Incoming Dual Totem Nerf

This kind of post is an unfortunate consequence of having Kripp stream alpha. Don't get this wrong, I'm glad he's allowed to stream alpha, I get to see what might come and prepare for eventualities. But some people like the OP are taking changes for granted and posting what is essentially "alpha feedback" in a "beta feedback" forum, which is very annoying!

Comment on possible changes you see, sure, but don't start a whine post for something that's not even in beta yet...

Thank you Anubite for speaking some truth.

Just because it is on alpha, or because you saw it on Kripps stream, doesn't mean that it is a definite change.

Personally I think streaming alpha content is bad purely for this reason. It lets information out that isn't confirmed, and starts a ruckus.

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GGG ALWAYS LISTENS TO ALPHA TESTER FEEDBACK ON CHANGES AND HAS ADJUSTED ALPHA ACCORDINGLY.

And here lies a problem with alpha testers. A majority of alpha testers only applied to see act3 they will barely log into alpha anymore without major balance/content changes.
Many alpha testers are players with that use broken skills on their characters and never used weaker skills.
I've seen over 70 alpha testers posting but the alpha realm only got 8-10 testers.

Their feedback on Totems wizj spark and icespear/freezing pulse will be: "It's balanced/It's ok" simply because they never used EE based characters or played a sweep templar/maradeur who uses Coldsnap.
2 Totems on Coldsnap wouldn't be necessary but I don't see Coldsnap being spamable anytime soon.
Dualtotems with Icenova with Increased AoE and Added lightning Damage is an essential link for a EE Firestorm character.

Somebody having 10+ different level 40 characters would give far better feedback than somebody having a Sparktotem, GS and a LA Charachter on high level.


And I have never seen skills/nodes getting improved again shortly after they hit a heavy nerf and there are many skills that got hit too hard.
Especially from patches with Chaos Maelström as temp endgame.

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Hilbert wrote:

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GGG ALWAYS LISTENS TO ALPHA TESTER FEEDBACK ON CHANGES AND HAS ADJUSTED ALPHA ACCORDINGLY.

And here lies a problem with alpha testers. A majority of alpha testers only applied to see act3 they will barely log into alpha anymore without major balance/content changes.
Many alpha testers are players with that use broken skills on their characters and never used weaker skills.
I've seen over 70 alpha testers posting but the alpha realm only got 8-10 testers.

Speculation is a dangerous thing to play around with. That's exactly what this is, speculation from the unknowing.

I even got response from one dev that the choice of alpha testers aren't optimal, the feedback is only ok and that those are mainly good for crashuploads.

So you wanna argue with that?

Also you can clearly see the characterpool from alphatesters on statsites.

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Hilbert wrote:

I even got response from one dev that the choice of alpha testers aren't optimal, the feedback is only ok and that those are mainly good for crashuploads.

So you wanna argue with that?

Also you can clearly see the characterpool from alphatesters on statsites.

Sure, that has nothing to do with particular things that you speculated in the comment above. At any rate, I'll let the beta forums continue to whine and cry over changes that were just made yesterday. - and are subject to continue to change.

Assume that several Raceralphas will participate on the race there isn't much time left to balance it with the common skills properly.

So either the changes won't be applied at all, they are final, there will be another change after the race that will be applied to OB and that might have fatal consequences because it wasn't tested.

deleted.

I have to just not respond to these topics.

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Anyway, sounds like you'd do a better job. I wonder how YOU would use alpha access differently?

One reason I never applied to alpha is because the devs want us to play it and that's why you defended yourself with a 1 time playthrough.

I would apply if you have infinete respecs and all gems available and the the vendors would sell average 3-4 linked weapons. The disadvantage is that you get a huge advantage to other players but you can give a better feedback on almost unused skills and it is far faster to check balance.

On one side it is good that Kripp tries several builds but if you watched the stream from time to time you can see that less uses skills need really good equipment and the kill speed on maps is far slower than with common builds.

On the other hand I have never seen him take the bad skills during no equipment playthroughs, he takes the strong ones.
For example how would his playthrough have looked like if he took ViperStrike?
While Viperstrike is indeed powerful in level 28 PVP in PVM it's utterly useless.

And that's the main point I am getting at, you don't get feedback for weaker skills because I doubt any alpha member tested such builds and that's why such changes as no dualtotem damage affect weaker builds far more than builds that rely on different nodes.