Well I called it, Blizzard has begun testing their “late 2017” Necromancer patch early, with the brand new in game Armory to allow quick itemization and specialization swaps, and it is pretty amazing.
I spent the day with my good friends Zhanji & Bear trolling through the changes, both intentional and otherwise, to see where not just where the game is headed, but also find out early what will trigger me next.
A quick summary of the major talking points include:
- The Armory: Players can save 5 builds per character
- Material Storage: Mats no longer take up stash page, convenient new tab
- Primal Ancient Items: 20% weapon range / 30% stat increase on items with a 1% drop rate.
- Bounties: Bonus order no longer exists, if you complete all 5 acts, you get 1 giant bonus with the same value as before.
I can say this to Blizzard, for the first time in years… THANK YOU . It only took them how many seasons to fix bounties? And the armory.. Kreygasm.
There were some other tweaks and minor changes on the PTR, unfortunately there seems to be a massive bug plaguing most classes that affects multiplies/buffs from calculating correctly, so it was hard to test changes such as hydra with Lightning wizard. To give you an idea of how broken Archon is on the PTR, here’s a Live Vs PTR shot of the exact same wizard with the exact same buffs:
LIVE:
vs PTR:
I personally enjoyed all of the changes, including the controversial new Primal Ancient items.. unlike many of the D3 community, I appreciate items that require a modicum of difficulty to obtain.
The only caveat I would stress is that Blizzard needs to aggressively address botting if they don’t want the remaining D3 players to flee. Competing with botters is already a nightmare, especially those who stop at nothing to get ahead. (New accounts every season to get 3 rollbacks, TurboHud, & Macros) This is yet another change that seems innocuous, but inadvertently will boost the benefit of botting, by an average of 20-30%.
Ask yourself, does it really seem fair that Cuba gets to be rank 1 just because he can afford more copies of Diablo 3 than me?
That about wraps it up from my perspective, if you want more details about what we actually did, check out the writeup by Zhanji over at TSLoot.com and make sure to watch the 6 part video series he put together:
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