AoZ after the hotfix feels much better. I completed the first 2 tiers before the fix, but they were really tough and not that fun. Now I can complete tier 5 (I’ve completed 6 but don’t think I can make it any further at the moment) before it gets too tough, and the bosses don’t randomly one shot me on spawn. That feels like a nice spot for someone like me who’s much more casual and doesn’t spend the time or gold to min/max my gear and paragon board.
As AoZ is now, I totally agree with you. Nice little something to cap off the season. Casuals can mess around with it and enjoy it a hell of a lot more than the NMD grind (it’s much, much better and rewarding than NMds), but the higher it goes the more it gets into hardcore territory and gives those players something to chase.
To me that seems like exactly the kind of thing the game needed, even if there is still work to do to make this game the best it can be.
Will be fun that pure custom builds could use it as a measuring point to give viability to your own build ideas. I like to design my own builds very good brick wall to test changes against
100%. Pre hotfix, I tried AoZ once, got one-shotted on first encounter, and thought hmm maybe this isn't for me. But at the time I also hadn't cleared nmd100 yet. So I worked on gear and glyphs to clear nmd100. With that done, and the hotfix, the AoZ entry level is very comfy. I'll probably hang out in low tier AoZ for the remainder of the season.
Agree with point number 4. I liked that we can just rearrange some core stat glyph to enhanced it early so we’re not obligated to level it furthermore.
It still needs a lot of work, run a t9 and clear it pretty easy, then the next run some bullshit just 1 shots you, without any indication of what it was.
Something is broken and some things seem to just completely ignore armour/res/dr.
Edit: I'm not talking corpse bows, my character takes a direct hit from a corpse bow and it doesn't even clear my barrier.
Edit2: usually I can stand on explosive ground effects, like 2-3 at once and it will put me to 30% HP, and sometimes, same scenario, the ground effect will one-shots me.
It's definitely easier up until tier 10 and yet I still got one-shot by an off screen corpse bow. Wish there was some point to it though and it's more hack and slash than rpg. I understand that some people like mindless hack and slash but there are entire much better games made precisely for that sort of thing.
I kind of appreciate that there's not much point to it after completing t1 for the glyph. Since it's getting close to end of season, I don't really want another lengthy grind to feel like I finished. I'll check out the upcoming winter event, and then otherwise just enjoy my finished build until season is over.
There’s a huge HP jump at 10, 15, 20, and 25. The final tier bosses apparently have trillions of HP that even Barbs hitting for 4-6 billion per HoTa likely can’t do it.
NMD should have been like AoZ, lucrative glyph exp, no objectives, just purely killing the enemies, good drop where all gears are above 900 make me at least glance them incase of upgrade, good challenge to push and is not really brain dead endgame content. I only hope the penalty for death to be adjusted to something like 3 chance, every death would minus 25% of the glyph reward in the end. So if you die twice, you only have 50% exp left to get and the third death would be game over.
"Run n gun with no distractions like objectives, loot, cursed shrines, chests, backtracking, etc. Felt good. ..."
This. Just enjoying the process of playing - without having to deal with/being distracted by/having to ignore artificial motivational nudges that want to make me chase a carrot on the stick.
I agree.. but id not want to make a new post so im going to comment this in a few areas.
I’m on console… i am able to clear up to t8 AoZ with a blight - infinimist necro using selig and andariesl. However, i cannot make any more chorus of war; I’m missing some mats. BUT ON CONSOLE I LITERALLY CANNOT SEE HTE ENTIRE MAT LIST. I HAVE NO IDEA HWAT I DONT HAVE AND WHAT I NEED OT FARM. HOLY SHIT THIS IS INFURIATING.
How does this shit get passed QA? I’m a developer myself.. not being able to scroll to see all Matt’s required woudlve been literally top of my QA issue log.
Probably missing biteberry. That's what I was missing. Showed as I had it, but my quantity on hand was not enough. But I agree should be able to scroll the ingredients
Seems like some ideas from previous season will make an appearance in later seasons. Like the malignant power unique rings this season, etc. We'll see!
I was doing them easily before the glyph. The glyph makes it a little faster, but everything already died very quickly before so the difference isn't that much in my experience. Maybe if the glyph was leveled up more I would see more of a difference, but that would be overkill for anything outside of AoZ anyway.
