If they want it tested and checked for bugs or bad interactions they should have a PTR vendor with the new items and aspects.

To me the most important point: 28:26 - having uniques that are obligatory to run in a build rather than being a good option that makes it hard to choose - makes it feel like the D3 set items that were mandatory for each build...

Blizzard: Opens a PTR to test the new things. Doesn't give us the new things to test.

I feel like they are so focussed on making "new" content, when we would have been way happier with them just improving the existing content. There were plenty of unique items that goes basically completely unused that could have been redesigned and improved rather than making brand new uniques

Tal-rasha ring needs to be a legendary node on its own paragon board or even a passive in the skill tree

Blizzard: Why do we need to have a test team when we can just throw anything raw to the public, let them test it, and just wait for feedback!

Wudijo: Powercreep is out of control... Blizz: Nerf sorc!

At 34:10, I disagree. Barbarians will have more slots for new overpowered unique items compared to Druids and Sorcerers, which will further worsen class balance. but overall, great video, thanks for putting it together!

i agree with wudijo about the powercreep and new uniques design, however i think wudi is too biased towards only legendaries and hard nerfing stuff which i don't agree. I hope blizzard listen some of his thoughts but not too much otherwise we are back at 0 with only legendaries with good tempers and trash an uniteresting uniques.

Power creep is worrisome. Been feeling like this since season 1

Just ask them to put all the new stuff in a npc like in D3 ptr problem solved

I really think Blizzard needs to rework how they distribute multipliers and get their math in order. Right now its imo just the wild west of multipliers. Everything has one and that things that dont are trash. They need to create a system where they can introduce new items and mechanics without worrying about creating huge imbalances between classes every time. Imo they need to do something like this: [x]% damage multipliers are now only available through the Skill tree, paragon legendary nodes and glyphs, class mechanics and uniques. Aspects and tempers don't multiply damage in any way any more. Tempers cannot give chance for multicast, duration increases to dot effects and other effects that effectively work as multipliers. They instead come from overskilling your abilities. E.g having 8/5 skillpoints in firebolt gives it a 60% chance to cast twice. Regular uniques only give kiss-curse multipliers like you mentioned here. There is always a downside. Unber uniques are the only items that can give flat multipliers that can be used without a condition. I think this would reduce the ridiculous power discrepancy between barbarians and classes who can only use one weapon. It would also open up much more room in buildcrafting as the difference between a kinda shit meme build and a hyper minmaxed build wouldnt be as big. At least not as much as it is today, talking 10000s of % difference in damage output. Its just nuts.

The kind of bugs they let on the PTR, and even live, are so blatant they should have been ironed out before end users ever get to see them. It's just clearly massive incompetence.

I really feel like you are overvaluing the amount of people who play or think like you. I would wager the vast majority of people who play WANT these crazy op things. Power creep be damned. D3 got crazier and crazier and still had a solid following. Same with PoE from what I’ve seen and heard. If this is what drives player engagement and shop spending even if for just a few weeks out of a 3 month season then blizzard will keep doing it.

Damn you are so much on point its crazy . You do double dip bugged damage on devs with that vid. Wp gg bro

Regarding the convo about build gaps at 34:25, while the relative tier rating of each given build may not change with the addition of items like the Crown, what likely *will* change is the magnitude of difference between each tier. For the sake of example, let's say Shred is doing 100dps and Bash is doing 200dps. A 50% bonus is going to equate to 50dps for Shred and 100dps for Bash. Because of the initial gap in damage, Bash gets TWICE the benefit relative to what Shred receives, at least from a raw DPS output perspective. It's the same way compound interest works. The more of something you have, the greater net benefit you'll see from percentage increases. So, whichever builds are outperforming other builds without these items are then just going to blow them out the water even more once everyone has their uniques, creating a much larger gap than before. :(

The only unique we've seen from PoE 2 (the low level belt that drains your mana until you're max health) is way more interesting than any of the new uniques they've added.

Excellent takes all around. I hope Blizzard takes a good long look at this video.

Uniques should change your build, legendaries should empower them. Uber uniques should make you want to build around them. I feel like their design philosophy has creeped closer to Diablo 3s higher damage number style, not great.....I completely agree with you Wudi. These new uniques are not designed well at all.

