adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Tech

‘Diablo 4’ Patch Notes Bring Fast Barbarian, Druid, Rogue Nerfs, Necro Buffs

Published

 on

It has been only a few days since the launch of Diablo 4, and while I knew that Blizzard was doing fast, reactive patches for the game, this is…a whole lot of balance changes to the game like 72 hours after launch. So much so that yeah, I’m thinking maybe they slow down a bit? It’s a lot.

My guess is some of this was sparked by the “world’s first” races to get to max level in the game, especially the hardcore race, and Blizzard believed some outlier skills were too strong. They also advertise some buffs in here, but it is overwhelmingly a good amount of nerfs. Here’s the list of changes to all classes:

BARBARIAN – Some pretty huge hits to Whirlwind Barbs, especially Gohr’s, which was creating a zillion explosions with activation and de-activation

  • Challenging Shout (Skill) – Damage Reduction gained from Skill Ranks reduced from 4% to 2%
  • Bold Chieftain’s Aspect – Cooldown reduction per Nearby enemy reduced from 2.7-5.4 seconds to 1.0-1.9 seconds. Maximum Cooldown reduction from 12 to 6 seconds.
  • Aspect of the Dire Whirlwind – Increased Critical Strike Chance per second reduced from 5-10% to 3-8%. Maximum Critical Strike Chance bonus reduced from 20-40% to 9-24%.
  • Gohr’s Devastating Grips (Unique Legendary) – Explosion damage gained from Whirlwind reduced from 50-70% to 16-26%. Damage against wreckable objects no longer increases explosion damage. Explosion damage is only increased by the first 100 hits of Whirlwind.

DRUID – This one is a mix of nerfs and buffs. Lightning-based builds in particular got a little bit of a buff, but there are definitely a lot of nerfs in here as well, which I’ve already seen some Druid players complaining about.

300x250x1
  • Pulverize (Skill) – Lucky Hit Chance reduced from 33% to 25%.
  • Lightning Storm (Skill) – Damage increased from 32% to 40%.
  • Grizzly Rage (Skill) – Damage bonus increased from 5/10/15% to 6/12/18%.
  • Obsidian Slam (Specialization) – Kills required for bonus increased from 10 to 20.
  • Calm Before the Storm (Specialization) – Lucky Hit Chance reduced from 15% to 10%.
  • Electric Shock (Passive) – Damage bonus increased from 5/10/15% to 6/12/18%.
  • Shockwave Aspect – Damage reduced from 90-130% to 60-100%.
  • Crashstone Aspect – Critical Strike Damage reduced from 40-50% to 30-40%.
  • Lightning Dancer’s Aspect – Flat damage increased from .5-.6 to .7-.8.

NECROMANCER – Out of all the classes, Necro actually got the most buffs by far. Most of these are focused on minion buffs including damage buffs to both skeletons and Golems, including a huge swing on an Iron Golem skill. I guess they were underperforming compared to the other classes a bit.

  • Blood Lance (Skill) – Damage increased from 67.5% to 80%.
  • Army of the Dead (Skill) – Damage increased from 30% to 45%. Cooldown reduced from 90 to 70 seconds.
  • Blood Wave (Skill) – Damage increased from 90% to 120%.
  • Shadowblight (Passive) – Damage increased from 20% to 22%.
  • Grim Harvest (Passive) – Essence gained reduced from 3/6/9 to 2/4/6.
  • Serration (Passive) – Critical Strike Chance reduced from .5/1/1.5% to .3/.6/.9%.
  • Death’s Defense (Passive) – Maximum Minion Life lost in a single damage instance reduced from 75/60/45% to 60/45/30%.
  • Raise Skeleton (Specialization) – Skeleton Warrior attack damage increased by 10%.
  • Golem (Specialization) – Golem attack damage increased by 10%.
  • Blood Golem (Specialization) – Blood Golem Life drain damage increased from 40% to 90%. Blood Golem Life drain healing from enemies hit increased from 4% to 5%.
  • Iron Golem (Specialization) – Iron Golem slam damage increased from 25% to 175%. Iron Golem shockwave damage increased from 30% to 40%.
  • Hulking Monstrosity (Paragon Board) – Golem Life and damage bonus increased from 30% to 40% Life.
  • Cult Leader (Paragon Board) – Golem Life and damage bonus increased from 30% to 40% Life.

