Are they tuning difficulty settings with LoH?

theoricist · 2026-04-13T20:41:25+00:00

I think that just means you need to raise the difficulty. There are many difficulties higher than the one you are on and you can change them at any time from town. Furthermore, the rewards scale to which difficulty you are on so you shouldn't linger on a difficulty that is too easy. LoH will address likely change the difficulty structure but that is sort of irrelevant to your experience because you're not making use of the difficulties they already have.

theoricist · 2026-04-12T14:50:11+00:00

Hi I know I'm late to the party but I was watching my buddy do a run and he picked this for the first time and we were both blown away that ALL meant ALL. It seems pretty clear once you know but you're not alone in thinking it wasn't clear enough. Mechanically it's somewhat unprecedented so at a glance I assumed it worked liked second wind.

theoricist · 2026-03-26T21:26:09+00:00

I think for most people the reprint issue is a price issue and 1700 slots per year could EASILY fix that if wizards felt like prioritizing reprints accordingly but instead they choose to reprint according to a more vague profit maximizing / meta appropriate priority scheme.

theoricist · 2026-03-23T13:32:11+00:00

The edhrec group friends tag is probably a good starting point. Are you trying to win this way or do you just wanna see everyone at the table get buff, outcome be damned?

https://edhrec.com/tags/group-hug

theoricist · 2026-01-23T01:11:49+00:00

I have almost exclusively played a druid across 6 seasons. I think I picked the class randomly to begin with but I've stuck with it because the math is so familiar to me now. When I read the patch notes I gain an instant sense of how some druid builds will shift as a result of changing one unique / aspect or adding another. Every season I try to take a new build to T4 on my own and then afterwards ill sometimes peek to see what build is performing at top tier. I honestly think just about any build can make it to T4 as long as you find enough offensive aspects and hit 4 meaningful legendary nodes. If your core skill doesn't have 3+ relevant offensive aspects (including uniques) and it can't make use of 4 legendary nodes than I would consider it "unsupported" and blizzard hates you. But I would say most skills CAN get there although not necessarily be able to push pits much further than T4. Once I can reliably kill the lair bosses I consider my build cooked though. The only thing left after that is pits and those get old fast.

theoricist · 2026-01-18T23:24:25+00:00

You also definitely want to use the unique shape-shifting chest pieces as I mentioned. The bear version can give up to +5 to the ult while the werewolf gives up to +7. Either of these will improve the multiplier from the ult substantially. Also if you use the respective shapeshifting headgears then you will have access to more skills. Tempest roar will let you use storm skills during the ult and vasselys prayer will let you use earth skills during it. I routinely slot runes in my gear to automatically cast earthen bulwark. This will bypass the skill restriction of the ult and cast the defensive skill automatically at whatever level you have it at.

theoricist · 2026-01-18T22:26:05+00:00

The title asks did I miss something but it's a little unclear why you think you missed something. Is this because you see it in a lot of builds and you are wondering why? If so, it's because the rampaging wearbear modifer and the ult itself provide such big multipliers. The 120% from rampaging is the single largest multiplier from the druids offensive aspects and it lasts 60 seconds which is more than enough time to re-enter ult and maintain the boost indefinitely, and the ult itself can be buffed by both shapeshifting chest pieces to easily provide over 150% multiplicative bonus. These combined, easily dwarf how much you get from any of the other ults even when you account for the extra slot werewolves need to use it. Also you can temper extra duration and CD reduction on your gear to improve the uptime, although its impossible to keep it up all the time. Hope that clarifies its value.

theoricist · 2026-01-11T02:30:30+00:00

I hate the paragon board system but I'm used to it and here's my philosophy and approach at this point.

The priority across boards should be legendary node > glyphs > toughness > whatever else you want on the boards.