Sorc/Druids need some big buffs with interesting mechanics and not just 5%[x] here and there, its not gonna do anything. It's quite sad to see that they still struggle to bring back build, the same builds, they heavily nerfed into the ground and beyond on release... i.e Hydra, Rabies, Minions, Shred

Finally, someone releases a video with the same concerns I've had the second I started seeing these crazy uniques. It's dangerously irresponsible to release such powerful items and ignore so much more work they need to do looking over all classes and skills.

I just want to know if sorcerer dmg is still 'on a Tuesday' behind cc layers

bro its so true... how they want us to test out stuff when we have to grind so long to even get the items lol

LOL at the Northwar build "this is the future"

I think what you are suggesting for the Scoundrel's Kiss should be in the skill tree. Aspects/uniques that modify a skill should be in the skill tree. They could be skill runes or something that modify the skill a certain way.

After the whole disaster that was the pre season 1 patch it seems like Blizzard is afraid of bringing the game back down to more reasonable numbers.

18:25 I couldn't disagree more with the downside aspect. Yes, these items seem to be shaping up to be so universal that they find their way into any build, but I very much doubt the solution would be to make them have extremely punishing downsides, then all of your gearing and theorycrafting would be centered not about optimizing but patching up, specially "4-5 items to make up for it"? jesus christ god no.

They need to control how many multipliers exist in the game. It will slowly become like D3 where four to five digit multipliers are normal. Probably should just have addictive stuff with very few multipliers and they should be capped. 300% multiplier should be reserved for something with a crippling downside.

Wudijo just wants everyone to deal 17 dmg like Druid and every pit boss is as hard as Lilith.

What he thinks about Storm arrows and Rain of arrows sinergy? I do like that style.

not all unqiues have downsides. Only extremely powerful ones should. that being said, even in PoE, the iems with large downsides are able to be mitigated since you have 6 stats and an implicit on all non uniques. Diablo has half the stats on legendary gear. If a unique took 4 items to overcome the downside, then the unique needs to always have more power than 4 other items combined. that isnt a solution. Agree that the power here is too high though.

How is the HS rogue doing in the PTR? I was late to the game with mine and starting to think about which class to run next season.

Thanks for the very informative and good summary. Hopefully Blizzard will pay attention.

@wudijo do you think it would help if they removed all multiplicative damage?

great video! perfectly explained what is wrong with the insane powercreep.

A 2-month break between season 4 and the expansion is cool. I might even open my steam library!

They should also expand the PTR to at least 3 weeks (or why not 5 weeks?), updating it halfway through to fix bugs etc. Also add a vendor where you can test every single new item and updated items like some others said in the comments.

I got PTR seen that its not setup like PTR on wow with no vendors and insta left because of this - not grinding PTR to TEST something

First of all i would Love If everything gets cut in half at least. The Power creep currently is just ridiculus and i dont wont to reach a d3 Level already

Indeed, the powercreep does seem out of control. Even when I first played the beta I was honestly surprised there were so many sources of multipliers and additional damage. Do we really need such high numbers right from the beginning? I thought it was somewhat strange and well... boring how so many of the aspects increased damage by X amount instead of doing unique effects, changing how skills worked instead of how much they do. I was originally expecting the paragon boards/glyphs to be the main source of damage increase and leaving our choices of skills/aspects to be how we wanted things to function. I guess it's sorta true, but there are just way too many multipliers from aspects in my opinion.

Thank you as always

I stopped when I realised the PTR was missing the D3 PTR buff

It would help Sorc if some of the new strong uniques would only be usable by Sorc chars, the other classes already have enough good ways to boost up their damage. What do you think about that wudi?

I am a big basic attack enjoyer and yet i hate the basic attack meta so much. i want playing basic attack build to be my choice, not the "right thing".

Very good points! Found myself agreeing with all of it. I feel like Blizzard really designed themselves into a difficult spot with the aspect system as a whole, and it might be too much of a challenge for them to fix.

on the topic of making the rapid fire ring generic and not required that kinda actually opens up a neat idea within the design space where a new system is added where we can find/craft a new type of item that augments functionality of specific skills wouldn't that be a neat world where ur lvling up with a build you've always been comfortable with and all of a sudden you find this special glyph/attachment of sorts that completely changes how one ability that u arent currently using works and encourages u to swap builds right then and there

Great video. I was really hyped after s4. I thought they are heading in right direction with this game, but mid season patch and now ptr shows they are completely clueless. Game balance is non existence. Instead of trying to fix that they are making it even worse. What a pity.

