Great work with the new expansion and Vaal Pact nerf

The new expansion looks great. I never really enjoyed the end-game too much since running strands all day was a "no thanks" for me. And even with Fall of Oriath I only got to like Tier 10 maps before I got bored of it. The atlas felt a bit old after the Fall of Oriath since it lacked maps and bosses from the new expansion. And there was no goal to running maps with Shaper being still too far out of my reach. The map density changes and new expansion mechanics both encourage more variety when running maps and add some goals to mapping.

I'm also glad that Vaal Pact is nerfed. Before the Fall of Oriath many builds were ES Vaal Pact and after ES nerf it just changed to Life Vaal Pact. I saw people saying things like "this is where I stop playing". Well for me it's the opposite - this is where I start playing seriously. I never liked how Vaal Pact was used by most builds. For example Pohx said on youtube he never used VP which proves that it's quite possible to make an end-game build without VP. Admittedly this breaks some of the builds I played in the past and wanted to play next but I'm ok with exploring new possibilities. Just don't forget to nerf the uniques (Atziri's Acuity) and ascendancies (slayer, berserker) with similar effects or the meta will just shift to those.

The main problem while VP was necessary for so many builds are the huge damage spikes in the game. Instant leech and high HP was about the only way to survive those. With VP getting the desired nerf I hope you'll look into those damage spikes next and mitigate them to some extent.

Overall I like the direction where the game is going. Good job GGG!

So far it seems the only thing that needs to be confirmed is balancing the Innocence, Gruthkul and Act 10 Kitava boss fights for an absolute 10/10 patch on every front. This is the kind of patch that shows balls and willingness to improve the game even if there will definitely be whining for the first couple of weeks. I've seen amazing games ruined by absolute lack of any courage in balancing and leaving toxic mechanics untouched, so this is always a huge plus in my book.

In my opinion the most imballanced fight is Doedre - both Act 8 and Act 9.

Act 8 Doedre killed every single one of my characters many times over and is way more difficult than Arakaali. I don't have a sightest idea how Hardcore players are beating her.

Similarly Act 9 Doedre has insane amount of HP and killed me more times than Shav, Maligaro and the Deprived Trinity combined.

And yes I do know how the mechanics of those two fights work. She still kills me no matter what.

Hm, actually the Act 8 Doedre fight imo is not very well balanced, but just requires closing the valve almost ASAP - I don't like that at all since that really screws up the flow of the fight, but once you figure that out, she wasn't that bad for me.

Didn't have that much of an issue with the Act 9 version either actually, even though my build was not absolutely amazing at that stage... This could greatly depend on the build itself and playstyle though. My Harbinger playthrough was with Scion built specifically for versatility/mobility and the only things that screwed me over were total oneshots or massive AoE spam.

But yeah, these things are worth discussing, although looking at the tons of threads that have been around, it seems the 3 I listed are the "top three" of 3.0.