This new patch has brought a lot of things I love about the game. Set item crafting, the woven echos, there is so much here that is incredibly good and fun. However there are also a few pain points I need to go over.
First is regarding the fixing of the bug where acolyte minions were not getting their 50% damage reduction. As of 1.2 I still don’t notice the minions being any more survivable than before so either the fix didn’t actually work or the minions are still so weak that they just die constantly no matter what the players does.
Skeletons are still extremely weak, lack elemental damage conversion and lack the ability to attack in an area or with multiple projectiles (one shot every 6 seconds with multiple projectiles is hardly worth mentioning as that does not help with clearing, it needs to be every shot).
Skeleton Mages mostly lack having 5 projectiles as they used to have instead of just 3 and they are still weak.
The Golem which is meant to be the tank, it is meant to literally stand on front of everything draw aggro and not die is dying even in just empowered monoliths.
As if this wasn’t bad, any kind of DoT is brutal on minions because they don’t have enough HP, they don’t have enough damage reduction of any kind and the dots are hitting them as hard as other things do on a single attack, except there are often several ticks of damage per second.
Even with 20% leech from the tree when they crit, the are dying. Even though I only see crits from them all the time, they are dying. 20% damage leech which in theory is huge, is not enough to keep them alive despite them criting all the time.
This is because their damage is so low, even after I super buff with 135 extra base elemental damage, they are still doing such a low amount of damage compared to the amount that they take that they just can’t survive even in empowered monoliths.
Spells like infernal shade have a bad tendency of retargeting the same targets rather than pick a new when something is active which makes sense if you were single targeting a boss, but when you are casting 3 at the same time and on your own minions it becomes obvious that what is desired is to have the maximum number active to then cast dread shade and get the buff on it from as many infernal shades as possible but the targeting issues makes this process long and annoying.
Most of the weaver stuff is overtunned compared to normal content. Getting one shot is way too common even in just empowered monoliths. It is one thing that some very hard bosses are meant to have some attacks that may oneshot players but these attacks need to be extremely well telegraphed and they need to give the players enough time to dodge them, however what I am finding is that many are not well telegraphed at all and most of them shouldn’t even be doing half the damage they are doing because they are not meant to be powerful, hard to kill bosses. We are doing relatively basic monolith content, maybe some weaver bosses but these are still normal bosses. We aren’t fighting orobyss or aberroth here, these need to be tunned down to the type of content they are meant to be.
The ward nerfs again were terrible. Even with 3.5K ward in basic empowered monoliths I keep getting oneshot. In part it is because many enemies are overtunned for sure, in part it’s also because ward has become too weak. I understand the need to bring down builds that were immortal but the solution can’t be nerfing the entire defense as a whole. Rather the solution would be to look at which items or which skills are allowing ward to scale to ungodly amounts and lower them because as it is you are also nerfing the cases where builds were getting just barely enough ward to now not having anywhere nearly enough. To put things into perspective, When I played my archmage build in S1 I had over 6K ward with chronostatis, exsanguinous and a T5 life to ward on gloves. My int wasn’t even that high nor did I have any ward given on my idols. Now I have 3.5K just with no chronostasis but with far more gain from my ward on the idols. The nerfs have been insane to builds that were barely making it in order to nerf the builds that were getting abusive amounts of ward which for the most part came from ward gain on hit in their skills.
The MG limitations are a bit too high. Getting higher ranks takes too much time. The reason for people to go MG over CoF is because they want to be able to get the items they need because the unfortunate reality is, you can’t really target farm what you need with CoF, not in any reasonable amount of time anyway. Problem is that you force players not to be able to trade for what they need by creating a ranking system which takes far too long for the average player to grind. Couple that with the whole design of the MG having flaws that make looking for what you want or even have a way to instantly get what you want when it is available on the market and the MG, much like CoF are not really serving their purpose well.
This of course then leads to the question of what is the correct pacing which there is not real good answer here because different people will have different expectations. Mine however are as follows. Until a player gets to a point where his gear is already very good, it shouldn’t be hard to get upgrades. What is very good then? T22 items and LP2 legendaries. Till the player whole gear is this, and I obviously mean all on correct bases and with the desired affixes, he shouldn’t be slowing down on how frequently he is upgrading to reach to this point. So how frequently should he be finding upgrades before he is at this point? I’d say as soon as the player enter monoliths, he should probably be finding 2 or 3 upgrades per day. Regardless of him being CoF or MG because if the player is feeling like he played the whole day and got nothing to show for it, it will get demoralizing. It feels like nothing drops, it feels like anything on the MG is also out of reach, whether by cost or by rank and ultimately, this leads to the player quitting.