MXL 2017 first impressions

It's no secret that I have some very critical opinions on this build, despite having thrown in my 2 cents countless times.

The "no resistances til terror" thing didn't pan out at all. I get gibbed by poison orb skeletons and instagibbed by radament himself, inner cloister vampires, cogs will just eat some new toons alive. Vampiress outside of crystaline passage do so much damage that it's simply unacceptable.

Many skills feel weak damage, like Steel Fur Titans lolwalking through the eyes of Black Hole sin spell, just to 2 shot you. I was straight up instagibbed by the fire from the chest in Maggot Lair, not to mention the poison inside it.

Tran is simply bad. No way around this. Zons do ridiculous damage to you even after maxing dr rings, and the priestesses themselves will instagib you with a single phalanx, not to mention their Tremor, which will slice 90% of your hp instantly.

Lc2 change was just such a bad choice in design.

Giftbox change was just fixing something that wasn't broken.

This patch needs a lot of work, and I really think you guys need to hotfix this asap. I know the times are stressful for devs, but I say all of this purely for my long time love for Median; this patch is not fun.

I'm not sure if it's just my build, but i feel like terror balance is completely out of whack.

I'm currently playing a Melee barbarian with the following stats:

Level 83
Full TU6 gear (+2x RW)
75 all resist on terror (85 fire)
3300 hp
~45% DR (Bear stance)
~55k Defense.

My damage is just fine, and i kill with a decent speed, but my survivability, which should be just fine with these stats, sucks big time.

I have currently progressed to Act 5 terror (With great difficulty), but if i encounter more than a few monsters, then they can completely wreck me in seconds. This is even more true in act 4/5 with gigantic packs of elite monsters all over the place.

I also have to agree with pretty much everything that Heathen said in the post above mine.

that's quite strange . i am at the moment in act 2 sewers at the same level (/players 8 all the way) and i'm starting to be afraid to overlevel and miss LC 2 , same t6 full gear + 1 rw as melee paladin . it's all going smooth , drinking heal pots from time to time when losim + lak + regen from apples and vindicate is not enough to keep the life bulb full) . level 83 , 3.4k hp , 80k defence , 10% DR from jitan kamon , 75% all resist but i think i will start socketing pgems soon to get at least 80% .

are you using tslam for crowd controll? gear and skillplan ? my barbarian (snake+eagle) finished hatred at level 68 with crap gear with no problem . i believe it can do even better than the pally on terror and forward .

you must be doing something wrong imo

indeed hatred was "easy mode" , but terror is just how it's supposed to be .

i agree that going from 2-shoting stuff to getting 2-shot can indeed f-ck up peoples minds . there's a big gap between the 2 difficulties , but : consider hatred as an introduction difficulty , for new players to understand what's it all about , and terror where the real and accurate difficulty starts . i believe there will be a lot of new joiners that will hit a wall/get all confused as you did ..

i believe you where used to tank anything on hatred and the fact that you can't tank much in terror overwhelmed you. don't be rambo and dont rush into packs . take slow steps and use crowd controll skills .

good luck !

ChuckNoRis wrote:that's quite strange . i am at the moment in act 2 sewers at the same level (/players 8 all the way) and i'm starting to be afraid to overlevel and miss LC 2 , same t6 full gear + 1 rw as melee paladin . it's all going smooth , drinking heal pots from time to time when losim + lak + regen from apples and vindicate is not enough to keep the life bulb full) . level 83 , 3.4k hp , 80k defence , 10% DR from jitan kamon , 75% all resist but i think i will start socketing pgems soon to get at least 80% .

are you using tslam for crowd controll? gear and skillplan ? my barbarian (snake+eagle) finished hatred at level 68 with crap gear with no problem . i believe it can do even better than the pally on terror and forward .

you must be doing something wrong imo

indeed hatred was easy mode , but terror is just how it's supposed to be .

Do you really have to flex your massive epeen?

You're delusional if you think any one of the enemies I listed are in a good spot. I will record and hand deliver all the bullshit spots if i'm merely asked to, for the sake of getting this mess fixed.

Sure, you could probs bs cheese with mercs/ ranged chars, but melee is as worse off (and moreso) than it's ever been.

i'm sorry you seam to have trouble ,but i play 7 builds in paralel (one for each class) , 5 of them melee , and got no problem (untwinked )

Well, then grats. But hatred was specifically designed to help new players understand median, and I can see very ironically that this is actually more difficult than before.

when your toon fights cogs, poison orb skeletons, radament, onyx knights, djinn, heretics in durance, cruciators, mindflayers in sanctuary, gets hit by diablos bloodstorm, firebloods, silverbolts, first baal wave minions, cloud lords, mutilators, vamps near crystalline, tran zons, tran priestesses, and then dies;

Just remember this conversation.

