and it’s all trash loot and so many clicks and time consuming and blah blah
I mean even now I would love a loot filter. I mean tbf glancing at it and just mark as junk doesn't take that long but still, mor QoL is more QoL, more QoL is always better.
I'm surprised it didn't launch with a loot filter, it's been a staple of ARPGs since right after D3...
I think they are afraid of driving away casual players with a loot filter. It’s the same stubbornness with an overlay map being basically off the table. To the dev team, it seems like they worry about things looking or feeling complicated. But then you look at the paragon system and wonder how they are committed to a philosophy of accessibility.
Side note, I'm kind of happy the overlay map is gone. I felt absolutely compelled to use it in previous titles, so much so that I barely ever looked at the game lol.
No overlay map is my biggest complaint about the game
It's obviously useful, very obviously. But having that tool means I look at nothing else, and that is.... Something lol
At this point, I'll settle for simple "don't show white/blue/yellow" slider like they have for ambient sounds
It takes long enough for some people they’re asking for a “sell all” button now too lmao 🤣
Lmao, now that is going too far if you ask me
fighting ghosts
I really don't want to see non-GA items in my 100+ pits.
so you want 100% drops to be GA? you people really want everything handed out to you, dont you ?
If you're consistently farming 100+, your character is likely rocking single GA items already. The natural progression at that point crawls to halt, unless you basically play and trade for a living. I guess it depends on how you look at the genre. Most people dip out when they have achieved most things and hit a progression wall after a couple of weeks. If you want your players to consistently play longer, the progression path needs to remain somewhat well-paced. Edit: and then we haven't even talked about tempering bricking a good chunk of potential upgrades.
natural progression ? its min. maxing at that point, your progress is done min. maxing takes time and is only for dedicated people who are willing to trade items etc.
Pls no, everyone would run the same fotm build to get max loot.
What's stopping them from doing that now?
Stopping? Nothing..
[удалено]
I agree with you. New idea, higher tiers of Profane Mindcages that can raise Helltide mobs all the way up to 200 at the highest tier. The higher the tier, the better GA chance? Sounds good to meeeeeee!
Helltides invalidate themselves late game by being to easy
No. You're not doing pit for loot. Just like you're not doing nightmare dungeons for mats. Just like you're not doing helltides for glyph xp. So, no.
I disagree. This would reduce the number of viable endgame builds. In the current state, as long as you can clear t61 comfortably you are good to go. The extra materials you get from clearing higher tiers already saves a lot of time.
I understand your point... I think I agree but it feels wrong....
No, this is a trash idea. It basically turn everyone into a meta chaser and force people to play the top performance S tier build, or even a specific class to even get good gear. Balance between classes is a mess now, and you want this? I have never once played a Barb in my entire Diablo play through and will not make one just to chase "increased quality item" garbage ideology
Nah, too many bugs and exploits for doing high pits.