Set Bonus and Skill Changes Coming in Patch 2.4

Hi everyone,

I wanted to pop in and let everyone know that our next PTR patch is changing the bonus damage from Legacy of Nightmares (aka the new “no set” set) from the current 800% to 100%. Please form an orderly queue for pitchforks on the left.

One of the things that we use the Public Test Realm for is to test ideas out—sometimes even crazy ideas. In our original images and communication, we had listed the bonus at a decidedly not-crazy 75%. But in the spirit of crazy ideas, we went live with 800% to give us a chance to gather data at radically different values and, eventually, find the value that’s best for the greatest number of our players. We need a lot of creative players testing the limits and the best way we could accomplish this was to turn it way overboard. Of course, drastic changes like this are inherent to what a PTR is used for, and players need to be prepared for these outcomes.

So why 100%? Well consider the way greater rifts scale. Every greater rift tier the monsters have 17% more health than the previous. If we were to lower the amount from 800% to say, 700%, this is basically equivalent to dropping by a single greater rift tier. One look at Legacy of Nightmares on PTR will show that this isn't nearly enough. Even dropping from 800%=>400% only represents a change of 4-5 Greater Rift tiers – such is the nature of exponential growth (4.41 GR tiers to be exact because 1.17^4.41 = ~2). The reduction to 100% represents about 13 Greater Rift tiers in raw damage. Once you take into account further optimization and exploration that will happen this seems like the appropriate amount for LoN to come down.

We don’t want Legacy of Nightmares to become required for top-tier builds. We want it to be a viable option among many. We think Legacy of Nightmares is really going to shine in allowing lots of build variety for “fun” builds. The last few patch cycles have seen a massive number of builds emerge that are focused on activities other than pushing Greater Rifts. We've seen creative uses for In-Geom, a resurgence of builds that incorporate Sage’s set, the use of Manajuma’s to run around as an Angry Chicken and many others. It is becoming increasingly clear to everybody that items and builds are not just about what can clear the highest rift possible. What is good for speed runs? What’s good for public games? Or at the end of the day—what do YOU think is FUN? The hope for Legacy of Nightmares is that it will open up space to allow players to explore lots of Torment X-viable builds that play differently than the status quo. We hope to see you invent something of your own that you know might not be the best in the world, but rocks in public games or is a style of play you can call your own.

So, I want to call on you, the brave PTR tester, to continue to experiment alongside us and find the most fun, most powerful builds and help make the Legacy of Nightmares the best it can be. Thanks for your willingness to work alongside us in this whole crazy process.

Great question.

As it currently stands each class gets a different proportion of it's power from the 6-pc sets vs. complementary legendaries. The classes performing the best with LoN right now are the ones who draw the largest proportion of power from the orange items vs green. We have talked about shifting the damage for the "set-oriented builds" which, if done properly, would allow LoN benefit more classes and builds since it will always be tuned around the high water mark. Unfortunately these types of adjustments need to take a back seat to trying to get all 24 existing sets to a good place, which already has enormous complexity as it is so I can't imagine we will realistically be able to do much of this reallocation of power among the 6-pc sets.

Let's start with clearing some basics up:

The changes made to Whirlwind (and Strafe) were not made because of concerns with balance. The changes to Whirlwind and Strafe were made to improve server performance. Our server logs indicate that Whirlwind was a significant factor in server performance issues experienced by all players (even if there isn’t a Barbarian in your game). The intention is to improve server performance without affecting the power of Whirlwind.

We're currently discussing how we can get server performance gains without affecting the power level of Barbarians. This might mean reverting our optimizations, or it might mean providing alternative complementary options for Barbarians to compensate for the change. While we haven't made a decision yet, it's possible you'll see a couple iterations or different approaches throughout the PTR.

[Update]: Update: This issue has been resolved in the newest build of 34669. Thanks for your patience, everyone!

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[Update]: The newest build (2.4.0.34591) is currently displaying a corruption message, and is not able to be resolved at this time. Although the error will direct you to run Scan & Repair, this will not currently resolve the issue with PTR.

Our Development team continues to work on a more stable Mac release, and we'll have new information to provide for a future patch update.

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We are currently aware of an issue causing instability with the Mac Client for the above PTR Build. Our technicians are working to improve stability for our Mac in the next PTR build for 2.4.0. We'll be sure to update this thread once a stable client version has been released.

In the meantime, while you will be able to download and install the 2.4.0 PTR client, your game will hang indefinitely or crash on launch.

We will be performing scheduled maintenance beginning on Tuesday, November 17, at 07:00 AM PST and we expect the service to be available again at approximately 11:00 AM PST. During this time the game will be unavailable for play.

Please follow @BlizzardCS on Twitter for further updates.