According to the campfire chat March 7th, you will still need mats to open the loot chest, so whether you need them to summon a boss or to open up your reward from killing the boss, YOU STILL NEED THEM!The system puts the key at the end rather than the beginning to help seasonal players more so because they don't know whether or not they are geared up enough to fight the boss and win. This way, as the team members pointed out, you can test your build without losing your chance at loot, if you win the fight, you can claim your reward.Here is the catch, this new top tier boss they added, Belial, his summoning mat/key ONLY drops from the mini version of him that can randomly spawn when you fight any of the lower or middle tier bosses. So that mat is locked behind RNG (as usual).The game difficulty has also been increased as they pointed out, their example: pre-season 8, the difficulty of defeating a T100 Pit is now going to be equivalent of a T89-T90 Pit once season 8 launches. Adding ten-eleven levels against you (which may be a good thing for the super builds, but not for the average player who gets pushed further away from being at the top) and doing pits is obviously to level up their paragon glyphs. That is making getting them to maximum level even more difficult, longer and further away again.Less loot for the soloists in the game, more difficult, and again far to much RNG. Not looking forward to this type of mind set. It is group friendly, but nothing else.
The boss changes add nothing good for anyone...1 guaranteed unique from the pool versus the current 6 is a MAJOR nerf.Targeted loot becomes harder, economy will favor those that play a lot and casuals will suck *!@# as usual.
You're not thinking critically about the situation if you think this is a net positive for players. They could have required one player to unlock the chest for all in the group, after the fight. We were already getting multiple drops. Now we just get one from the pool. It's also not clear how the drop rate of new keys vs old boss mats will compare. It sounds like all players need boss mats now (drop rate wise) to get rewards. I thought I heard a comment about getting rewards from bosses less often now, and not spamming bosses.This update just sounds like artificially slowing the game with no net positive for players. Instead of true balance or progression overhauls, they're simply extending the ladder where ever possible.
Does it feel like the are trying to use RNG for endgame instead of new or more compelling content?
