[PTR] Wizard, Witch Doctor and Legendary Feedback

I've been trying out the PTR both on my level 60 WD and Wiz and leveling up both of them from scratch. Here's my feedback so far with a focus on the wizard:

General

• Love how we only need to play through the game once to hit 60. Much better than redoing the game three times.
• Reviving at corpse is a huge QoL improvement. Cheers!
• Drop rates of legendaries while leveling felt much better than vanilla. It was cool actually getting exciting when a legendary was an upgrade.
• White items don't seem to be dropping very often. This is a problem when they are a reagent to new recipes.
• Overall, the game feels like a real Diablo game. You're constantly excited about new builds and you keep wanting to play more to get that next drop. Removing the AH really made this PTR fun for me.

Witch Doctor

• Circle of Life increases your number of dogs to 5 but Zombie Handler doesn't increase it further to 6. WDs should really support the Pet Class and I feel this small change would really help promote that.
• Similar: Big Bad Voodoo - Boogie Man increases your dogs to 10. Zombie Handler should feel like a 'pet build passive' and increase it further to 11. Again, having more synergy will really help the class.
• Bug with Big Bad Voodoo - Boogie Man and Zombie Dogs. You can cast Boogie Man, get your 10 dogs then change out the skill and keep all of the dogs as long as you have your normal Zombie Dogs still on the bar. Intended?
• WDs should further support the Pet Class role by showing how many Fetishes you have at all times, similar to Zombie Dogs.
• New Vampire Bats feels awesome. You can not worry about regeneration at all and go for passives like Pierce the Veil.

Wizard

• Teleport seems to get stuck a lot like it used to before it was fixed. Feels clunky now but the animation is beautiful.
• Electrocute - Lightning Blast seems far better than any Cold or Fire options. If I want to build a dedicated Ice build for example, I feel at a disadvantage when taking 'Magical Missle - Glacial Spike' or 'Shock Pulse - Explosive Bolts'. They should be evened out a bit to allow for dedicated element builds.
• Hydra damage still feels too low. It seems like the kind of skill that, if you have room for it on your bar, should always be a DPS increase. Compare it to a passive skill like Magic Weapon - Force Weapon. Right now, you're rewarded higher for a "set it and forget it" type skill than for one you have to actively cast on the field. You should be able to use hydras to increase your damage output rather than for a couple of niche situations.
• Archon feels awesome to me. I like that it changed to a big cooldown you can blow when you come across an elite pack. However, you are rewarded for getting a lot kills, the exact opposite time you want to be using this skill. There are few situations where you want blow a 2 minute cooldown on a pack of white enemies. It is also rare that you can have a big group of enemies followed by an elite pack. To compromise, I think either the duration should be extended to 30 seconds or the initial damage boost should be higher (50% instead of 20%?)and amount gained per kill should be lower (2% instead of 6%?).
• Power Hungry is a really great change compared to the old skill. Is it intended that it only works for the first tick of channelled spells? If so, it kind of seems underpowered for channelled spells.
• Prodigy at 4 arcane power feels too week. I barely noticed a difference in arcane regeneration spamming Lightning Blast at 2.5 APS. It should be buffed to double or triple it's current amount.
• Galvanizing Ward at a 12.5k shield is far too weak. It should really scale off your health as a (40%?) shield.

Legendaries

This is a review of only the Legendaries I tested and found issues with.

• The Magistrate - Feels really awesome to use this but it should be more "build changing". A simple way to do this is just allow the Hydra to use whatever rune of Frost Nova is on your bar. Suddenly, you're changing 2 skills on your bar, both Hydra and Frost Nova.
• The Swami - Similar to the Magistrate, the effect should really take on the rune of your Frost Nova. Again, it would be a build changing legendary in that you now get a bonus for having Frost Nova on your bar.
• Harrington Waistguard - The buff feels kind of pointless. Since chests are somewhat uncommon and you typically only find them after you've killed a group of enemies, 10 seconds just feels too short. It should really be the kind of buff you want to keep up 100% of the time. Maybe decrease the effect to 15% but allow it to last 2 minutes? Suddenly you're running around trying to find chests constantly then take out a crowd of enemies. This change would allow the legendary to become more game-play changing in my opinion.
• Goldwrap - 5 seconds feels too short to be significant. Typically you are getting gold after you've killed enemies. This is the time where you specifically don't need a boost in armor. Should be 10%? the effect for 30 seconds where picking up additional gold will stack and refreshes the timer.

