d3 Community Perception of the Season 21 Buff

[Stan 5,240]

Season 21 is live for more than 48 hours, and the community reacts to the Seasonal buff that makes your character periodically channel an elemental power that unleashes into the environment.

If you haven't had the chance to catch up with the latest news, Season 21 just started and with it came a new Seasonal power that makes your character do all sorts of stuff like breath lightning, rain meteors from the skies around you, release twisters of energy, and more.

(Source)

• The elements have deemed you worthy. With you as their champion, the burning hells will face the Trials of Tempests!
  • Your character will occasionally (every 90 seconds) channel an elemental power which unleashes into the environment for a limited time:
    • Meteors rain from the skies around you.
    • Breathe lightning.
    • A wall of flame engulfs everything.
    • Release twisters of pure energy.
    • Crush your foes under the weight of rolling snowballs.

The community perception of the latest Season 12 buff is all but positive. A Reddit thread titled "How did this seasonal effect make it past PTR?" has surfaced and accumulated more than 300 upvotes and we are highlighting the biggest concerns player have with the new Season theme:

• Apparently, the graphic effects make it nearly impossible to see what's going on, making it extremely frustrating for Hardcore players. If you fight Orlash and get the breath, it is difficult to determine where to stand.

Card

• The sound that comes with it is obnoxious and distracts from gameplay and it cannot be turned off, Redditor stealth_elephant says.
• The third main concern is power. Many Redditors claim that it is good enough for ending massacres, but mediocre when it comes to killing enemies.

Card

On the other side of the spectrum, Wudi provides enough perspective on both ends. He discovered that it is much easier to kill Rift Guardians now with the Season 21 buff in a group where you get 10,000 stack to virtually one-shot it.

What has your experience been with the Season 21 buff so far?

[Alkasar 55]

I am currently thinking about replaying Dungeon Siege 1 and 2 again. Maybe this season is another pass for me. At least on PC.

Might give it a try during travels on my Switch.

Edited July 5, 2020 by Alkasar
typo

[Koxsos 38]

Well, it definitelly adds to the clutter and it can overlap with select mechanics and in solo play does not feel overly strong + kinda forces you to be facing in a specific direction in case of the lightning breath, which is not always doable for let's say any strafing DH build right now.
I mean it's nice but I guess I am more fan of the passive buffs. I mean the entire buff is sort of unexplained as to how much does it scale, with what, what happens when, why and what not and that is overly eh. Does it scale better with sets that increase all damage rather than specific ability damage? How would I know?

[Yojiro 30]

From my experience I either don't notice it exists at all (either visually or damage wise) or it makes it near impossible to see what's happening and still feels like it accomplishes almost nothing, so yeah it's kinda like not having a season effect at all or just a slight handicap every now and again, maybe it will feel different when I go up much higher with GRs.

[Grizz801 0]

With all the nasty flashes, the theme should be changed to “The Season of Seizures.”

[solitha 84]

It changes the lighting unpredictably... sometimes our screens have gone nearly black without warning. It seems to fire randomly without respect to the cooldown. And... how do you manage it? What makes it seem more or less powerful? What's the counter on the buff? I think some of those questions are answered by the video linked above, but I can't play it right now ><

And fighting Belial when you have green meteors raining down... ugh.

I know there were a lot of issues with it and I was wondering what they were going to do to fix it before it went live. It really felt like they didn't fix anything at all.

[SidonisAntares 290]

Definitely seeing an FPS drop when these go off, doesn't seem like it was integrated very smoothly compared to past visual indicators like the power circles.

[SidonisAntares 290]

19 hours ago, Stan said:

 

On the other side of the spectrum, Wudi provides enough perspective on both ends. He discovered that it is much easier to kill Rift Guardians now with the Season 21 buff in a group where you get 10,000 stack to virtually one-shot it.

What has your experience been with the Season 21 buff so far?

Title of the video seems a bit arrogant, given the facing/triggering issues of the seasonal buff and you're kinda SOL if you don't have an RGK and you miss the RG with the buff proc. Also depends on taking advantage of what could be considered exploiting a bug or unintended feature, since it relies on staying several screens apart from someone in your group in order to keep stacking one of the buff counters. Also not realistic to have players separated that far in a meta push.

Edited July 6, 2020 by SidonisAntares

[Bubble181 14]

20 hours ago, solitha said:

It changes the lighting unpredictably... sometimes our screens have gone nearly black without warning. It seems to fire randomly without respect to the cooldown. And... how do you manage it? What makes it seem more or less powerful? What's the counter on the buff? I think some of those questions are answered by the video linked above, but I can't play it right now ><

And fighting Belial when you have green meteors raining down... ugh.

I know there were a lot of issues with it and I was wondering what they were going to do to fix it before it went live. It really felt like they didn't fix anything at all.

 

The power is based off the buff counter, which is the number of enemies killed since the last proc. Kill 20 enemies since the last proc, do completely useless piddly bits of damage. Rack up a 300 kill streak, and get the lightning or meteors, and watch everything just melt away. Haven't found any sort of good calculation or formula, though. No idea how much it scales with your own sheet damage or effective damage (though it seems to). 

I've also seen it proc seemingly half-way through its cooldown, no idea how or why though. Can't watch the video now either since I'm at work. And yeah, I owe at least 2 deaths to Belial to the green meteors, they suck ?

What they fixed was that these seasonal buff effects now don't proc other stuff and don't take into account Area Damage. It was too easy to get to 100+% Area Damage, and have the meteors or the lightning completely destro everything. They could also proc a whole bunch of on-hit modifiers, which was also massively overpowering them.

 

I'm not a huge fan of the mechanic, either, though I do understand they don't want to simply make a meta-breaking theme every season - this one's fairly passive and calm, compared to the last season which completely changed half the builds and created completely overpowered combinations.

 

[solitha 84]

On 7/7/2020 at 2:58 AM, Bubble181 said:

 

The power is based off the buff counter, which is the number of enemies killed since the last proc. Kill 20 enemies since the last proc, do completely useless piddly bits of damage. Rack up a 300 kill streak, and get the lightning or meteors, and watch everything just melt away. Haven't found any sort of good calculation or formula, though. No idea how much it scales with your own sheet damage or effective damage (though it seems to). 

I've also seen it proc seemingly half-way through its cooldown, no idea how or why though. Can't watch the video now either since I'm at work. And yeah, I owe at least 2 deaths to Belial to the green meteors, they suck ?

What they fixed was that these seasonal buff effects now don't proc other stuff and don't take into account Area Damage. It was too easy to get to 100+% Area Damage, and have the meteors or the lightning completely destro everything. They could also proc a whole bunch of on-hit modifiers, which was also massively overpowering them.

 

I'm not a huge fan of the mechanic, either, though I do understand they don't want to simply make a meta-breaking theme every season - this one's fairly passive and calm, compared to the last season which completely changed half the builds and created completely overpowered combinations.

 

Thanks for the explanation, it's nice to actually know.

Did the changes they made to area/proc change the potential for a zdps build to rock the charts? Last I heard that was still in place after the last round of nerfs. Then the PTR went down and the season went live.

[Zelendel 9]

I wonder if they know that most people play with the game sounds turned down or even off so they can communicate with their team.  So the sounds mean less then nothing. \

 

As for not being able to see where you are going. That is normal for my builds anyway. You cant see anything on the screen when I play except lightning every where.