Fair play to you Wudijo, this is a honest review. I saw a video a while ago from Bellular about how Blizzard’s number 1 priority is to keep people in the game - at the expense of pretty much everything else - ‘longer engagement leads to higher likelihood of spending in the shop’. Making very OP uniques but giving them the very slim drop chance you have highlighted is perhaps, in their minds, a way to keep players grinding and grinding. The build variety was limited on release but, as you say, it does seem that they are narrowing it further and further. Everyone running the same thing. Yawn fest. For someone of your understanding and creative talents, its got be getting very tiresome. POE2 is on the horizon.

Preach it man. Doing the lord's work as usual.

There are so many bugs or undocumented changes that I don't even know how to interpret my testing data on the PTR. On another note Wudi definitely seems to be the voice of reason here. Makes a lot of good points!

Numbers are getting way too high and impossible to parse, like three zeros+ too large at this point.

It's crazy they are making regular uniques better then mythics, crown over shako so far

100% agreed. Hopefully Adam J watches this! Also ... I miss the balance of NMD 100 pre-season... defenses mattered, not just dmg/glass-cannoning.

Its an odd season guys, what'd we expect? Season 4 was good but obviously season 5, being an odd season, is going to be pretty underwhelming.

What if we could only wear 2 uniques at a time, could that solve many of these problems?

Great video! I will sy this seems so hard. Like I really like the Basilisk Staff for druid because it sounds interesting and changes something but ppl complain that's its not just damage. All complain about both side and it sucks.

Raxx mentioned that the devs told him that most players are hyper casual and just blindly put five points in basic attacks. This is why.

I wish they would bring back set gear. One of my favorite parts of d3 was theory crafting different combinations of set gear combinations. It gave you something to hunt for, had a massive payoff, and made the game that much more fun. Sets that fired basic skills with core skills took care of mana problems and made the basic skills actually usable. They could rework it and get creative, but I think it’s a massive opportunity for fun farm-ability.

Idk if it’s just me but after the PTR update my Necro is getting one shot in the pit way too much. Not even high pits either, at 71 it’s been happening and at 81 is a damn near guarantee🤦‍♂️

Agreed...I want a challenging game that gives me some choices in gear (and every build can perhaps be viable to a degree). Personally, I'd love to see some crossover gear (like maybe sorc's can shapeshift, or rogues can get a barb shout from a unique helm, etc)

Hears is a question I asked in feedback. Since season 5 is the return to hell why not bring back a classic weapon from d2/d3 and that weapon would be the demon machine crossbow since there is not a unique crossbow and 3 not so great unique bows

Reminds me D3. Everyone is forced to play one build because of ridiculous (x). But in worst state. Math in D3 actually works compare to monkeys who are responsible to programming in D4. S2 and S4 were great... hoping to waiting room to S6. Dissapointment

Thank you for bringing up rapid fire and scoundrels kiss. Rapid fire has always been my favorite go to skill, but I don't like the way it works with the ring. So it ruined my favorite skill for me because all balancing for the skill will be based on using the unique.

Delete all Uniques. Aspects only.

it is almost like blizzard uses the excuse of "thats what the ptr is for" for not testing their own changes.

In the future, a vendor that sells everything for 1 gold would do a world of good.

As a sorc I wanna wear the druids ware-bear chest with a barb helm that gives me a shout

Would love to see some druid love

they may need to provide something like Jamella in D2 where players can craft gear for testing

I wish they would allow console players to participate in ptr. I hate the kiss curse system they use currently. Yes, power creep becomes a problem no matter what, but the bigger problem is the majority of players can't make a build on their own that competes. As a primary druid player, I am more concerned with class balance. Everyone that I have seen ask for a harder WB for example, plays barb. When Raxx said the new wb took his team of op barbs a full minute, I was trying to conceptualize how long that would take a druid. If you want a challenge, play a different class. I have been at the WB by myself this season and it was ROUGH. Just wish I didn't have to by a pc to have a voice because people who can play 12 hours a day are probably no longer in touch with the majority no matter how humble or nice they are.