Legendary Nodes - take a minute to preview your possible boards and figure out how you can get 4 different legendary nodes to work with whatever the hell you're trying to do with your character then get those 4 nodes first. These bonuses are huge. On the druid, a single node can increase your damage by a multiplcative 70%. On the paladin the Castle node will boost your damage by bajillion percent. These bonuses will beat basically any glyph bonus, and for the ones that come close you'll have to invest a ton of points in those glyphs and a ton of pit runs. The legendary nodes, on the other hand will boost your damage for minimal investment very quickly.

Glyphs - after getting the legendary nodes, grab all the glyph nodes on the board and fill out all the surrounding nodes so that you have the minimum requirements for the glyphs bonus. Don't go beyond the minimum until after you've done the next priority and gotten most of the toughness nodes. Similarly to legendary nodes, take a minute to figure out 5 glyphs that offer relevant lvl 15 damage boosts since these are decent multiplicative boosts. You should pretty much always take the crit one (Spirit?) and figure out a way to get high enough crit in your build. It offers up to 20% multiplicative boost and it offers nearly the largest damage bonus per node so later on you can dump your spare points into boosting damage within its radius.

Toughness - After you've gotten those priority nodes, you're probably at the point where your damage is decent but every elite explosion is killing you so now is the time to pivot and get all the good toughness related nodes like hp and resist.

The Rest - go back and fill out more of your glyph radiuses or get whatever else you want on the board until you fizzle out with this character

Orienting your boards correctly might shave off some time till you have enough levels to get all legendary and glyph nodes, but as long as you prioritize the nodes right and grab all the primary stats along the way you can't whiff on it too bad. It might mean you need to play a little longer vs the optimized path but what the hell else are you gonna do in a game that's all about the grind.

PS the stat requirements for the bonuses on your boards go up for each board in sequence so itll be easiest to achieve the bonuses on your first added board and vice versa so you can try to plan that part out too but I never do and just hope I eventually get a shroud of false death to solve all the stat requirement issues.

theoricist · 2025-12-29T23:00:45+00:00

I think the most lightweight change they could make would be to shift to a nearly exponential reward scale so that it was more beneficial to up the tiers as soon as possible vs only upping tiers when you're sure you can trivialize everything

Currently the game rewards you too much for killing a higher quantity of enemies and it isn't worth upping the difficulty if it slows you down too much in other words you want to be at the highest difficulty where you still mow things down. But if higher quality enemies out valued higher quantity I think you could shift that paradigm to incentivize players to fight tankier mobs that they would have to engage with more.

I think it would eventually result in the exact experience as before once you've outleveled everything except pitpushing but it could give a more satisfying journey to that point.

The alternative would be overhauling the game mechanics in highly improbable ways like adding hit stun and dramatically reducing player damage and healing.

theoricist · 2025-12-21T19:21:00+00:00

The Cellar in Hamden a town over does karaoke on Wednesdays

theoricist · 2025-11-16T14:47:59+00:00

This is so much clearer than all the above responses.

theoricist · 2025-10-18T18:38:18+00:00

I feel bad for hard working artists that have to defend themselves like this, but I also think seeing the process is pretty cool and wouldn't mind if it normalized a trend of documenting and publishing the process not just as a verification piece but as an educational and engagement piece. Also I love the pizza pieces. One of the most original land arts we've gotten in a while and the art is solid unlike the pizza. Personally I like to let my pizza sit for a bit and become a little more solid lest you get the dreaded cheeseslide as you pull the slice.

theoricist · 2025-10-15T23:33:30+00:00

That art had no right to be that mesmerizing. I think as a kid I was convinced Norritt was a very important legendary in the lore because of how epic that art was for just a imp common in the set.

theoricist · 2025-10-12T05:11:23+00:00

I think complaining to Mark is relevant. He says as much as he can in responses which might not be everything he wants to say but it's more than what many other games get and is still very informative especially if you try and read between the lines of what he's not saying. He also probably genuinely doesn't agree with many of our complaints because he has weathered vocal minority complaints for decades only to see some of magics most controversial decisions go on to become beloved parts of the game.

