Developer Questions and Answers

Will there ever be a display for a Server Time? It would be very helpful when I'm trading and am often offline. It would make setting quick meets and trades much easier.

I'm just adding my voice to the previous 13 or 15 or something mentions of desync.

There's been some really comprehensive community provided feedback / arguments / commentary / suggestions / recommendations / criticisms relating to GGG's position on desync in the 50 page Client-server Action Synchronisation thread in the Development Manifesto forum. So far GGG has, as far as I am aware, not really addressed [m]any of the fundamental points being made by the community in that thread. To the extent that you can respond to the concerns the community has expressed in that thread in this Dev Q&A, please do. Please be as comprehensive as you can.

To the extent that there are issues from that thread which you cannot fit into this Dev Q&A, should the community ever expect to get a comprehensive response to the points and arguments that have been made in that thread? If so, when is that likely to happen?

Thanks!

I'm honestly courious why you are keep adding more skills, that are questionable from a balancing standpoint, while leaving old skills as they are? It feels really bad creating a build around an old skill (let's say Lightning strike) and you realize the whole build works a lot better just replacing your main skill with one that was released more recently (spectral throw or molten strike) and the build will be better in about every way.

Same thing with uniques. Some uniques designed by you are gamebreaking and don't even have a drawback (shav's or acuitys at release) or one that stands in no relation to how strong they are (mjollner) while supporter uniques have too big drawbacks to make it worthwhile to build around (hyaon's fury or oro's sacrifice, i'm talking before the damage taken buff) or are statwise medicore at best (cherubim's maleficence).



I'd also like to know if you plan on revising the armour damage formula? Back in Beta armour was good but since release you added more and more sources of damage that will kill you almost instantly. Armour does nothing against the attackbased elemental damage and next to nothing to the physical ones. (CWDT-)IC makes it even worse when you can just ignore physical damage as whole and don't care about armour.

Are there going to be any changes to the coral amulet implicit?

1. Are there any plans to make the map system feel fresh again ? Zana gives us all maps in different levels, wouldn't it be nice for players to have a recipe to make our own maps like that ? Maybe add in a quantity penalty or another bigger downside to justify it.

2. Is a loot filter on your to do list?

3. How come the promise custom leagues that were advertised since (closed?) beta have disappeared? I feel the community and player base is ready for it. It might also be some kind of solution for the dead space at the end of every challenge league and between race seasons etc...

1. How will you stop people from quitting the game due to desync related things?

2. How will you stop the game from becoming too repetitive and frustrating (Can't play merciless unless you farm in Ledge for 2-3 weeks to get enough currency to buy gears).

3. Frustration of 1 hit kill monsters that requires special builds (having saffel's frame or Phoenix shield or needing Purity of Fire) such as Igna Phoenix, Magus, or Vaal Oversoul (that can kill you in 1 hit with smash).

4. When would off-line trade stash system be introduced? (its annoying to wait people who are not in your time zone).

5. Will we get an option to turn off particle effect (it lags even on really good pc).

6. Ram consumption concerns of instance is very heavy compared to games with better graphics such as diablo 3 or Grimdawn, is there any plans to shave off unnecessary use of memories with the instance?


Overall I think game is good if it isn't cranky and too "indie developed"

- Why they're many orb too improve items, and only one, (scouring), to remove all mods. A new one to randomly remove one mods of an item couldn't be add to the game ?

- Do you still working on a ingame trading system? He's still for me one of the worst part of the game. Alway's boring to find what item you could buy, but you never had the vendor online or responding to you. Just a simple trade stash in hideout, where we could find and buy items could be appreciate.

Can you swap Cloak of Defiance and Shavronne's Wrappings rarity tier?
Lowlife isn't that beneficial anymore and way harder to make work, I don't think it should be locked behind a crazy rare unique that isn't even very good. CoD on the other hand...

Spell effects. When do we get optimization?
They were laggy since I started playing and now with all the crazy trigger gems I think it really is time that the way everything renders gets a serious improvement. No reason to render 10 billion things if you can't see more than 5 anyways because they're all stacked up on each other.

Finally a request/suggestion: Shorter and more leagues please, waiting 2 months for new expansion is not fun :D Don't even need new content, just do some crazy mix-up leagues using currently available things. League-based different skill-trees for more theory-crafting, not a focus on balance but on having players experiment.

Do you planning to add more prefixes & suffixes, and to increase the values of current ones?
Do you planning to add more basic items with level 70+ ?
Is there any chance to get more then 120 passive points from the skill tree in near future?
PVP patch is running for few months..., do you think that it's successful, or you are planning to improve PVP system more in the future?
Do you planning to improve guild system? How?
Can we have active skills like: Attack, Bow: 1st. %lightning damage (increases by the level of gem), 2nd. %fire damage (increases by the level of gem), 3rd. %cold damage (increases by the level of gem) ? This will unlock good build with weapons like Oro's Sacrifice or Hyaon's Fury. We have enough skills that converts physical to %elemental dmg, now we need skills that are pure elemental, also supports for this skills.

Hey,

Many times I have thought about max resist and flasks. My problem is that most of the high end encounters designed for close to 100 resist, what I mean is you easily faceroll everything with flask standing in void zones which does not require player skill but those who lets say can't get close to max resist but trying to push to the limits balancing with their player skills fail due to tremendous amount of incoming damage without max resist.

Question1: Is there any plan on capping max resist to let's say 90 and 'reduce' or rebalance some encounters damage to be acceptable for such resist level?

To stick to this many times realised that for endgame maps like 77+ and atziri the best defense stat is your damage, the faster you kill them the more chance you got to survive wihch is not a good design (otherwise the encounter has a soft enrage/enrage mechanic, but that's another question). Let's say someone with hundreds of thousand DPS enter a boss fight and kills it in mere seconds while skip the entire fight phases. I'm telling you those players doesn't even know the boss fight as much as others with a lot lower gear but trying to kill bosses with their experience of the fight.

Question2: In the first leagues the DMG numbers were a lot lower yet the game waas perfectly playable and players still could achieve many things. Now let's say difference between a '250 physical dps' dagger and '500 physical dps' dagger is like 10+ times in tooltip which is getting out of hand. How can such scaling be real in the game?

Question3: In future content (most likely acts) any plan on item squish or adding new base items? Let's say you have a max geared character with top mirrored items there is a new act coming. The exact same items will be top items. Is there any new base items that worth changing your existing gear? Not to talk about standard sc/hc leagues but even in the new challenge leagues. Will we see new base items which gives you lot better stats? Let's say top chests has like 2000 armor, new items can have 5000 armor just to make you feel that the game is going somewhere? Like in a MMO you are max level, new expansion is coming out you change your whole gaer in the new zone with quest rewards.