Bonus album of the legendaries I found while playing:

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So many details have been improved. So good.

Just play the PTR (not the ROS beta) for like a hour. Beside those obvious changes in the patch note, there are just so many small details get improved. The attack animation, the skill effects, the animation of the health global, the distribution of enemy in low difficulties, some new blood effects, the UI changes, etc.

Some of those things are already done extremely well in the vanilla D3 like the fluent combat that everyone has been talking about, but details of these are further improved. So good. Can't remember all those small improvements, but I gotta say the experience seems very satisfying so far.

ohhh and btw...
I used to think that the population of the Diablo General Forums were the lowest, most depraved circles of humanity... ... then I saw the PTR feedback forum.

Wow.

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[VIDEO] ALL Crusader Abilities, Runes, and Talents in 15 minutes for easy comparison

I hadn't paid much attention to the Crusader's abilities since he was announced way back when. Glad to know that I can make a Hammerdin from Diablo 2 again! i was leveling this way for a while, it was a lot of fun. its a fairly cheap skill and with the right supporting abilities the wrath isn't too much of an issue. I havnt messed with it since 70 though, so i don't know how effective it is in torment. Currently monster HP is just silly high in torment, so many of abilities just fall flat still, hopefully this gets fixed soon.

for instance, i dont even consider the damage from the primary's because it is so pitiful against the monsters health, so only the effects matter, and they all do the same job as far as wrath generation goes. I really feel this is bad design, while they are generators and shouldn't be the only thing you do, they should feel like they are contributing more than a buff/effect and wrath generation.

hammers worked will for me for a while, and it was a ton of fun, but while leveling on master, they felt like they started falling behind. There is a nice passive for them though, but its not available until late 60s . There is currently an kneck that can proc a vortex on all mobs, its great for lots of builds, but it really shined with hammers, pulling everything in to the swirling vortex of doom.

there are so many cool and fun abilities in this class with potential and flavor, but they need to be viable/competitive damage wise.

right now i think the majority of crusaders are using phalanx/shield bearers because of how good it is compared to any thing else. I see a nerf of some sort coming to it, but at current monster hp, its one of the few abilities that dosn't feel like a wet noodle. So think we are going to see some better tuning of monster health, then bring more abilities in line by bring everything closer to the middle.

 

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Start Giving Blizzard Realistic Beta Feedback And Stop With The Grandiose, Unrealistic Ideas

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10788878886?page=2#38

"Because blizz uses betas only to chop, never to add." - Confirmed by Blue Post.

Now with that said, I'd like to see more constructive feedback on the content present in the beta itself. I keep seeing all these posts going on about:

• Endless Dungeon & Endless Nephalem Tower
• Infinite PVEVP / PVPVE Mode
• Super Omega Alpha Flare Mode That I Want To See But Is Nowhere Near What Is Currently In The Beta

While those ideas are very cool, you must keep in mind that they don't just happen overnight. They don't happen in one week. They don't happen in one month. These things take time to be created, written, drawn, animated, coded, implemented, and tested. Those huge, out of left-field suggestions aren't helping them make Reaper of Souls better, because none of them are realistic possibilities between now and release, which is very close now:

Instead, let's discuss and make some threads about ACTUAL CONTENT in the Beta, such as:

• Monster Density from 1.0.8 doesn't seem to be present in the Beta
• Underpowered / Overpowered Legendary effects (Pox Faulds still sucks even at 70)
• New Sword & Board Passive on Barbarians serves little purpose and is (IMO) out-performed by other skills
• The Slash - Electrify Rune is very underwhelming
• Paragon Level point distribution
• The fact that at the higher levels, 2H'ers are currently not worth using for any class except Crusader.
• Reporting Actual Bugs
• Are there any other skills with massively overshadowed runes?
• Suggestions which are small enough tweaks that don't require months and months of development time

Even if you do not yet have access to the Beta, you can contribute by watching streams and forming your own opinion of the gameplay. That is how I spotted the density one.