ROGUE – A couple buffs here, but the main thing is the decimation of the extremely popular Twisting Blades build, which was already emerging as a strong favorite. Too strong for Blizzard’s taste, and it’s getting hammered pretty hard here.

  • Twisting Blades (Skill) – Advanced Twisting Blades Cooldown reduction per enemy hit reduced from .25 to .1 seconds. Advanced Twisting Blades maximum Cooldown reduction reduced from 3 to 2 seconds.
  • Rapid Fire (Skill) – Damage increased from 24% to 30%.
  • Dark Shroud (Skill) – Damage Reduction per shadow gained from Skill Ranks reduced from .8% to .4%.
  • Dash (Skill) – Enhanced Dash Critical Strike Damage bonus from 20% to 15%.
  • Caltrops (Skill) – Damage increased from 30% to 40%.
  • Concussive (Passive) – Critical Strike Chance reduced from 5/10/15% to 4/8/12%.
  • Repeating (Affix) – Maximum Minion Life lost in a single damage instance reduced from 75/60/45% to 60/45/30%.

SORCERER – Sorcerer was barely touched. Either they think it’s pretty balanced or they haven’t had much time to dig into its potential issues yet. But no destroyed builds via nerfs here.

  • Arc Lash (Skill) – Lucky Hit Chance reduced from 30% to 14%. Glinting Arc Lash Cooldown reduction reduced from .25 to .15 seconds.
  • Teleport (Skill) – Shimmering Teleport’s Damage Reduction duration reduced from 5 to 3 seconds.
  • Aspect of Control – Bonus damage reduced from 30-40% to 25-35%.

PARAGON BOARDS – There are some huge, overall changes to Paragon Boards, where Blizzard thought that Glyphs were way, way too strong so they are getting somewhat slaughtered:

  • Rare Nodes – Player Attack Speed nodes reduced by 50%.

Glyphs:

  • All Glyph Bonus scaling has been reduced by ~34%, except for the following:
  • Critical Strike Damage Glyphs’ Bonus reduced by ~66%.
  • Vulnerable Glyphs’ Bonus reduced by ~66%.
  • Glyphs’ Bonus to Rare nodes reduced by ~50%.
  • Glyphs’ Bonus to Magic nodes reduced by ~40%.
  • Glyphs’ Bonus to Cold/Fire/Lightning/Non-Physical/Physical nodes reduced by ~62.5%.

Most players are probably not even touching the Glyph system yet, so this is super hardcore speed levelers and their super builds, but I know many are not happy.

So, too many nerfs too soon? I guess we’ll find out.

 

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

PlayStation 5 Pro rumored to beef up GPU and ray tracing, bring AI acceleration

Published

 on

The PlayStation 5 launched in late 2020, though it feels like it arrived later due to supply issues. A Pro model will reportedly arrive four years later with a much improved GPU, AI acceleration and other enhancements.

The GPU will be the biggest upgrade on the PS5 Pro. Rumors claim up to 45% higher rasterization performance and 33.5 TFLOPs of compute power. Future SDK versions will support resolutions up to 8K and higher frame rates with 4K @ 120fps and 8K @ 60fps being possible.

Ray tracing performance is set to include 2-3 times, even 4 times on some occasions. This is thanks to a massive increase from 18 BVH4 work groups to 30 BVH8. The so-called “Bounding Volume Hierarchies” help speed up ray intersection calculations (i.e. does this ray of light hit this object or not?). We will skip the technical details, but the digit after BVH means that each individual work group will be able to do more work.

300x250x1

The Pro will also feature the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution upscaling and antialiasing technology (PSSR for short). This will be especially helpful for ray tracing, which sees computation demands explode as resolution goes up.

The PlayStation 5 Pro will also bring a custom machine learning architecture. An AI Accelerator will offer up to 300 TOPS of 8-bit and 67 TFLOPS of 16-bit floating point computation. This might be the most interesting part as modern generative models can create realistic textures and speech, write out text based on a prompt and so on – what can developers do with this?

