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Mod 20, part1 - The Good, The Bad and the rest
adinosii
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 4,294 Arc User
Well, I typically post my short summary for every mod...so time for this one....but it is a pretty short one.
Good
- The Forest Guardian headpieces (+5% damage in Sharandar) are probably BiS for DPSers in Sharandar. They are also usable by tanks.
- The Forest Guardian footwear (CA 7500) is quite decent for DPS and Tanks.
- The Star (Sparkling Fey) Artifact set is DPS focused, and is an obvious upgrade from the Demogorgon set. It might also be usable by healers.
- The Diamond Artifact set is Tank focused. The stat bonus is a bit odd...I would have expected this set to have +4 CON, instead of the DPS set - it looks almost as if their stats got partially swapped by accident.
- One of the Weathered Wood shirts might be decent for healers, but it is just a minor upgrade from an existing shirt.
Mediocre
- If you are for example a new L80 with 20K, rejoice! You will get upscaled to the point where you should be able to handle the content almost as well as someone who has spent years building a maxed-out character. The person with the maxed-out character might feel somewhat demotivated, though.
- It takes a VERY short time to reach the weekly limit for the campaign currency. That's fine if you want just to get it over with and go somewhere else, but if you are done with the other campaigns and the new one just takes up two hours per week, what do you do then? Spend your gaming time doing old content over and over, or find some other game?
- The Forest Guardian body armor might be good for Tanks, and perhaps situationally for others if there are places where capping Awareness is critical.
- The Companion gear pieces have high stats, and may be useful for balancing builds. However, they only have s aingle runestone slot, so if you are using a combat companion and Indomitable runestones, forget them.
- The "green" pants and shirts may be desirable for the apperance library, but they are not worth wearing, due to the lack of bonuses.
- The "Crone" gear is basically copies of older gear with slightly higher stats. Not recommended, except as a stepping stone. However, as they are available for seals, they are very easy to obtain.
- I am a bit mystified by the Weathered Wood pieces. 3 out of 4 of the armor pieces give a Power bonus, which might have been desirable before, but that's really not the case any more. The bonuses are basically cut-n-pasted from earlier sets, and while the items have a higher IL, they are probably not worth wearing in scaled content, as they will just reduce the percentages for some of the harder-to-get stats, like incoming/outgoing healing. In unscaled content, sure, those pieces are usable if you don't have something better.
Bad
- The content in part 1 is limited, and quite frankly, a bit boring, unlike the original Sharandar. Hopefully that will change once the dungeon opens up.
- The Forest Guardian arm pieces are not worth using by anyone. Many better alternatives are available.
- The grind for diamonds to obtain the artifact set is tedious and boring.
- The Weathered Wood trouses all have the same, useless bonus.
- None of the Forest Guardian pieces seem designed with healers in mind.
- We lost the Arcane Reservoir - one oof my favourite areas in the game and I am not optimistic we will get anything with a similar "fun" factor.
So, in short:
- If you are a healer, this is not a great Mod for you. This is kind-of sad, because when the flexibility was reduced, hybrid builds were killed off and everyone was forced into DPS/Heal/Tank, role, one would have expected that all the roles would get similar attention. Sadly, that is not the case.
- If you are a DPS or a Tank, then yes, there are some pieces you might want so log in for a couple of hours per week to progress in the campaign, until the dungeon opens up.
- If you are gearing up, then yes, this might be a module for you. Get some gear, then open your wallet and get some mythic mounts and companions and you are good to go.
- I kept revisiting the old Sharandar, in particular the Arcane Reservoir over and over after I was done with the campaign. I don't see myself doing the same thing here.
Hoping for improvements...
7
Comments
I dont want the 5% damage in Sharandar, i dont want the accuracy, the CA or whatever else.
I want awareness, defense, deflect, crit avoidance. These are the stats i need to survive.
The bosses in the dungeons wont look at me and say "oh look, the tank that sits in front of me has high CA and damage, better i run". He would probably think "this fool has low defensive stats. Smack him".
Mod 20 is bad for tanks. Combat rework was bad for tanks. Mod 19 was kinda decent, we got a few tank gear pieces like the wisps of the shadow demon. Other than these, since mod 16, tanks have seen no love at all.
By the way, damage resistance doesnt work. Tested and reported. Dont know if they will ever fix it though.
I can tell you though how i tested it and what i tested.
I went into TOMM solo and let halaster hit me a few times and got the damage charts, i was sure to remove anything that would give me any resistances or any stats during combat.
After that i started going in using different things that give damage resistance and again got the damage charts.
Then i calculated the damage percentage that was mitigated on each hit.
Lastly i compared them, the percentage mitigation as well the numbers before and after mitigation.
All numbers were almost identical (some times there were some differences of 2k damage but thats not much considering the damage of the boss) and, mind you, some of the things i tested were giving a lot of resistance, enough to notice even if you were to just look at the numbers.
The things i tested were the Frozen Galeb Durh equip power which gives up to 5% damage resistance on legendary, the Ring of the overwhelmed +5 which gives 10% damage resistance while running, the Paladin encounter Absolution which gives 20% damage resistance and the Elemental Earth weapon set which gives up to 25% damage resistance when fully stacked (i made sure to have it fully stacked before i got hit).
For all of them and without any damage resistance, all the numbers were almost identical. AKA damage resistance doesnt work.
You did keep Combat logs I hope? In my pen testing (last preview build) ring of the overwhelmed is 100% WAI
I didnt. Im not a professional tester and im not really willing to spend the time and effort to test anything to the extreme.
Maybe the Ring of the Overwhelmed worked and im wrong, idk.
What i know is that when i go in with zero resistances and get the same numbers in the combat log with when i go in with 20% or even 45% damage resistance (absolution+earthern) there is something wrong.
I made a post in the forums. If anyone wants to test things better they are free to do it.
What i know is i will keep complaining about it until i go in and see the numbers changed when i use damage reduction or until someone explains to me that im wrong and it works perfectly fine.
When I go to a restaurant, I expect the chef to cook my food, not bring it to me half cooked and then ask what my opinion is and what it is missing. I will walk out and NEVER come back.
1) As always, the scenery. Redesigned trolls are ok but pointless. Redcaps were fine as they were and just look like mushrooms now.
2) New transmutes are nice.
The bad:
1) Foremost, the obnoxious grinding of HEs just to get a chance to get something from the RNG. THIS IS A GAME, NOT A FULL TIME JOB. Just make the diamond's blessing a random drop from RNGs and let us buy artifacts from the campaign store like we've been doing since AI. Quit infesting everything with a hostile RNG.
2) New trolls and cyclopses are kind of zombie looking actually. They move in a really stiff, dead way like something that broke into the game from 1993. Do they even have eyes?
3) 40k IL gates are obnoxious and pointless, especially for strongholds. Aren't we supposed to be able to actually play our alts?
4) What's the point of the 100/week limit? I finish for the week in 45 minutes. Just let us earn more and use it to buy artifacts from the campaign store instead of facing a boring and frustrating HE grind.
5) Give us some way to trade in obsolete campaign currencies
6) You forgot to take old Sharandar off the legacy campaign quests.
7) New gear is one step forward and two steps back, as usual.
8) I'm just going to go ahead and guess that the Vault of Stars is full of too many unskippable cut scenes, obnoxious damage soaks to test the healer and tank, and all the boss encounter mechanics are the same tired, exclusionary OP control and instadeath garbage we've been dealing with since Ras Nisi and watching get worse and worse with every new release (and by the way, you really need to re-nerf that encounter).
You can do this at the antiquities scholar. I found it by chance.... You have to scroll across the top menu.