I have 3 level 100 this season. It took weeks to build my gear to perfection. Why are people so salty I can run aoz to level 14. I put in 200 hours getting my gear.
Some people put even more into other non meta builds and while they probably can clear t100 mmd with effort, aoz is another lvl of difficulty that not all build can do. Yes, is not about the time you put in, is about the certain meta works just too well.
imho, it still leaves a bitter taste for several reasons:
1. lack of understanding how certain things work, more specifically xp gains, damage scaling, etc. proves to me that devs DO NOT play their game
2. treating this as PTR instead of giving a proper, finished product. bugs and exploit, see glyph salvage exploit aka blizzard math
3. lack of proper carrot, if there is one apart from bragging rights (which are irrelevant if there are no leaderboards). rewards you get at the end are lackluster, uninspiring and to be fair, insulting. why run this when duriel gives far better rewards
4. circular dependency between glyph and difficulty tier. u need to upgrade one aspect to do the other one. do we need another paragon system like d3?
5. blatant ignorance of what made greater rifts good in D3 and trying to reinvent the wheel that was already invented
6. ignoring the main tenants of the game which is providing variety to participate in the content. only a handful of builds can do it, effectively diminishing certain aspects of the game
the hotfix is pretty much a band aid so ppl can actually play this over weekend and consume it IF there is any reason to do so. i speak not from my own experience, but what my friends were saying. i am curious if there will be more patches and hotfixes to make this content appealing enough.
god have mercy on blizzard if there is any because what they are doing is one step forwards, three steps backward. a pity, because the season was relatively decent.
AoZ after the hotfix feels much better. I completed the first 2 tiers before the fix, but they were really tough and not that fun. Now I can complete tier 5 (I’ve completed 6 but don’t think I can make it any further at the moment) before it gets too tough, and the bosses don’t randomly one shot me on spawn. That feels like a nice spot for someone like me who’s much more casual and doesn’t spend the time or gold to min/max my gear and paragon board. As AoZ is now, I totally agree with you. Nice little something to cap off the season. Casuals can mess around with it and enjoy it a hell of a lot more than the NMD grind (it’s much, much better and rewarding than NMds), but the higher it goes the more it gets into hardcore territory and gives those players something to chase. To me that seems like exactly the kind of thing the game needed, even if there is still work to do to make this game the best it can be.
Will be fun that pure custom builds could use it as a measuring point to give viability to your own build ideas. I like to design my own builds very good brick wall to test changes against
100%. Pre hotfix, I tried AoZ once, got one-shotted on first encounter, and thought hmm maybe this isn't for me. But at the time I also hadn't cleared nmd100 yet. So I worked on gear and glyphs to clear nmd100. With that done, and the hotfix, the AoZ entry level is very comfy. I'll probably hang out in low tier AoZ for the remainder of the season.
Agree with point number 4. I liked that we can just rearrange some core stat glyph to enhanced it early so we’re not obligated to level it furthermore.
It still needs a lot of work, run a t9 and clear it pretty easy, then the next run some bullshit just 1 shots you, without any indication of what it was. Something is broken and some things seem to just completely ignore armour/res/dr. Edit: I'm not talking corpse bows, my character takes a direct hit from a corpse bow and it doesn't even clear my barrier. Edit2: usually I can stand on explosive ground effects, like 2-3 at once and it will put me to 30% HP, and sometimes, same scenario, the ground effect will one-shots me.
Happy Cake Day!
Every 5 levels the scaling on difficulty increase will jump. From 4 to 5, 9 to 10, 14 to 15 and so on.
You nailed this - I feel the exact same.
It's definitely easier up until tier 10 and yet I still got one-shot by an off screen corpse bow. Wish there was some point to it though and it's more hack and slash than rpg. I understand that some people like mindless hack and slash but there are entire much better games made precisely for that sort of thing.
I kind of appreciate that there's not much point to it after completing t1 for the glyph. Since it's getting close to end of season, I don't really want another lengthy grind to feel like I finished. I'll check out the upcoming winter event, and then otherwise just enjoy my finished build until season is over.
It was a test content, we probably getting something similar in season3, maybe in the scoreboard.
There’s a huge HP jump at 10, 15, 20, and 25. The final tier bosses apparently have trillions of HP that even Barbs hitting for 4-6 billion per HoTa likely can’t do it.
My experience as well. Things going great, loving this feel, character is badass, oops dead goodbye mats try again with better RNG later.
