Oh, I missed 3 leagues, not 2. So I don't know the Atlas changes either. Bah!

I expect tons of **** from 3.9 and 3.10 to be obsolete in 3.11, but for different reasons for each. The cluster jewels are absolutely amazing and also totally broken as is. About the only fix likely to rein them in reasonably well is to make it so that any one notable can only be allocated once. As they are now, if you aren't abusing stacked cluster jewels (heralds, but also war cries and a few others), you are either doing it wrong, or you are abusing archmage with storm brand, which also figures to be gutted. So, the 3.10 meta is mostly builds that won't exist in 3.11, but there is also no way cluster jewels are removed from the game entirely, so 3.11 is still likely to have people trying to abuse cluster jewels as best they can, but in new ways. Certain archetypes will surely still exist, but it's hard to say what will actually rise from the ashes of the mass nerfs that are about to rain down.

Oh and the atlas changes are massive, but they're pretty good, and as of 3.10, they are pretty easy to figure out based on in game tool tips, except for the Sirus fight, which comes out of nowhere, has tons of mechanics you have never seen before, and they for some dumb reason force your camera to zoom in for the fight, making it artificially tougher to track the guy teleporting around the arena for no good reason, when the best way to stay alive is to stay close to him. And if you die once, there's a good chance you have either bricked the fight or you get killed from off screen on your way back in. And there's also a chance of hitting a bug that results in Sirus teleporting you to a certain, unavoidable death. You will want to watch some youtoobz before running it the first time.

Cool, thanks. It makes sense that I lean the mechanics of the leagues and so on then, but probably to ignore the passive tree changes for now. I can presumably learn atlas changes from standard too.

Or you can just play the game and figure things out on your own over a few days, shouldn't be tough and will contribute to fun. That's what I'd do. Not sure if I'm coming back, still have been playing Diablo 2 recently and got into Terraria which is still keeping me occupied. I missed enough leagues to jump back in though and have plenty of fun with new things.

Pff, if I don't have a spreadsheet of what to do in advance of the league, it's not fun!

The main reason to study the Sirus fight is that in the old days of the the Uber Elder being the end fight, if you lose, you could just buy another set of frags, or run four maps. For Sirus, you will have to run another 30 or so maps to respawn him.

Yuck, but now I have to redo all the low tier maps, half of which I don't have.

Animal Crossing!

League mechanic looks like it might be pretty tedious but I've been wrong before about how fun the league mechanic will be.

Two-hander + Slam + Warcry changes look very promising though. Also new brands, I can see brands being good vs the league mechanic since you can precast them before opening the seeds. Arcanist Brand triggering linked spells in sequence especially could lead to some interesting options.

Hopefully they learn from previous mistakes, Bestiary comes to mind, annoying when it was on but implemented in the game afterwards quite well

They are at least out in front of the biggest mistakes from Synthesis, that you have apparently lots of room to put seeds, you don't even have to plant them to store them, and you don't have to interact with the grown ones until you want to. I think the biggest risk is that while you don't have to think too hard to interact with the mechanic, there may be a cavernous gap in reward level between plant-and-go vs. meticulous farming that forces you to be meticulous. I do think it's interesting that the rewards are crafting uses rather than massive loot vomits that were the hallmarks of Legion, Blight, Metamorph and Delirium.

well, I downloaded PoE again, played a bit (just until Brutus), got super excited about coming back so I'm definitely coming back for Harvest. The game seems so much different a prettier, but that's probably I played diablo 2 too much recently.

lol @ announcing a bunch of buffs to 2h melee, and then adding nerfs to compensate, and also nerfing all melee in multiple ways, notably dual wield. General's Cry and Infernal Cry are at least facially cool enough to keep the meta from looking quite as warped as Synthesis, when no one bothered with the bottom half of the tree, but I'm still leaning at going with the Necro spellslinger.

I just want to know if it's possible to make General's Cry into a viable main skill. Cyclone - CWC - Desecrate - Unearth to create 20 corpses, 24 by annointing the new Undertaker notable. And then a 6-link General's Cry with whatever the highest damage attack is. There's 141% Warcry Cooldown Recovery Speed available on the tree which puts the cooldown to 3.3 seconds. You can get another 20% from belts, 15% from boots and 45% from 2-hand Axes. Let's say we get to 200% overall, that makes the cooldown 2.7 seconds. Making Second Wind one of the 6 links is also an option.

It's not clear you need CwC - desecrate. The demo vid never showed more than 5 mirage attackers, and GC doesn't consume corpses, so one desecrate gets you there. The updated rallying cry caps its effectiveness at 35 power, but I don't see any indication if that's the same for General's. I guess we'll see later today what the power cap is for General's, assuming there is one. Self-cast desecrate may be enough, or maybe skipping unearth.

But if you can get to ~2 attacks per second slamming yourself, (5/2.7) = 1.8 doesn't look all that great, especially since it's at the cost of a link relative to regular attacks. You'd need 6 attackers, or some really sweet exertion/power bonuses, which are TBD.

Yeah I can't wait to see the gem reveal, a lot depends on how many Warriors it can generate. In addition to the 6th link there's also opportunity cost from all the passive points invested into Warcry Cooldown Recovery Speed that could go into damage.

I'm still interested in just slamming myself but it seems like optimal play style might include different Warcries which is a lot of different button pressing in addition to flasks and other stuff that you do.

Yeah, it's really hard to scale the damage of the warriors on the tree, too, since they're not minions, so you don't double dip on Spiritual Aid.

That 30% less is pretty bad for General's Cry, as is 5 capped warriors, unless that goes up to 6 with a corruption. If it takes an empower to also get to 6, it's not going to be good, but maybe a corruption and a +skills on weapon? Still, it seems like they made the conscious decision to have it be worse than just slamming yourself.

Infernal cry looks like it more or less delivers on its promises, but you probably have to support Combust to make it good.

Seismic cry looks like the winner here, especially if you invest into exerted attacks on the tree.

Arcanist brand looks awful.

... guess still storm brand for me.

On the bright side General's Cry only has a 4 second cooldown, so that would be 1.3 seconds at 200% Recovery Speed.

Oh, I didn't realize your earlier calculation was based on a longer cooldown than that. 5/1.3 * 0.7 = 2.7 effective APS, which is, well, obamanotbad.png.

Now to decide what to play... I hate that part. I usually don't repeat my builds and I missed out on a few leagues so I want to do something relatively proven, I narrowed down my choices to:
VD Spellslinger
Summoner
BL miner (will I even enjoy it)?

There are many cool builds that I already done in the past, so I feel a bit limited. Don't want to go any melee because I'm worried about eventual prices and I assume melee is still "inferior" for people who are not mathil.

Just noticed that Zizaran uploaded a video yesterday about the "INSANE Starter Build" and it's VD Spellslinger... maybe not a good idea then if everybody will be playing it. Build is capable of doing everything so I guess the endgame items will be awfully expensive. If BL Miner feels not satisfying to play I guess I should play a summoner once... :O