I agree with you, Wudi, about the items. And people who blast and play many hours a day like we do would also more than likely agree with you. It seems to me that these changes are not geared towards us blasters and more geared to casual players to feel powerful

Honestly think that the biggest thing holding d4 back, in terms of power and builds, is the lackluster skill "tree". Since there is so little power in your class trees, the items have to make up for that, meaning that we most likely end up in a d3 situation at some point. Blizzard really needs to develop some proper skill trees, call it "season of remade skills" or something, with new abilities that interact with each other, like the old skill tree we were shown for d4 back in the day

Very good summary of the PTR. I agree 100% 👍

I wish they'd fix everything that doesn't work or doesn't work as described currently before they introduce new stuff to the game that also has a 50%+ chance to be broken... Smh...

Sounds like we're going to go from ignoring 98% of our loot, to ignoring 99% of our loot. Exciting! lol

I’m glad you’re saying this as well. They need to just give us infinite resources, tempering, and access to all items. In my opinion, all of these new uniques should be held back until the current uniques are addressed. I also find the new uniques to be just bland damage multipliers. Uniques need to be far more transformative.

thank you

It's crazy how people were so convinced early on that this would be a more methodical aRPG, but we've basically had one-button builds, screen-wide clearing, terrible visibility and crazy damage for a while now. They need to reign this in now or just embrace it and go full D3/PoE. A lot of people are going to like this direction, but a lot of people will feel jebaited by Blizz's early messaging about the game.

I quit this terrible excuse of a test realm and went back to HAVING FUN with my bash barb. The Axial conduit pants have a cool effect, but i had to go get my starless skies AND my shako to make it decent. THEN, I went looking for that Lucion helm, with no luck. Season 4 PTR was so much fun, and this is a pile of shit.

It’s so odd they don’t have settings for a prod build and settings for a PTR build. It’s a simple config file or something else. The tech people out there puzzle me sometimes

Why dont they let us have an extra ring slot if they won't give us 3rd enchantment slot?

Problem with sorc is that they want you to combine different elements and that becomes the builds instead they should give us more option to run just fire, or just lightning or just cold

Like just copy wow, have vendors that sell uniques. Same company right?

Reddit is gonna cry again if they nerf

I for one am an auto attack enjoyer so I approve this message. Thanks blizzard

the only ptr d4 needs is someone to test the dev's they lack many many skills ..seem to be missing

I'm excited to see what the unique buffs / overhauls are - but it takes a lot of wind out of your sails seeing brand new uniques introduced that feel like they're poorly designed. How are you going to go back and fix the existing pool of unique items when you can't even design them when given a clean slate? Between that, the horrendous state of class imbalance, and the new activity seemingly like a boring grindfest... it's going to take a LOT before I even consider playing season 5. Super excited for season 6 and the new class reveal though, will absolutely be playing that regardless.

They should change frostburn aspect to something like "lucky hit -hitting a frozen enemy has an x chance to cause an explosion of x fire dmg" or more fire dmg to frozen or chilled enemies

I would better to use all these op uniques, rather than rolling tempering over and over again. I the idea of tempering but gambling feels tempers is frustrating.

I'm pretty sure that the Blizzard plan is to cripple the majority of existing characters so that when the expansion drops the new "Spirit Born" character is the new meta and therefore sells more expansions. But I also felt like the famous pre season 1 nerf was to funnel everyone into playing seasonal characters.

i dont want downsides, i just want them to offer unique gameplay to aspects. change how i interact with skills/enemies with comparable power to what your giving up

The only thing Blizzard didnt break is my disappointment.

Thanks

I’d like a unique that gives rouges 2 imbues at the same time. Would be fun.

They should make a PTR only vendor that allows you to craft any unique item for free to test

So many of these balance issues could be fixed by allowing a single tempering affix on uniques. Like, I would NEVER use a unique staff on sorc because losing the tempering affixes is a HUGE downside.

Sorcs a super bad example because the class is just broken. Aspects are all trash, damage is missing so we end up leaning into anything that stacks damage over aspects for builds. This helm is Sorcs only multiplyer don't take it away.

Blizzard needs to focus on just 2 things, balance and new end game content, but what it seems is that no one talks about this in a meeting or no one addresses either of the 2 topics. We don't need new unique ones, we need the current unique ones to work and for us to be able to make different builds without having to surrender to 1 or 2 skills.

I was building blight build on s4, i got it adjusted to s5 on ptr and its weaker than a bone splinters build i cooked out today..

if they dont have the uniques increase your damage, but only change functionality, like wudi suggests, it would be cool if they let us temper the uniques