Race Season Eight - Signature Race (Locked June 16)

I find it disappointing that Templars aren't getting Molten Strike. It's by far the strongest early game single target melee skill now, and Glacial Hammer has always been kind of weak on damage compared to Heavy and Double Strike. Glacial is nice defensively, especially against weaker bosses/exiles/rares, but that doesn't really matter when you're trying to beat on Gravicius. Lightning Strike hasn't been worth using in races for ages and still goes unchanged.

With the addition of Flameblast I doubt that melee Templar builds will be able to compete with caster Templar builds for records, even with the best Sledgehammer you've ever seen. Before these changes melee Templar was clearly better than caster Templar because of the lack of early game spell gems with good single target damage, and the power granted by chaos spamming two-handed maces, but shifting it in the opposite direction isn't fun.

Melee Templar have pretty much always been an inferior variant of Marauders in D:C, first and foremost due to the fact that you're forced into taking life and strength nodes after your first six damage nodes before you can access more mace damage nodes, but now caster Templar is just going to be an inferior variant of Witches due to the fact that they have no good single target spells to work with until they hit level 10 for Flameblast. Currently Templars get no single target spells in their beginning chest, then get Fireball and Firestorm in the second zone. Witches get Spark in the starting chest and Storm Call in the second zone, which are by far the two strongest pre-Flameblast single target spells. I get that lightning elements are generally supposed to be Witch themed, but making them exclusive to the Witch in D:C makes caster Templars and Shadows suck a lot in comparison because none of their abilities are up to par.

The fact that most spells lack decent single target is a problem throughout the entire game, but it makes doing the required bosses and farming exiles and rare mobs in D:C an absolute pain for certain builds due to the gem limitations. Even with Glacial Cascade and a Hatred unique claw added to Shadow I imagine they will still struggle with single target, especially with The Brute and zones before it. The only early single target "spells" they have are Bear Trap and Viper Strike, both of which do poor damage, don't scale with most of the damage nodes a caster Shadow is going to get, and are awkward to use. Most likely you'll just end up spamming EK.

The Brute himself is pretty challenging as a caster Shadow, a lot more than most other classes, because you're limited on what abilities you can use without accidentally feeding lots of Soul Eater charges (Bear Trap/Viper Strike), even if you try and keep the skeletons out of any collateral AoE, and the AoE abilities (Fire Trap/Lightning Trap/EK) don't do good enough damage to kill him quickly enough to not care about a few Soul Eater charges. Although you can eventually kill him, you end up wasting a lot of time.

There's other random frustrating problems like caster/trapper Shadows that choose The Dungeon of Necromancy for the Lightning Trap gem ending up screwed on Dexterity because this zone doesn't give a Jade Amulet for whatever reason. This makes continuing to level Bear Trap especially difficult as soon as level 9. You have to either hope for dexterity rolls on gear or modify your early game build into something odd and suboptimal (like going down to grab the Haste notable passive) just to get the stats.

The balance of the the rogue exiles unique to D:C could do with being addressed as well since when and where they spawn is based on class as well, and their loot can be race-winning and record enabling (assuming you even found them in the labyrinths of dead ends). The Witch exile and Marauder exile have always seemed like total pushovers, where as the Shadow exile and Templar exile could at least pose some threat if you aren't careful or well geared.

Overall I think making D:C the signature is a fine idea, although some people will simply hate it, but there needs to be more changes before the season starts.

Amazing, this race was always my favorite one but I got frustated by the layout quite often so these are welcome changes!

[li]The entrance to The Burning Cave is now in the centre of The Chamber of Greed.[/li]


Don't you guys mean the entrance to chamber of greed is now in the centre of the burning cave?

There's definitely some really good points addressed from what I can see, and a few complainers (but what can you do?). The biggest balance issues will definitely be Flameblast being OP, and shadows still sucking overall. I feel that the real issue is that shadow's tree doesn't allow it to go any good early game builds, since it's primary strength is to easily spec into late game crit builds. This makes for subpar race builds, combined with terrible gem selection in D:C. Further class issues have mostly been addressed, and I'm not one to give input that I don't really deserve to give. I would say that I am very biased towards caster builds, as it takes the variance out needing to roll good damage weapons for multiple weapon tiers as well as resistance gear for the final Gravicious fight.

Secondly D:C RNG is now primarily pack size oriented. After realizing Flameblast was available with witch, I proceeded to get top 3 every D:C race just because it was THAT EASY, having played caster so long in sig races. This was compared to barely breaking level 24 playing ranger most times before. However, after my first race ever using witch, I had at least 2 more races where I didn't do as well, even though I cleared more [percentage of] levels and monsters in the last 4-6 zones. Because the champion mobs and general pack size was weaker, I wasn't able to get as much exp overall.

If this is to be a competitive race, there needs to be some way to eliminate the varying pack RNG. Something like making each level have the same total overall exp for monsters or just something that balances the amount of exp you can gain for each level. This combined with shortening the race will allow competitive racers to have to optimize when to descend to the next level and how much to kill before moving on. A suggestion would be to make it somewhat like the Sins 2 layout have have guaranteed blue packs at each corner, but players would have to decide if it's worth it to take the time to kill those mobs or go to the next level for higher level mobs. In the end, since you aren't going to be able to full clear everything, there's actually some "skill" and decision-making involved that's not in D:C currently.

Keep in mind that shorter the race - more impact of grav kill on overall result will be. And what's more important - the less time you have => less GEAR you acquire => less resists and worse weapon you have. So the RNG will have MUCH more impact on acquiring this items. And if casters are only need one-two pieces of gear with fire resist to kill grav/lighting res to safe and fast farming last zone, melee will be totally screwed. I cant imagine how people will kill grav in 40 min race and now much RNG on resists and hp they will need to be able to kill him, because even now its pretty hard to do. Same to every class that needs weapon and gear to kill him and don't have good resist nodes. Probably even on marauder it is not that easy - best racers can die at grav as marauder, while on witch you can kill him with your eyes closed.

