Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

[Roxas]

Blizzard really pineappleed up. How do you do nothing for a year and then only release a class? Diablo seems to suffer from chronic bad management, but other Blizzard games seem to do fine.

[Dark Link]

Blizzard really pineappleed up. How do you do nothing for a year and then only release a class? Diablo seems to suffer from chronic bad management, but other Blizzard games seem to do fine.

That's what happens when majority of the devs are moved to other Blizzard games.

[Malthe]

Blizzard really pineappleed up. How do you do nothing for a year and then only release a class? Diablo seems to suffer from chronic bad management, but other Blizzard games seem to do fine.

What, aren't you happy that you get to pay for a new class to run through the content you've already spent hundreds of hours on?

[Dark Link]

The new gem from the Diablo 1 dungeon

[JoeTang]

Hellcat Waistguard in action:
https://gfycat.com/ScholarlyAccomplishedAntelope
https://gfycat.com/FatOptimalFantail
Rapid Fire is still not viable though.
Might prove to be an entertaining option, and possibly superior for Maurauder builds if they make it work with sentries. Currently, the Cluster Arrow grenades don't gain the bonus if they're cast from sentries. Unfortunate it competes with Zoey's Secret in slot and Visage of Gunes/Cloak of Garwulf in cube.

Barber is super bugged. Sometimes it doesn't proc at all, other times, it procs indefinitely and doesn't blow up until it randomly wants to.
Rabid Strike doesn't work for bell builds because the helm makes bells a ranged skill and you no longer teleport. It also doesn't work for LTK because Rivera Dancers make it attack faster than Rabid Strike's ICD and some other random bug or whatever.

The anniversary event is actually very fun. Would recommend starting as a fresh level 1 and clearing on T2-ish is probably soloable depending on how hard you want it to be. You could probably do Normal with just auto attack for that true D1 experience.
Would not recommend T6 as that took me and @Dark Link 10 years to kill the first zombie and level and then we had to lower to T5. Almost finished on T5 except ran out of time so went down to T1 to finish the last floor off quick. Probably wouldn't have done T5 the whole way if not for some lucky weapon drops on his end I think. The post-60 scaling is too strong.

Hopefully, they buff the gear that drops down there since a lot of it is garbage that's below your level if you're on a higher difficulty due to the EXP scaling.
Probably end up soloing this on my next seasonal to start things off to get the achievements.

[Dark Link]

I blame my WoW raid starting right when we hit the final floor. I literally kept tabbing between the two games while trying to do raid trash in WoW.
Doing a near full T5 run was very fun even after we died a billion times. I did like how we restricted ourselves to only using 5 Paragon points per level up. I knew once we hit level 61 it was going to be a disaster, because the scaling gets to absurd levels almost immediately.

I think it's a good thing we didn't try doing that after my raid ended for the night as it took us about 5 hours? in total to clear the thing on T5.

EDIT:

New PTR update was mostly PTR only fixes, but Electrified affix was nerfed by ~35% due the change it was given.

[Dark Link]

Season 9 started on the PTR:

Conquests:

The Thrill (GR45 solo w/o set items)
Sprinter (Act I-V in one hour)
Avarice (50m gold streak)
Speed Demon (TX rift in 2 minutes)
Curses! (350 kills on a TX cursed chest)

Haedrig's Gift:

Barb: Earth
DH: Shadow
Monk: Sunwuko
Crusader: Invoker
Wizard: Firebird
WD: Jade

[JoeTang]

Tempted to try DH for Hellcat Waistguards, but WD's Barber is looking super strong and fun, and Hellcat Waistguard might end up not working with Marauder's anyways, and I did DH last season.

Haven't played a WD since before I played in seasons I guess, and I never tried Jade so that'll be fun.

[TugboatWilly]

Guess I'll do Crusader in S9. The Thrill should be easy as Thorns.

[Dark Link]

PTR Update:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/2036...tes-11-22-2016

Gem got super powered up, but still not sure if worth using.

[JoeTang]

Wizard

Manald Heal
Enemies stunned with Paralysis also take 3000-3500% 13,000-14,000% weapon damage as Lightning

Not sure when that went through, but still sounds pretty bad.
Glad to see they're actually ironing out some bugs though. No Fist of the Heaven's fix yet ? =/

Apparently, the Barber's effect completely doesn't work anymore. k

[TugboatWilly]

They're putting a cap on Faithful Memory for Crusader. Depending on the cap it may or may not kill my excitement about playing Crusader again.

[JoeTang]

I can understand a cap on it since in top density, it was such a huge bonus, but knowing how hard they like to nerf gun things, we can only hope...

I think it's confirmed that Hellcat's Waistguard isn't going to work with Marauder's too though.

Shockingly, some buffs


Did they actually cave in to the pressure to actually balance sets? Looks like a fundamental change to Wrath of the Wastes. I've never used it on PC, but I've seen it on console and it's basically... Energy Twister with the straight line legendary power equipped because you can use it without moving on console unlike on PC. No changes to most of the items though? The Faithful Memory cap is at 10 and The Barber doesn't do increased damage anymore, just converts to area of effect.

Apparently, Arachyr's Hellbat is already meta, and they buffed it, and the change to Wastes' is a net nerf.

[TugboatWilly]

RIP Hammerdin. My hopes of playing Crusader die on the PTR yet again.

[Dark Link]

DMO getting a small buff is really surprising. Too bad Vyr's still DESPERATELY NEEDS EVERYTHING right now.

[Dark Link]

Season 8 ending December 30th
Season 9 beginning January 6th

Bunch of PTR hotfixes went out as well
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/d3/topic/20752515453

[JoeTang]

Reading the answers to the Q&A, it's amazing how little they can care.

Saffron Wrap is essentially garbage and their response is to let the players try it out and figure out interesting builds before deciding if it needs a buff. So few items that underperform have ever gotten a buff, it's a joke.
Same applies to the set balance answer. "We've buffed some of the weaker sets". Wastes was a net nerf at first. Arachyr's apparently is the best WD set. Everyone complains how bad Roland's has been every time it's been buffed and still underperforming. Will they get it right this time? Akkhan's is still garbage design, but look, we have an amulet now, think of the limitless possibilities! No supporting items were touched.

[Dark Link]

Vyr's is in the same boat. The set got buffed...a couple times?, but because Firebird and Tal'Rasha both synergize with Archon much better Vyr's is in extreme dire need of a revamp at this point to even be usable. The only use the set ever gets is for its 2 piece set bonus for Tal'Rasha Archon and that's it.

[JoeTang]

Apparently, despite the buff, Wastes is still underperforming compared to live. What happened to the idea of "we don't want people to log in and feel weaker"? And the apologists that say it's a buff despite it performing worse than live and any other Barbarian set is hilarious.
There's so many tiny easy changes that they could do to improve the quality of so many builds, and they choose to go with "we don't want to make changes for the sake of changes" while some builds perform 10 GR lower and they think it's balanced.
I could literally go on and on and on, and that's depressing when they made literally 13 changes this patch.

[TugboatWilly]

They made The Barber terrible for some reason so there goes my backup plan.