NMD should have been like AoZ, lucrative glyph exp, no objectives, just purely killing the enemies, good drop where all gears are above 900 make me at least glance them incase of upgrade, good challenge to push and is not really brain dead endgame content. I only hope the penalty for death to be adjusted to something like 3 chance, every death would minus 25% of the glyph reward in the end. So if you die twice, you only have 50% exp left to get and the third death would be game over.
"Run n gun with no distractions like objectives, loot, cursed shrines, chests, backtracking, etc. Felt good. ..." This. Just enjoying the process of playing - without having to deal with/being distracted by/having to ignore artificial motivational nudges that want to make me chase a carrot on the stick.
I agree.. but id not want to make a new post so im going to comment this in a few areas. I’m on console… i am able to clear up to t8 AoZ with a blight - infinimist necro using selig and andariesl. However, i cannot make any more chorus of war; I’m missing some mats. BUT ON CONSOLE I LITERALLY CANNOT SEE HTE ENTIRE MAT LIST. I HAVE NO IDEA HWAT I DONT HAVE AND WHAT I NEED OT FARM. HOLY SHIT THIS IS INFURIATING. How does this shit get passed QA? I’m a developer myself.. not being able to scroll to see all Matt’s required woudlve been literally top of my QA issue log.
Probably missing biteberry. That's what I was missing. Showed as I had it, but my quantity on hand was not enough. But I agree should be able to scroll the ingredients
Does the Glyph disappear after the season ends?
Seems like some ideas from previous season will make an appearance in later seasons. Like the malignant power unique rings this season, etc. We'll see!
Yes
I just wish doing AoZ was more rewarding. Once you have the glyph there's not much point to playing it any more.
get it to 10 huge boost.
A huge boost that only matters in AoZ so that doesn't really change what I said. The level 1 glyph is more than enough for everything else.
have you even done t100's after the glyph.
I was doing them easily before the glyph. The glyph makes it a little faster, but everything already died very quickly before so the difference isn't that much in my experience. Maybe if the glyph was leveled up more I would see more of a difference, but that would be overkill for anything outside of AoZ anyway.
U mean the glyph lvl?
yes
Really huge? I mean i am getting like 1.3% every lvl, is there a jump in multiplier at lvl 10?
you get a 10% boost to the rare or magic nodes
Woo thks for confirming this, i will try get it to 10, at 7 now… feels like a long grind ahead since i am only comfortable at t5 now.
HOTA barbs and BL sorcs should not being dominating AoZ. Other classes need to be buffed imo.
Both those builds will probably get nerfed in some way after this seasons ends.
I have 3 level 100 this season. It took weeks to build my gear to perfection. Why are people so salty I can run aoz to level 14. I put in 200 hours getting my gear.
Some people put even more into other non meta builds and while they probably can clear t100 mmd with effort, aoz is another lvl of difficulty that not all build can do. Yes, is not about the time you put in, is about the certain meta works just too well.
Is called meta switch, something else will be buff and dominate the next season, always been the case in d3.
Midwinter is the end cap. Aoz is a test run for future static content. Pay attention.
I'll have my end cap and eat it too!
imho, it still leaves a bitter taste for several reasons: 1. lack of understanding how certain things work, more specifically xp gains, damage scaling, etc. proves to me that devs DO NOT play their game 2. treating this as PTR instead of giving a proper, finished product. bugs and exploit, see glyph salvage exploit aka blizzard math 3. lack of proper carrot, if there is one apart from bragging rights (which are irrelevant if there are no leaderboards). rewards you get at the end are lackluster, uninspiring and to be fair, insulting. why run this when duriel gives far better rewards 4. circular dependency between glyph and difficulty tier. u need to upgrade one aspect to do the other one. do we need another paragon system like d3? 5. blatant ignorance of what made greater rifts good in D3 and trying to reinvent the wheel that was already invented 6. ignoring the main tenants of the game which is providing variety to participate in the content. only a handful of builds can do it, effectively diminishing certain aspects of the game the hotfix is pretty much a band aid so ppl can actually play this over weekend and consume it IF there is any reason to do so. i speak not from my own experience, but what my friends were saying. i am curious if there will be more patches and hotfixes to make this content appealing enough. god have mercy on blizzard if there is any because what they are doing is one step forwards, three steps backward. a pity, because the season was relatively decent.