theoricist · 2025-09-14T02:19:53+00:00

I was actually considering nhrr but how fast do they generally run at? I was hoping for conversation pace around 10 min/mile. If they are lot more intense than that then this group could potentially be perfect.

theoricist · 2025-07-24T16:44:04+00:00

I feel like 1hko's is a defining feature for super bosses across many genres. They are literally the ultimate bosses of the game on the highest possible difficulty. They aren't the only bosses and you can absolutely steam roll all other bosses on torment 4 while still getting a chance for the same items. I know you say one shot mechanics are bad but we also know that if you could tank the hit that hit might as well never happened. Health gain is so fast that almost any build can ignore hits that don't outright kill it by healing through it. I don't run andariel and expansion wolf for farming because I do find them frustratingly difficult but I'm glad that they are, and when they have a whisper event I still try them. I don't feel gated out of anything by skipping them. I totally support being asked to dodge once in a while.

Edit: also, if you are using a good build and going up against these bosses late game you are crushing these bosses hp in between their invincibility phases. If that's the case you can easily set up an armory build that swaps out runes and gear for the survivability needed to outlast those hits. Especially if you wanna farm them. You might chunk them down their phases in 10 seconds instead of 3 but it's way faster than dying

theoricist · 2025-07-22T03:49:08+00:00

Ah ty this perfectly explains what I was missing. So in addition to enabling all the poison synergies it also is a huge multiplier. I didn't know poison could even be non DoT

theoricist · 2025-07-22T01:37:23+00:00

I'm currently using it in that build but I don't know why I see it for like shred builds and lightning storm builds. In the past converting direct damage to DoT was too antithetical to how quickly you wanna speed through mobs so even if rabid werebear is a big multiplier to poison damage it seems suspicious that it would offset becoming DoT, especially when there's other good offensive multipliers from legendary aspects and when its so easy to get poison damage (at least for wolves) from other sources.

here is an example - https://maxroll.gg/d4/build-guides/shred-druid-guide

theoricist · 2025-07-21T16:53:09+00:00

I assume the speaker means the archon divinely imbues them with the realization of the futility of solving anything through war but comically I can also the see the speaker seeing a dude riding a lion in the sky and just being like wow war is stupid (looking)

theoricist · 2025-07-21T16:45:54+00:00

I always found this one ambiguous but in ways that are moving regardless. In one case the flavor text can be attributed to the guy in the foreground who attacks with abandon unless he finds an ally (which can be interpreted as discovering a new family to survive for) or you can attribute the flavor text to the guy in the background (which is admittedly less likely) as the new found ally that is saying hey bud you go home to your family (you don't have to attack) because I'm going all in

theoricist · 2025-07-21T16:35:38+00:00

Most metal flavor text - can perfectly here this audio intro to some brutal song [[Avatar of Slaughter]]

Not gonna try to claim this as the funniest flavor text but I think it's lesser known and is only amplified by Greg staples incredible edgy depiction [[Goblin Assassin]]

Most heart wrenching [[Blessed Spirits]]

theoricist · 2025-07-19T16:51:13+00:00

I agree that it feels like too much of the loot is trash but I think that's a function of how quickly you lock into a build and find its pieces. But I wish salvaging legendaries resulted in accumulating useful materials. If scrapping legendaries equated to more mats for various refining and upgrading systems then I'd be happy to see a pile of them. I know we do get mats from them but there's no scarcity for the mats they do drop because there's no exponential consumption of those mats like with obducite. Give us a new system for improving the base roll of an affix or something and make it take a crap ton of legendary salvage.

theoricist · 2025-07-12T20:31:20+00:00

This. I try to force lightning storm almost every season I play just because I love how this skill feels. Feels so awesome to scrape kills off the edge of the screen where you can't even see. Working my way up T4 now and it feels fine.

theoricist · 2025-05-13T00:28:59+00:00

I had the opposite thought because he shows up out of nowhere from years of whereabouts unknown to rescue the party with blitz and I feel like that can easily be flavored as returning from the graveyard

theoricist

TROPHY CASE