Started a Spirit barb, Just done Athulua challenge.
-Good Shamanic trance replacement with Manifestation, now Spirit barb won't have to wait until lvl 90 to shine. Dumb everything to strength and you are good to go, your minion get stronger and stronger as you progress through the game (best)
-3 types of Spirit at once is really nice and my dream for so long, perfect.
-I see so much more potential for Stampede, in last version, its only used for spreading poison (and therefore if you want it, you have to go snake stance). Now it become a new attack skill for Throw barb, and you can use it with any stance except Bear.

I think I will go with Wolf for max attack speed on minion and get that new Aura Spirit to get rainbow damage for my barb team.

I will stay at the back, throw Stampede and be happy :mrgreen:

Im waiting next pacthe with
"no corpse"
auto-identify
native skill: town portal

I like the damage tweaks and difficulty rework so far, however it feels like some mobs have slipped through the difficulty check.
Corruptor Warlocks deal tremendous amounts of damage compared to everything else around them, Globbers are absurdly tanky compared to everything else in the area, those zombies that release Haunting Banshee on death will shred you apart if you kill too many of them at once.
Those hunting banshees pretty much one shot my Bat Strike army where as everything else didn't even seem to touch them.
Gravediggers in River of Flame and Chaos Sanctuarium pretty much one shot you with their projectiles if you don't have a decent life pool by then (by decent I mean 1.5k+).
Those are just a few examples of mobs that seem out of line, pretty sure there are a few more that I missed.
Whats more of a problem to me with this patch is that some of the unique monster encounters in Terror (Griswold, The Smith.. etc) are way harder than the act boss itself.
Shower of Rocks almost instantly kills you if you don't walk out of it (you almost have to anticipate it), the avoid has been extremely problematic too.
Actually had to skip The Smith because I couldn't get enough def on my melee necro to fight him, the fact that he curses you with amp damage and no healing paired with his absurd attack speed and massive blows makes him a more formidable opponent than everything else I've seen so far in this patch.

Re-introducing the original questlines with all the coresponding areas is nice, it always felt like a huge chunk of the game was missing which is now finally in this mod.

Removing the Special Box from T Gris is something I don't understand, it was always a nice source of getting good runes for runeswords for me.
Instead of removing it entirely I would have liked it to be tweaked a bit to not hand out too ridiculous rewards.

Gold, gold, gold, gold, gold... The automatic gold pickup is phenomenal, but doesn't help the fact that there is an insane gold shortage in the early stages of your playthrough. Dying costs too much gold, and to be fair, most people die a lot. It is really difficult finding enough resources to deck yourself out with mystic orbs and tie up the loose ends of your character that way (MOs are way too expensive imo). Not to mention the revive cost of your mercenary gets more and more absurd as you move on.

The character changes are really nice so far and I am enjoying the new possibilities for every character.

Not sure if I forgot to mention anything else.. so to sum it all up:
TLDR Most of the changes this patch have had a positive impact on playing experience, however there seem to be some loose ends here and there.. not sure if it's due to improper amounts of testing of just an oversight. Would love some more tweaking regarding some monsters, I do like challenges but if something sticks out way too much it just feels odd. Can't speak for any of the Ubers yet, but I missed the Lvl5 Challenge Charm for the utility it provided early on. Overall great patch but has a few flaws which I hope will be ironed out at some point.

I'm having fun while leveling, there is definitely a lot of changes, with all the new lower numbers, game feels interesting again.
Fact that you can't just mo everything to max, and easily deck yourself with t6 uniques by farming boxes is good too. I mean you still can get uniques, but it will cost you more time. And getting rid of rerolling rare rings - great change. Now you have the incentive to actually pick them up.. After old honorific all res item bullshit, now you suddenly must look at resist stat on items. That part of gearing up process practically didn't exist because you could cover that for entire leveling process, in a2 hatred by creating honorific.
I'm enjoying this so far, despite fact that "tank barb" build I like to level with got sort of nerfed (at least in the learly game).
Build that uses blood hatred to heal, ww to move/add poison, and sor to aoe spread the poison. (it still sux lategame for farming, too small aoe, but for leveling it is cool).
- bh is turned to normal attack type from double swing, you can use it with 2h weapon, but with dw now, it hits 1x not twice, so for dw it charges up/heals half as fast as before
- sor is 85% damage from pre patch 150%, which is almost half the deeps

But it still works and is fine so no worries.