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Blizzard's Internal Test Team has Never Beaten Inferno Difficulty

How hard is Inferno difficulty going to be? That’s a very good question but Blizzard knows how hardcore their fans are and I’d be willing to bet they are going to make every effort possible to give us just what we want. So I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty darn hard.

Here’s an interesting fact about the game that we discovered from our Twitter stream: Blizzard's internal test team has never beaten Inferno difficulty.

Jay Wilson, Blizzard Game Director for D3 answered this question on Twitter:

“Was anyone in the internal test team able to beat D3 Inferno difficulty?”

The answer?

A simple “no”. 

I have a funny feeling some fans are going to read this as a challenge. How long do you think it will take the first player to beat the game on Inferno?

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Diablo 3 Beta Weekend Reached 300,000 Concurrent Players

Did you participate in the Diablo 3 Beta Weekend? Well, you most certainly were not the only one. I was there (as the server allowed) and my friend maxed out the beta content in just a few hours. This stress test was one excellent example of just how popular this game is.

Blizzard reported said they have 300,000 gamers in this stress test/beta weekend. Honestly, I’m not surprised at those numbers at all. What an incredible start to Blizzard’s newest game, right? 

Blizzard's community manager "Bashiok" claims on Twitter that the number of concurrent users playing the Diablo 3 beta over the weekend peaked at 300,000 gamers. The total number of users test-driving the highly-anticipated Diablo sequel is currently unknown, but Bashiok said it was "a lot."

"Every time we tried to log in this weekend and failed, we were doing our part to help Blizzard,"Forbes reports. That’s pretty much how I felt too, trying to get logged in to check out the beta. 

I didn’t mind too much since I’ve done stress tests before and I know that the purpose of them is to see if the servers can handle the load. In this case, they didn’t seem to be handling it too well but all that means is that they know exactly what they have to fix before launch day. 

Here’s waiting for May 15^th when we finally get to see more of Diablo 3!

Source: Tom’s Hardware

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Diablo III Stress Test is Literally Stressful

As gamers stress test Diablo III, they run into some very stressful situations indeed. What was meant to test the servers and see how they would hold up under heavy load could not have been better named because it was absolutely stressful trying to get into the game to experience the free beta weekend. Apparently, we had to keep with a few hundred thousand other fans to check out this sampling of the upcoming Diablo 3.

As Forbes explained, it wasn’t easy to get into the beta weekend this past weekend:

If you’ve been saddled with my bad luck you’ve likely had a tricky time trying to play the open beta of Blizzard’s Diablo 3 this weekend.

After the very large download, and probably some errors getting the launcher to work properly, and maybe a really long hang-time while it updated you may have reached the game itself only to have been met with an Error 37. 

Or some other equally irritating notice that no, you won’t be able to play because the servers are down or the player limit has been capped.

I had the same problem at first but finally was able to get in and check it out for myself. A couple of friends were also excited to check out the beta and we’re feeling a little pumped up about seeing more that the game has to offer.

I was unable to play the stress test of the game without spamming Star Game over and over in frustration until it finally decided to let me in. There were quite a few error messages, both getting in the game and once you were in but that is to be expected in a beta and a stress test.

All in all, I liked the overall look of the game and I still have plans to get it when it releases May 15th. What about you? Did you try the stress test weekend? Were you able to get in and experience the game or did you run into problems as well?

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