So for example the sig ladder for duelist will probably look like this:
guy_who_got_lucky_and_got_insane_gear_and_killed_grav
guy_who_farmed_last_zone_and_got_insane_density_who_dont_even_tried_to_kill_grav
guy_who_farmed_last_zone_and_got_insane_density_but_died_at_grav

And witch ladder:
guy_with_perfect_density_killed_grav_at_last_microsecond
guy_with_perfect_density_killed_grav_at_last_second
guy_with_perfect_density_killed_grav_at_last_ten_seconds

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ctcsback wrote:

If this is to be a competitive race, there needs to be some way to eliminate the varying pack RNG.

why isnt this an issue in past signature races? hypothetically, if we took similar paths in a fix seed race and ran similar times the person who ran into the most blue packs would win. more so i could run times that were slightly worse than yours but because i ran into crazy blue packs i would more than likely come out ahead.

i think this issue is pretty complicated and dont know if there is an easy response. people want to remove the random aspect of the races because it will equalize the field and therefore make skill more relevant. but this would hinge on the fact that your ability to mitigate RNG is not a skill.

-HeaT

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Dreggon wrote:

Is Witch still bad in Descent-type races? I did one Descent race with a witch and it was awful.

Sorry, but Witch is very good for races, especially Descent.

I don't understand why you feel you must try to cater to some people by increasing the frequency of these "decent" type races and drastically shortening races in general. If there was reward incentive to race again, unlike season 7, people would be motivated to race for reasons other than the love of the sport. Wouldn't it be better if the non super-competitive people raced because they were working towards a nice reward instead of people saying, "well I dont really like to race, but decent champions is the least boring for me so I do that one more often". By now I had expected you to raise the bar with interesting race options like backwards racing where you start at dominus and work backwards to hillock, something out of the box. You've added tons of race mods that can make racing almost painful and completely disable some builds/starting gems (FBLAMT) but this doesnt do much for the replayability, it just makes it harder.

The moves you've made up to the end of season 7 have discouraged build diversity in racing, the best you've done is with giving everyone all starting gems in endless ledge. This quickly turns soley to rng/race ability and not decision making as you get no guaranteed supports in endless ledge and how well you do is almost completely decided by rng of support drops. Why wouldn't you allow more build diversity in races when for whatever reason you allow fotm (flavor of the month) gems to be completely overpowered (flameblast) in competitive play.

You've succeeded in testing our ability with low level builds that have limited diversity. When you're picking from a handful of gems with only enough time to pick a few points from the build options become slimmer and slimmer. Theres no race without xp where you play on an endless ledge type map where it counts kills for a winner, with possibly full clear bonuses for level. We've had no race experiences similar to The Coward's Trial map where its a survive the waves event. We had fixed seed, why not a mod where every mob is a champion?

Personally I feel decent champions is the second most boring repetitive race, after endless ledge.

Please give out worthwhile season rewards and give us some more innovative races, like decent champions was before you hosted it hundreds and hundreds of times. I thought decent champions was the tip of the iceberg for unique races, not the new norm.

Yes!!! This will make me start racing again. Thank you!

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HeaT1 wrote:

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ctcsback wrote:

If this is to be a competitive race, there needs to be some way to eliminate the varying pack RNG.

why isnt this an issue in past signature races? hypothetically, if we took similar paths in a fix seed race and ran similar times the person who ran into the most blue packs would win. more so i could run times that were slightly worse than yours but because i ran into crazy blue packs i would more than likely come out ahead.

i think this issue is pretty complicated and dont know if there is an easy response. people want to remove the random aspect of the races because it will equalize the field and therefore make skill more relevant. but this would hinge on the fact that your ability to mitigate RNG is not a skill.

-HeaT

Sorry if it's not clear, but D:C, like endless ledge has the high variance pack/rng problems (and item rng problems as jstq pointed out) because you cannot reset zones. You only get one zone and whatever monster spawns you get from that zone is what you have to live with. The issue here is that regardless of how good the first half of the race is, if you get crappy packs at the end of the race when you actually focus on clearing as much as possible, the one with the best pack rng will win (especally in the current D:C where the top 10 players basically full clear every inner halls).

One way of fixing this is reducing the time limit. Players can't just full clear the last 5 zones and have 5+ minutes to go waiting in nexus (sigh, yes that happened to me). Now you have to decide when to progress, or when to farm exp, but eventually people will realize which zones will be more beneficial, etc.

What I'm saying is that there needs to be more balance in the champion pack rng, which obviously isn't a easy issue to resolve, but it should be more balanced if possible. There actually was a fixed seed run where I got about 5x docks in a row, each around 5-8 blue packs, and ended up winning the race (by almost a level) even though I was in 2nd place up to docks. Fixed seed races get to reset zones, and on average, doing enough instances will eventually reduce the variance enough to balance out. The reason why it's not always the best pack rng who wins is because certain builds are stronger/weaker at certain stages, and item/vendor rng can affect how fast you progress (ms boots, +1 wands). Vendor RNG is out of the picture in D:C, and with the change of layouts (freezing chamber), everyone SHOULD have 20 ms boots after freezing chamber.

And sorry, I shouldn't have said "eliminate". Obviously, that is impossible and some variance is tolerable, but the devs should have at least tested it so that the winner currently isn't the one with the best pack rng in inner halls. Their decision to reduce the time for the race somewhat mitigates the issue, but doesn't actually resolve the real problem. Also, why not add more zones instead of reducing the time. The D:C races last season got a bit stale in all honesty.