Pets, Summons, and Mercenaries will now warp to a player’s location if they are far away from the player’s character
If you had one of the builds that rely on the non-targetable mercenary bug, this will no longer work. Mercenaries are now targetable after teleporting to you from within a locked room.
Fixed an issue where overlapping Fire Wall or Blaze missiles could cause increased damage
Back to your blizzard sorc, gents. You can no longer stack firewalls to increase damage and kill everything in seconds. Sounds good, right? Well, yes. But it’s one less viable build in the game.
Overall is a good patch and there are very important things there. My votes for Best Change, Worse Change, Most Useless Change:
Best Change:
The Tomb Viper poison cloud “fix”. Although it is really not a fix. Blizzard actually intentionally used a bug to buff Tomb Vipers in the Halls of Vaught. What this patch did was to revert that.
Worse Change:
Force Move. It is not what you think. You do not have a new Force Move action on the skill bar. It’s instead a damn new keyboard shortcut that works out much like the new Quick Cast feature. Garbage!
Most Useless Change:
Skill Binding Bar. Useless space-filler bar that doesn’t tell you anything useful.
Yeah. Firewalls do not seem to cut it anymore in Hell. Still a good option for levelling though. But you’ll have to respec after Nightmare.
You are probably thinking of the Quick Cast change. The one where you change and activate skills with the keyboard.
That’s a game changer for sure. But as far as I could tell from my own experimentation, only for new players into the game. I suspect many will be like me and simply have an hard time adjusting to it, and will prefer to play the old clunky way. Even though we play other ARPGs with “quick casting” built-in.
Speaking just for me as a dude played much diablo 2 with the old skill bar controls back in the days: Since yesterday i personally adapted very quick to that new skill bar quick cast controls, and i don´t see any sense in going back to the old skill bar controls. In my opinion, so with quick cast controls one is playing:
more efficient
can quicker react
more comfortable
Just superior in comparison to the old skill bar controls, at least in my opinion.
(Last year i did a Diablo 1, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 playthrough, and my conclusion: Diablo 2 still is best Diablo game in the franchise)
just like wsg this was a bug, needs to be fixed (altho a diminishing return on stun is needed)
i beg to differ fireball/meteor or light sorc have always been viable builds
again i beg to differ, on my setup i can see precisely what shill i use and when, i cant tell you how many times i died while teleing into a pack of cows because the game could not swich fast enough tele with blizz etc
it took me like 30 minutes to remap and get used to the new system, it cut ~1/5 of the time i used to run things
Firewall was broken. The damage was 100% higher than d2 even with the same tooltip. It’s not “ruined” the build, that build was using a bug crutch that was fixed.
The patch was awesome imo. I wish they’d prioritised the chat and game list, because that’s the thing really making the game pointless to play without being a member of a trading forum… But im really liking the insta skill switch. The best quality of life change since auto gold pickup and multi stash
I’m a bit surprised, that you find this change good, normally being against any qol-improvmements (like PL, for example…) . At the moment I’m still playing the old way, though. (playing a MA-Assa atm.)
my stance was consistent through, I was always for fixing BUGS, and not against 100% in adding small qol for new players but i was and will ever be against touching the CORE D2, ploot grifts and all those modern concepts do not belong in a arpg that was made in the wild west of gaming. I was never 100% against p8 online because it already exists in SP and with the d2r there came alot of cancerous ppl and ruining the experience for mostly new ppl. I don’t want them to get frustrated and leave, if they do not advocate for core game changes, so if they want p8 to continue enjoying the game, i can understand that, but trash like ploot or grifts do not belong and crosses the line.
Well, I’m also against copy of D3-gameplay. But I’m definitly NOT against PLoot, as you know. But Quick cast is imho as much a game change as Ploot.
But I’m not against new content, being new secret levels or something like that. (rumors are, that there even is one implemented: let Shenk and his minions get killed by the babarians, without making any damage yourself to him or its minions. I’m not sure, if this is just a rumor, though, I didn’t ry it (yet). )
Btw anyone noticed how insanely strong shadow master is now? Very tanky at lvl 13-14 skill as must have claw block and sometimes life leech. Since patch the Shadow master always teleports into pack of mobs and can stay alive against fanat death lords for ages sometimes
The new skill bar is an absolute game changer, n question. It makes classes that needed more than 1 spam skill an absolute pleasure to play. Sticking to the old way when this is available is indeed crazy as it is far more efficient now. Teleport for example, now only a single button press, has gone through the roof in power and usefulness.
That said, there are still some builds that play much better with a controller anyways: FOrb/Fireball Mage, Bone Necro, any Amazon build, any melee build etc. For me at least.
Shame they made a mess of it by now allowing LMB be one of the mapped skills, and in turn leaving the LMB useless for most builds, only able to assign a small subset of your skills to it.
Didn’t Mercs always teleport with you if they got far away? Wasn’t this the very thing you used to bug the Merc in the first place? What has changed?
Finally, surely overlapping Firewalls should stack damage? I’ve cast it twice, it should damage twice. What other skill works this way? If an Assassin lays 2 traps they both do damage, so why not 2 Firewalls?
I could be wrong but I think he was saying Blizzard Sorcs are dead because they typically used Firewall as their off-element skill as it required fewer synergies (say compared to Fireball, which is too weak to be used with Blizzard because they both demand a ton of synergies).
I’ve already begun leveling up a new Sorc since I used up all my respecs already. Figured it will be faster to do than trying to farm bosses in Hell for a token.
It is unfortunate they nerfed Firewall back into uselessness but I knew it was a bug going to get fixed so can’t really get too mad about it. Definitely lost flavour for sorc builds but just gotta deal with it.
Where do you find all that “loot race” moments? In 2 months from release I have such moment only once: I’ve asked for Anya quest help, and mal droped from the white haired beast on frozen river. There were also some leechers, but necro that came to help, get that rune, because he was right there. Absolutely fair drop.
You can get x2 damage, if cast twice. But previously, you get x6 damage or more, if cast twice. Explanation:
Each firewall consists of 3 parts. High level firewall parts overlap in the middle. You, basically, get x3 damage before this fix.
Not sure, probably, also every part could also stack with self, so big monsters (including bosses), could get x3Y damage, where Y is a monster size.