The console will also come with a modest boost to the CPU, which will have a “High CPU Frequency Mode” that goes up to 3.85GHz (from 3.5GHz), a 10% increase. By the sound of it, the PS5 Pro is very close to thermal limits, so this mode will drop GPU frequency by 1.5% (resulting in 1% performance loss).

The Pro model will have faster RAM that does 18 gigatransfers per second, a 28% increase from 448GB/s to 576GB/s. This is needed to feed the beefier GPU.

The audio subsystem will also get a boost with 35% more performance that can be spent on higher quality sound effects.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is expected to have 1TB onboard storage and a detachable Blu-ray drive similar to the slim models. Sony might release the Pro model in Fall 2024, but there has been no official acknowledgment of the console.

Source

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 is for lower-tier high-end phones – MobileSyrup

Published

 on


Qualcomm has a new Snapdragon 8-series chip aimed at devices that aren’t quite flagships but are not quite mid-range either.

The new chip offers manufacturers more options but also further contributes the Qualcomm’s increasingly weird and confusing product lineup. The new 8s Gen 3 is like the opposite of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ chips, which typically offer a little more than the company’s annual flagship product.

The 8s Gen 3 matches most of what Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 flagship offers, but with just a little less. For example, the chips have a similar GPU, but the 8s Gen 3’s version has one less performance core and runs at a lower frequency. Additionally, the 8s Gen 3 uses the previous generation Snapdraogn X70 5G modem with Wi-Fi 7 support, compared to the X75 modem in the 8 Gen 3.

300x250x1

Since AI capabilities were one of the major highlights of the 8 Gen 3, the 8s Gen 3, unsurprisingly, also sports similar (but not quite as good) AI chops. The 8s Gen 3 can support generative AI on-device and is capable of running large language models (LLMs) of up to 10 billion parameters. That includes LLMs like Llama 2 and Gemini Nano.

While that’s all well and good, it’ll be interesting to see how manufacturers use the 8s Gen 3, and how consumers respond to the new chip. Flagships will likely keep going for the flagship Qualcomm chips, like the 8 Gen 3 or inevitable 8+ Gen 3, whenever it arrives. But Qualcomm also offers the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, just a hair below the new 8s Gen 3. Will the 8s Gen3 offer enough to make it a worthwhile choice over the 7 Gen 3? If you’re already looking at the 8s Gen 3, does it make sense to just go for the 8 Gen 3? Only time will tell.

Qualcomm expects the 8s Gen 3 to land in devices from Honor, iQOO, Realme, Redmi and Xiaomi in the coming months, though notably, none of those brands sell phones in Canada.

Header image credit: Qualcomm

Source: Qualcomm Via: The Verge 

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Tech

Google partnership 'missing piece' in Apple AI strategy – analysts – Proactive Investors USA

Published

 on


News of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL, ETR:APC) and Google’s discussions over the rollout of the latter’s Gemini AI chatbot on iPhones sent shares higher and prompted positive feedback from analysts on Monday.

Apple climbed 1.4% on the reports that it would license Gemini to power new features in its latest iPhone software, while Google owner Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) jumped 4.6%.

As per Wedbush, such an agreement is the “missing piece” in Apple’s artificial intelligence strategy, due to materialise with the release of IOS 18 software for its products this year.

300x250x1

Such plans could involve the introduction of an AI App Store, as per Wedbush, alongside the incorporation of new features into the iPhone 16, expected in September.

These may well be among features unveiled by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, such as homegrown large language models.

“This is a major win for Google to get onto the Apple ecosystem and have access to the golden installed base of Cupertino,” analysts said in a note.

Indeed, some 2 billion-plus Apple devices are said to currently be in circulation globally, with Wedbush also highlighting a likely “major license fee” attached to the deal.

“For Apple, this will give them the foundation and technology blueprint to double down on AI features currently being developed,” the bank continued.

This should help “make sure that iPhone 16 will be a potential game changer iPhone release around AI functionality”.

Though details of the deal, reported by Bloomberg, are slim, Wedbush said more could be expected before June’s conference, while reiterating an ‘outperform’ rating for Apple.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending