Yeah, I might actually enjoy getting my low level monk and DH up to cap and geared post patch. I fully expect griftss to have issues in their first iteration.
Also thanks sneak, Raz and everyone else for todays rift runs and advice on how to make my sader less lame and more of killing machine. :P
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Yeah sometimes I feel like there are people who take the "RNG gonna RNG" idea as some sort of holy mathematical gospel that the game is fine and it's the flawed perception of the people that is wrong, when in actuality the issue cuts both ways.
The game can be "fine" from an aggregate population perspective but be completely broken from the individual perspective. This is particularly true once they took down the Auction House and prevented the vast majority of trading. At that point, the game designers should have stopped caring about population distributions and started caring about the individual distribution instead. Because if I don't have access to the population's item drops as a whole, then I essentially live in a closed system that needs to be managed on its own. Bob getting 17 Starmetal Kukris and me getting 0 but all of it "averaging out" in the end is patently absurd from the game user perspective, because at the end of the day Bob doesn't need 17 SMKs and I might actually want one, and there's no way to bridge that gap regardless of the amount of time I invest in the game.
It is fundamentally poor game design to have an item generation system which makes it possible for a user to invest hundreds of hours into playing and not see a particular item, especially if that item is a requisite to play particular difficulty levels. Difficulty in this game has absolutely nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with obtaining items and using the correct build.
It's fine to use an RNG to seed item generation. In particular, it's perfectly valid to use the Skinner Box paradigm as a way to get people to play the game. But having a "random drop" system doesn't necessitate that you actually randomly generate the items and when they appear. It just means that you are distributing them in such a way that they appear to be random to the user. Arguments of "true randomness" actually existing when you use an RNG aside, there's plenty of evidence to show that people don't actually perceive true randomness properly in the first place. All you need to do is leverage the Skinner Box mechanism while mitigating the random quality of the drops in the first place.
Blizzard doesn't seem to want to do the amount of architecture rework it would require to get something like this in place, and at this point in the game's lifecycle I'm not sure I blame them. But buffing drop rates and adding Kadala are half-measures at best, and they really need to address the issue more directly.
Bring back trading, un-bind gems... ta-da! its gems/item trading for other gems/items! i get to trade hoover (probably my soul) for his sixth pair of hexing pants, and everything is right with the world.
Yeah sometimes I feel like there are people who take the "RNG gonna RNG" idea as some sort of holy mathematical gospel that the game is fine and it's the flawed perception of the people that is wrong, when in actuality the issue cuts both ways.
The game can be "fine" from an aggregate population perspective but be completely broken from the individual perspective. This is particularly true once they took down the Auction House and prevented the vast majority of trading. At that point, the game designers should have stopped caring about population distributions and started caring about the individual distribution instead. Because if I don't have access to the population's item drops as a whole, then I essentially live in a closed system that needs to be managed on its own. Bob getting 17 Starmetal Kukris and me getting 0 but all of it "averaging out" in the end is patently absurd from the game user perspective, because at the end of the day Bob doesn't need 17 SMKs and I might actually want one, and there's no way to bridge that gap regardless of the amount of time I invest in the game.
It is fundamentally poor game design to have an item generation system which makes it possible for a user to invest hundreds of hours into playing and not see a particular item, especially if that item is a requisite to play particular difficulty levels. Difficulty in this game has absolutely nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with obtaining items and using the correct build.
It's fine to use an RNG to seed item generation. In particular, it's perfectly valid to use the Skinner Box paradigm as a way to get people to play the game. But having a "random drop" system doesn't necessitate that you actually randomly generate the items and when they appear. It just means that you are distributing them in such a way that they appear to be random to the user. Arguments of "true randomness" actually existing when you use an RNG aside, there's plenty of evidence to show that people don't actually perceive true randomness properly in the first place. All you need to do is leverage the Skinner Box mechanism while mitigating the random quality of the drops in the first place.
Blizzard doesn't seem to want to do the amount of architecture rework it would require to get something like this in place, and at this point in the game's lifecycle I'm not sure I blame them. But buffing drop rates and adding Kadala are half-measures at best, and they really need to address the issue more directly.
what are they going to do
go back to the D2 model where everyone farms pindleskin and mephisto unto oblivion?
so what if you never see one of the rarest items in the game? that's the nature of the beast, same as D2. I think trading restrictions should be removed between say, clan members or people on your friends list (if the item dropped for you while they were already their friend). If their intent is to remove the enitre back alley transaction style of D2 (as was the auction house, with disastrous results at the individual level I will remind you), but losing those hoops so that friends and guild members can share in each others fortune seems fine and relatively unexploitable to me.
RNG was kind of odd to me last night. 4 legendary drops over the course of 2 T3 rifts, all 4 are Atrophy plans.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Yeah sometimes I feel like there are people who take the "RNG gonna RNG" idea as some sort of holy mathematical gospel that the game is fine and it's the flawed perception of the people that is wrong, when in actuality the issue cuts both ways.
The game can be "fine" from an aggregate population perspective but be completely broken from the individual perspective. This is particularly true once they took down the Auction House and prevented the vast majority of trading. At that point, the game designers should have stopped caring about population distributions and started caring about the individual distribution instead. Because if I don't have access to the population's item drops as a whole, then I essentially live in a closed system that needs to be managed on its own. Bob getting 17 Starmetal Kukris and me getting 0 but all of it "averaging out" in the end is patently absurd from the game user perspective, because at the end of the day Bob doesn't need 17 SMKs and I might actually want one, and there's no way to bridge that gap regardless of the amount of time I invest in the game.
It is fundamentally poor game design to have an item generation system which makes it possible for a user to invest hundreds of hours into playing and not see a particular item, especially if that item is a requisite to play particular difficulty levels. Difficulty in this game has absolutely nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with obtaining items and using the correct build.
It's fine to use an RNG to seed item generation. In particular, it's perfectly valid to use the Skinner Box paradigm as a way to get people to play the game. But having a "random drop" system doesn't necessitate that you actually randomly generate the items and when they appear. It just means that you are distributing them in such a way that they appear to be random to the user. Arguments of "true randomness" actually existing when you use an RNG aside, there's plenty of evidence to show that people don't actually perceive true randomness properly in the first place. All you need to do is leverage the Skinner Box mechanism while mitigating the random quality of the drops in the first place.
Blizzard doesn't seem to want to do the amount of architecture rework it would require to get something like this in place, and at this point in the game's lifecycle I'm not sure I blame them. But buffing drop rates and adding Kadala are half-measures at best, and they really need to address the issue more directly.
what are they going to do
go back to the D2 model where everyone farms pindleskin and mephisto unto oblivion?
so what if you never see one of the rarest items in the game? that's the nature of the beast, same as D2. I think trading restrictions should be removed between say, clan members or people on your friends list (if the item dropped for you while they were already their friend). If their intent is to remove the enitre back alley transaction style of D2 (as was the auction house, with disastrous results at the individual level I will remind you), but losing those hoops so that friends and guild members can share in each others fortune seems fine and relatively unexploitable to me.
Completely ignoring other, very valid reasons for why this is a goose argument, Blizzard says they care about this. They're spending a large portion of their time on one of, if not the biggest, additions coming in 2.1. Leaderboards are one of the main reasons 2.1 is taking forever to come out. They care enough to prevent people from exploiting normal, rank 1, etc. rift bugs so they care about their competitive addition at least somewhat.
But then you get right back into what I talked about earlier, they designed a competitive system solely around you winning based on dice rolls with Vegas odds. You can't compete on the leaderboards without the rarest items in game. Finding those items really is the whole competition. You still need grandeur rings, unity, SMKs, and other items with drop rates so abysmally low they might as well not exist just to get middle of the road grift clears. THEN you need those items with amazing stats to push even higher.
There's a good reason random select tourneys are sideshows and not the main event, no matter how much fun they can be. Right now leaderboards have even worse odds than me getting stuck with Dan every time I random my character for a set in a game like Alpha 3 where he's true joke tier. In it's current form, there's little to get excited about regarding leaderboards. All they're doing is delaying an overall great patch from getting released.
Blizz never really addressed the clan trading and friends list issues either. People came up with plenty of legitimate ideas regarding waiting periods and restrictions that would make it such a hassle for third party sites to make money but all Blizzard ever does is regurgitate the lines about not wanting to ruin your friends experience with trading. Because we all know how much we'd ruin our friend's experience by trading them an extra SMK we lucked into after thousands of hours needing, literally, one item compared to letting our friend deal with the same drop nonsense.
how is it a goose argument? the game is literally a lottery, it always has been. they're substantially improved the odds that you'll have chances at legendaries dropping at a personal level multiple times over in RoS compared to vanilla, but you still never have promised 100% chance of seeing anything specific in the game for sure. blizzard can say all they want that they to improve the player gearing experience, but it is still a lottery and nothing short of changing the entire gearing system can remove that fact. yeah, the AH made it possible for anybody to get any item, but the economy of it quickly escalated to the point that most players could never AFFORD to get the highest, rarest loot ever. it had the exact same effect as the lottery system is now. trading should be improved and I think they'll eventually address it, but the personal gearing treadmill is improved enough that I'm still content to continue to play.
I am not addressing the ladder or leaderboard competition aspect because you cannot make this kind of game competitive and fair because of the rng aspect and I don't think you could balance it around rng. Ladder's not my thing anyway and I could care less about it.
RNG was kind of odd to me last night. 4 legendary drops over the course of 2 T3 rifts, all 4 are Atrophy plans.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Thank you RNGesus.
Did you learn the first one? Pretty sure a recipe won't drop again if you know it.
RNG was kind of odd to me last night. 4 legendary drops over the course of 2 T3 rifts, all 4 are Atrophy plans.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Thank you RNGesus.
Did you learn the first one? Pretty sure a recipe won't drop again if you know it.
They won't. Once you learn a plan they never drop again and once you learn all the plans no more plan drops at all.
Smith not high enough to learn it yet would be my guess.
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
edited July 2014
Now that I have a SMK lıterally the only thıng I care about ıs makıng sure other people don't get a SMK so that I can feel more special.
Blizz plz don't reward casuals, RNG lottery is what makes America better than the Commies
I thought this was what Kadala was supposed to prevent, but her drop rate on legendaries doesn't seem that great.
It'd be nice to have an option with her to buy a legendary for a slot, but it would be far, far, far more expensive than the random chance option. It might even be more efficient to use the random option, but the trade-off is that the other one is guaranteed. No huge streaks of nothing.
Been gathering up goldfind rares in anticipation of those treasure dimensions. I'm hoping those stacks of millions aren't an exaggeration.
There's no monster in the treasure rifts, no? Dps (or lack thereof) won't be an issue?
RNG was kind of odd to me last night. 4 legendary drops over the course of 2 T3 rifts, all 4 are Atrophy plans.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Thank you RNGesus.
Did you learn the first one? Pretty sure a recipe won't drop again if you know it.
They won't. Once you learn a plan they never drop again and once you learn all the plans no more plan drops at all.
Smith not high enough to learn it yet would be my guess.
No, my smith's is at max level, I was just in the middle of a rift when the first one dropped, and didn't feel like TPing to town to teach my blacksmith something that I'll never use. You know how it is when you've got a good swarm of fetish sycophants rolling, "we break for nobody". I also dislike standing around IDing items in the middle of a run, might just be me though.
I figured that with all the plans in the game that I haven't learned (to say nothing of all the legendary items that could drop), what are the chances that the next legendary drop is going to be the same plan? Let alone the next three drops.
Would it be a bad idea to have Kadala's prices go up to 200 shards per armor piece, 300 per weapon, 400 per ring and 500 per amulet and just be guaranteed legendaries? I don't even bother gambling amulets, even though they're the highest potential upgrade slot, simply because 20 shards per is like buying hot dogs at the ball park. I can make the fucking things for 30 cents at home, don't charge $8 for them!
Also, all the talk about RNG...I found five pairs of Raiment boots within two T4 rifts on PTR last night after going about 150 hours on my Monk without seeing any at all! But at least one of them rolled basically perfect, like 748 dex, 100 AR, 39_ armor, 741 vit, +2 pickup radius and +28k globe value. Also got a 93% Az'Turraq and have since been running lightning EP. I'm not sure I like it more as a spender than the lightning WoL rune, but it certainly has more lol moments. Seeing 3 125m popups off a single dashing strike sure is fun!
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
RNG was kind of odd to me last night. 4 legendary drops over the course of 2 T3 rifts, all 4 are Atrophy plans.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Thank you RNGesus.
Did you learn the first one? Pretty sure a recipe won't drop again if you know it.
They won't. Once you learn a plan they never drop again and once you learn all the plans no more plan drops at all.
Smith not high enough to learn it yet would be my guess.
No, my smith's is at max level, I was just in the middle of a rift when the first one dropped, and didn't feel like TPing to town to teach my blacksmith something that I'll never use. You know how it is when you've got a good swarm of fetish sycophants rolling, "we break for nobody". I also dislike standing around IDing items in the middle of a run, might just be me though.
I figured that with all the plans in the game that I haven't learned (to say nothing of all the legendary items that could drop), what are the chances that the next legendary drop is going to be the same plan? Let alone the next three drops.
Turns out, chances are pretty good.
Not complaining, just thought it was funny.
Plans are weighted super heavy now until you collect them to get them off your loot table.
Would it be a bad idea to have Kadala's prices go up to 200 shards per armor piece, 300 per weapon, 400 per ring and 500 per amulet and just be guaranteed legendaries? I don't even bother gambling amulets, even though they're the highest potential upgrade slot, simply because 20 shards per is like buying hot dogs at the ball park. I can make the fucking things for 30 cents at home, don't charge $8 for them!
Also, all the talk about RNG...I found five pairs of Raiment boots within two T4 rifts on PTR last night after going about 150 hours on my Monk without seeing any at all! But at least one of them rolled basically perfect, like 748 dex, 100 AR, 39_ armor, 741 vit, +2 pickup radius and +28k globe value. Also got a 93% Az'Turraq and have since been running lightning EP. I'm not sure I like it more as a spender than the lightning WoL rune, but it certainly has more lol moments. Seeing 3 125m popups off a single dashing strike sure is fun!
So, that would be what, 7 or 8 rifts to guarantee a single random legendary amulet from Kadala?
I think I'd like to have it as an option personally. A chance at a legendary for cheap, or a guaranteed legendary for a nutload of shards.
Maybe we could take it a step further though, how about a "Pick your legendary for a bunch of shards and souls" option, where more useful/rarer legendary items cost more souls? I'd happily pay 500 shards + 50 souls or so to skip gambling for a T&T or SMK. I think this could be tied to how many shards you've spent gambling, as an option it only becomes available once you've spent some fairly large amount of shards (2500-4000 or so). Possibly, it's an option that you could only use once for every X many shards gambled so it's not quite as exploitable.
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Yeah sometimes I feel like there are people who take the "RNG gonna RNG" idea as some sort of holy mathematical gospel that the game is fine and it's the flawed perception of the people that is wrong, when in actuality the issue cuts both ways.
The game can be "fine" from an aggregate population perspective but be completely broken from the individual perspective. This is particularly true once they took down the Auction House and prevented the vast majority of trading. At that point, the game designers should have stopped caring about population distributions and started caring about the individual distribution instead. Because if I don't have access to the population's item drops as a whole, then I essentially live in a closed system that needs to be managed on its own. Bob getting 17 Starmetal Kukris and me getting 0 but all of it "averaging out" in the end is patently absurd from the game user perspective, because at the end of the day Bob doesn't need 17 SMKs and I might actually want one, and there's no way to bridge that gap regardless of the amount of time I invest in the game.
It is fundamentally poor game design to have an item generation system which makes it possible for a user to invest hundreds of hours into playing and not see a particular item, especially if that item is a requisite to play particular difficulty levels. Difficulty in this game has absolutely nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with obtaining items and using the correct build.
It's fine to use an RNG to seed item generation. In particular, it's perfectly valid to use the Skinner Box paradigm as a way to get people to play the game. But having a "random drop" system doesn't necessitate that you actually randomly generate the items and when they appear. It just means that you are distributing them in such a way that they appear to be random to the user. Arguments of "true randomness" actually existing when you use an RNG aside, there's plenty of evidence to show that people don't actually perceive true randomness properly in the first place. All you need to do is leverage the Skinner Box mechanism while mitigating the random quality of the drops in the first place.
Blizzard doesn't seem to want to do the amount of architecture rework it would require to get something like this in place, and at this point in the game's lifecycle I'm not sure I blame them. But buffing drop rates and adding Kadala are half-measures at best, and they really need to address the issue more directly.
what are they going to do
go back to the D2 model where everyone farms pindleskin and mephisto unto oblivion?
so what if you never see one of the rarest items in the game? that's the nature of the beast, same as D2. I think trading restrictions should be removed between say, clan members or people on your friends list (if the item dropped for you while they were already their friend). If their intent is to remove the enitre back alley transaction style of D2 (as was the auction house, with disastrous results at the individual level I will remind you), but losing those hoops so that friends and guild members can share in each others fortune seems fine and relatively unexploitable to me.
It's perfectly possible to use the loot drop system while guaranteeing item parity. For example, you can simply take the "loot timer" system to another level, and assign each item a weighted drop counter which basically says "if this item hasn't dropped by X, drop it next".
Would it be a bad idea to have Kadala's prices go up to 200 shards per armor piece, 300 per weapon, 400 per ring and 500 per amulet and just be guaranteed legendaries? I don't even bother gambling amulets, even though they're the highest potential upgrade slot, simply because 20 shards per is like buying hot dogs at the ball park. I can make the fucking things for 30 cents at home, don't charge $8 for them!
Also, all the talk about RNG...I found five pairs of Raiment boots within two T4 rifts on PTR last night after going about 150 hours on my Monk without seeing any at all! But at least one of them rolled basically perfect, like 748 dex, 100 AR, 39_ armor, 741 vit, +2 pickup radius and +28k globe value. Also got a 93% Az'Turraq and have since been running lightning EP. I'm not sure I like it more as a spender than the lightning WoL rune, but it certainly has more lol moments. Seeing 3 125m popups off a single dashing strike sure is fun!
Maybe we could take it a step further though, how about a "Pick your legendary for a bunch of shards and souls" option, where more useful/rarer legendary items cost more souls? I'd happily pay 500 shards + 50 souls or so to skip gambling for a T&T or SMK. I think this could be tied to how many shards you've spent gambling, as an option it only becomes available once you've spent some fairly large amount of shards (2500-4000 or so). Possibly, it's an option that you could only use once for every X many shards gambled so it's not quite as exploitable.
Ahahaha, would love to see it but will never happen... Ultra-rares like T&T or SMK are easily worth a price up in the multiple thousands, but I don't really see them implementing some complicated system beyond the "spend shard, get random item" we have now.
RNG was kind of odd to me last night. 4 legendary drops over the course of 2 T3 rifts, all 4 are Atrophy plans.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Thank you RNGesus.
Did you learn the first one? Pretty sure a recipe won't drop again if you know it.
They won't. Once you learn a plan they never drop again and once you learn all the plans no more plan drops at all.
Smith not high enough to learn it yet would be my guess.
No, my smith's is at max level, I was just in the middle of a rift when the first one dropped, and didn't feel like TPing to town to teach my blacksmith something that I'll never use. You know how it is when you've got a good swarm of fetish sycophants rolling, "we break for nobody". I also dislike standing around IDing items in the middle of a run, might just be me though.
I figured that with all the plans in the game that I haven't learned (to say nothing of all the legendary items that could drop), what are the chances that the next legendary drop is going to be the same plan? Let alone the next three drops.
Turns out, chances are pretty good.
Not complaining, just thought it was funny.
Oh yeah, not stopping when you're rolling along is always preferable so I get that.
Like Rolo said plans are one of, if not the, highest weighted drops until you get them all leading to situations like that. The good thing is, at least I'd swear a blue post confirmed one of these two things a while back and it wasn't just idle speculation, plans don't cost you a legendary. However plans roll within the drop system bare minimum plans don't count as a found legendary for the mystical, oh crap we haven't given this person a lego in hours system, while best case scenario it was confirmed as an entirely separate roll that never means you got a plan over a "real" legendary.
Damn, it just struck me that the wording on paragon GF and gear GF is different where gear says "from monsters". Is this just some old holdover that has never been corrected or do they really work differently? :<
I assume most of the gold drops in treasure rifts come from breakables/chests, so...
how is it a goose argument? the game is literally a lottery, it always has been. they're substantially improved the odds that you'll have chances at legendaries dropping at a personal level multiple times over in RoS compared to vanilla, but you still never have promised 100% chance of seeing anything specific in the game for sure. blizzard can say all they want that they to improve the player gearing experience, but it is still a lottery and nothing short of changing the entire gearing system can remove that fact. yeah, the AH made it possible for anybody to get any item, but the economy of it quickly escalated to the point that most players could never AFFORD to get the highest, rarest loot ever. it had the exact same effect as the lottery system is now. trading should be improved and I think they'll eventually address it, but the personal gearing treadmill is improved enough that I'm still content to continue to play.
I am not addressing the ladder or leaderboard competition aspect because you cannot make this kind of game competitive and fair because of the rng aspect and I don't think you could balance it around rng. Ladder's not my thing anyway and I could care less about it.
Just to make it clear incase it was muddled before, internet, faceless text, all that jazz, I don't think you're being a goose. I just think that argument is always goosery no matter who or where it comes from. The game can always be made to be more fun for more players. Plus, sarcasm aside, even if the bulk of the problem with Rolo's comment about filthy casuals comes from players being stupid at least part of that problem comes from systems that breed and attract those players like abysmal for no reason drop rates.
I'm also spoilering this since there's no reason to clutter the thread with a wall of text I wrote while eating lunch.
While I agree about ladder and seasons being pointless we can't just hand waive it away as something they don't let impact the overall game. Plenty of people want them, and even if it's a minority, it's not a pointless minority like the people who want D2:HD Edition. Until they indicate they want it to truly be it's own thing with it's own rules seasons and leaderboards are bare minimum affecting what drops you get in other aspects of the game and how long it takes for the game to even get patches.
It's a goose argument because you're not putting a carrot on a stick that's truly obtainable. It's using a stick with effectively no carrot. It's just not fun to go into a game knowing there's items you may truly never see no matter how much you play, so why bother continuing to grind? You can't ignore the items, they're not cosmetic where they're nice to have but unimportant in the grand scheme. A lot of them with that low a drop rate are game changing not just in a min-maxing way but a fun way that can drastically alter a skill or even whole class. Plus it's not like there's any skill attached to them, be it usually superficial grind skill like world firsts or genuine skill like winning Evo or breaking a world record speed run, warranting craptastic drop rates to embellish the reward aspect.
The gold exploit ruined the economy, not the AH itself. Hell, truly best in slot, end game items were traded via third party sites so you could charge more money for them than the max buyout prices on gold and real money AHs. Even with the gold flooded AH there wasn't a single item I couldn't sort by cheapest price and buy to try out a build. It would be abysmal rolls, like truly lowest possible rolls in every slot abysmal, but I'd be able to buy it just to mess with eventually. I care far less about being in T6/whatever endgame than being able to cycle whatever build I want on all the classes. While I'd be okay with it's return just so I could buy cheap, terribly rolled items again to mess with builds, we're past that stage where the AH likely matters. Which then gets into trading and other aspects where, as already mentioned, Blizz just spouts ruining your friend's experience over and over again.
The other ideas people already mentioned not covering boss farming seems telling. I agree that's a step back like the AH would likely be. It doesn't appear anyone liked the system when you had to do it for blacksmithing items, although there was additional baggage there too due to other RNG factors. But other games do it better if boss farming is what you find fun. You've got actual D2 and PoE for that. Or you've got completely other styles like Monster Hunter, where you're spending the bulk of the game boss farming, but the fights are so much more involved and different. Farming bosses doesn't offer anything compelling gameplay wise, there's other ways to make itemization more fun than running Ghom for twelve hours.
What would likely bring the most fun for everyone is buffed drop rates of some kind. One of the biggest complaints, possibly even just behind the AH complaints, for vanilla was never getting any gear meaning you could not ignore the AH to gear up. Things aren't that bad anymore, by any means, but there's definitely items that make or break your enjoyment, whatever and however serious that enjoyment might be. Prior to all the classes getting some love, and especially the Crusader's own buffs, it full akkan or bust. Just a shit class or best class in game with very little middle ground. SMK takes you from a demigod to full blown god status. Those things matter for tiered rifts because people are going to climb higher by the nature of it's current deign, regardless of their desire to make a leaderboard. The topic also comes up, a lot, since people are constantly hunting for one or two specific items.
If the argument shifts to player retention, like, what keeps people playing once they have every single drop in the game, then you move into where the items already are, and should be, balanced going forward; the rolls. Even if we spitball the perfect system for drops between Kadala, monsters, chests, whatever, giving us the perfect drop rate for items whether I play ten hours a day or ten minutes a week items still have to roll well. That's a great carrot to chase with the new content coming out whether you care about leaderboards or not because it keeps side grades coming while allowing the ever shrinking, but still possible, chance for upgrades. Then you have other carrots to chase in your legendary gem upgrades which will take some time as well. It looks like the game has plenty of things to chase and grind out in a good way going forward without needing to string along what's left of the player base with 1% drop rates.
The other aspect to all of this is just how good the game as whole truly is. Drop rates arguably need some love, and some of the stuff on 2.1 needs and is already getting some work, but overall we're all still here talking about and playing a very fun game. Issues like never seeing a SMK stand out that much more because of how solid everything else is.
For those that have been pushing greater rifts, how rewarding do they feel compared to current rifts, just in terms of average number of legendaries per run?
Also, I'm assuming legendary gems are a subtle buff to the gearing curve, in that their power will facilitate moving up a Torment level.
I agree with all of that Column, really well said. I'd say the other argument against "why do you need to get every item in the game?" which you touched upon is basically because Blizzard has decreed it so. Instead of items just being stronger, they are completely game changing. Certain items change how classes play completely and the fact that it is hidden behind a super rare drop rate makes it super frustrating if you want to try the build out.
For those that have been pushing greater rifts, how rewarding do they feel compared to current rifts, just in terms of average number of legendaries per run?
Also, I'm assuming legendary gems are a subtle buff to the gearing curve, in that their power will facilitate moving up a Torment level.
The few that I did felt great. I think I got all of the gems now, and was getting 2-3 legendaries off each end boss at the higher rift levels after I did. Note, I've only done like 3 passes through the system, but overall it feels good. I may be weird in the idea that I actually like that they removed gold/item drops from the trash, and you can just focus on killing stuff and keep moving all the way to the end.
For those that have been pushing greater rifts, how rewarding do they feel compared to current rifts, just in terms of average number of legendaries per run?
Also, I'm assuming legendary gems are a subtle buff to the gearing curve, in that their power will facilitate moving up a Torment level.
The few that I did felt great. I think I got all of the gems now, and was getting 2-3 legendaries off each end boss at the higher rift levels after I did. Note, I've only done like 3 passes through the system, but overall it feels good. I may be weird in the idea that I actually like that they removed gold/item drops from the trash, and you can just focus on killing stuff and keep moving all the way to the end.
Nice, that sounds pretty good.
As far as going to the next level... does the key get upgraded for you to return at your leisure, or do all the grift levels have to chain together as one continuous session?
It's just not fun to go into a game knowing there's items you may truly never see no matter how much you play, so why bother continuing to grind?
For a flip of that, I actually DO find that fun. I think it's really cool if there's some stuff that's so rare I may not ever even see it much less own it. It kind of gives me a reason to always play the game no matter what and whenever I play I always have a goal even if I've maxxed everything else out.
I'm not saying games SHOULD be made that way since it's a wildly unpopular opinion but I certainly don't mind if they are.
I like that the ps4 version is $60 and the ps3 is $40. Same game does not make sense.
I think it's because Diablo 3 was NEVER out on the PS4 while it was on the PS3. They want the PS3 version cheaper so people that already own it will buy it to get the new stuff.
Then you have an item you only get one of, in hundreds of hours, that rolls like crap further cementing how dumb drop rates are in this game from the "I want to test and play around with fun shit" perspective; shit never drops.
...
All that said, thankfully 2.1 is offering a more than leaderboards in what looks like a great patch so it's easy enough to ignore. The only negatives I'm seeing about 2.1 is how warranted seasons are and, if they are warranted, how much exclusive stuff should be locked into them for people who want to do them and how much that screws over people who could not care less about them.
Do people think Zuni is worthwhile in a non-SMK world (which I feel I will exclusively live in, hehe)? I'd lose my Strongarm's to maintain 2 piece Aughild, lose my UK mojo to get the Zuni, and gain Hexing Pants + lose the Sycophants passive/spirit generator for FA. Could stack my fire damage better that way with Tiki Torchers, WP, Burning Dog.
I feel like, even if I did this, I'd just be running around letting things do damage for me to even more of an extreme. At least now I feel like I'm doing something shooting off Explosive Toads with my Flayer to generate fetishes.
Trying to figure out if I should try to gamble Zuni chest & mojo or focus on getting a Harrington or better Taskers (ugh).
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Also thanks sneak, Raz and everyone else for todays rift runs and advice on how to make my sader less lame and more of killing machine. :P
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Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
The game can be "fine" from an aggregate population perspective but be completely broken from the individual perspective. This is particularly true once they took down the Auction House and prevented the vast majority of trading. At that point, the game designers should have stopped caring about population distributions and started caring about the individual distribution instead. Because if I don't have access to the population's item drops as a whole, then I essentially live in a closed system that needs to be managed on its own. Bob getting 17 Starmetal Kukris and me getting 0 but all of it "averaging out" in the end is patently absurd from the game user perspective, because at the end of the day Bob doesn't need 17 SMKs and I might actually want one, and there's no way to bridge that gap regardless of the amount of time I invest in the game.
It is fundamentally poor game design to have an item generation system which makes it possible for a user to invest hundreds of hours into playing and not see a particular item, especially if that item is a requisite to play particular difficulty levels. Difficulty in this game has absolutely nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with obtaining items and using the correct build.
It's fine to use an RNG to seed item generation. In particular, it's perfectly valid to use the Skinner Box paradigm as a way to get people to play the game. But having a "random drop" system doesn't necessitate that you actually randomly generate the items and when they appear. It just means that you are distributing them in such a way that they appear to be random to the user. Arguments of "true randomness" actually existing when you use an RNG aside, there's plenty of evidence to show that people don't actually perceive true randomness properly in the first place. All you need to do is leverage the Skinner Box mechanism while mitigating the random quality of the drops in the first place.
Blizzard doesn't seem to want to do the amount of architecture rework it would require to get something like this in place, and at this point in the game's lifecycle I'm not sure I blame them. But buffing drop rates and adding Kadala are half-measures at best, and they really need to address the issue more directly.
-oh look i found a witching hour today
man i love RNG
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what are they going to do
go back to the D2 model where everyone farms pindleskin and mephisto unto oblivion?
so what if you never see one of the rarest items in the game? that's the nature of the beast, same as D2. I think trading restrictions should be removed between say, clan members or people on your friends list (if the item dropped for you while they were already their friend). If their intent is to remove the enitre back alley transaction style of D2 (as was the auction house, with disastrous results at the individual level I will remind you), but losing those hoops so that friends and guild members can share in each others fortune seems fine and relatively unexploitable to me.
I wish this was like how the game was at release. I'm trying to get my friends to try it out but they hated release so much they are refusing to.
After the fourth dropped, I finished the rift and called it a night.
Thank you RNGesus.
But then you get right back into what I talked about earlier, they designed a competitive system solely around you winning based on dice rolls with Vegas odds. You can't compete on the leaderboards without the rarest items in game. Finding those items really is the whole competition. You still need grandeur rings, unity, SMKs, and other items with drop rates so abysmally low they might as well not exist just to get middle of the road grift clears. THEN you need those items with amazing stats to push even higher.
There's a good reason random select tourneys are sideshows and not the main event, no matter how much fun they can be. Right now leaderboards have even worse odds than me getting stuck with Dan every time I random my character for a set in a game like Alpha 3 where he's true joke tier. In it's current form, there's little to get excited about regarding leaderboards. All they're doing is delaying an overall great patch from getting released.
Blizz never really addressed the clan trading and friends list issues either. People came up with plenty of legitimate ideas regarding waiting periods and restrictions that would make it such a hassle for third party sites to make money but all Blizzard ever does is regurgitate the lines about not wanting to ruin your friends experience with trading. Because we all know how much we'd ruin our friend's experience by trading them an extra SMK we lucked into after thousands of hours needing, literally, one item compared to letting our friend deal with the same drop nonsense.
I am not addressing the ladder or leaderboard competition aspect because you cannot make this kind of game competitive and fair because of the rng aspect and I don't think you could balance it around rng. Ladder's not my thing anyway and I could care less about it.
Did you learn the first one? Pretty sure a recipe won't drop again if you know it.
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Smith not high enough to learn it yet would be my guess.
Blizz plz don't reward casuals, RNG lottery is what makes America better than the Commies
It'd be nice to have an option with her to buy a legendary for a slot, but it would be far, far, far more expensive than the random chance option. It might even be more efficient to use the random option, but the trade-off is that the other one is guaranteed. No huge streaks of nothing.
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There's no monster in the treasure rifts, no? Dps (or lack thereof) won't be an issue?
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
No, my smith's is at max level, I was just in the middle of a rift when the first one dropped, and didn't feel like TPing to town to teach my blacksmith something that I'll never use. You know how it is when you've got a good swarm of fetish sycophants rolling, "we break for nobody". I also dislike standing around IDing items in the middle of a run, might just be me though.
I figured that with all the plans in the game that I haven't learned (to say nothing of all the legendary items that could drop), what are the chances that the next legendary drop is going to be the same plan? Let alone the next three drops.
Turns out, chances are pretty good.
Not complaining, just thought it was funny.
Also, all the talk about RNG...I found five pairs of Raiment boots within two T4 rifts on PTR last night after going about 150 hours on my Monk without seeing any at all! But at least one of them rolled basically perfect, like 748 dex, 100 AR, 39_ armor, 741 vit, +2 pickup radius and +28k globe value. Also got a 93% Az'Turraq and have since been running lightning EP. I'm not sure I like it more as a spender than the lightning WoL rune, but it certainly has more lol moments. Seeing 3 125m popups off a single dashing strike sure is fun!
Plans are weighted super heavy now until you collect them to get them off your loot table.
I think I'd like to have it as an option personally. A chance at a legendary for cheap, or a guaranteed legendary for a nutload of shards.
Maybe we could take it a step further though, how about a "Pick your legendary for a bunch of shards and souls" option, where more useful/rarer legendary items cost more souls? I'd happily pay 500 shards + 50 souls or so to skip gambling for a T&T or SMK. I think this could be tied to how many shards you've spent gambling, as an option it only becomes available once you've spent some fairly large amount of shards (2500-4000 or so). Possibly, it's an option that you could only use once for every X many shards gambled so it's not quite as exploitable.
It's perfectly possible to use the loot drop system while guaranteeing item parity. For example, you can simply take the "loot timer" system to another level, and assign each item a weighted drop counter which basically says "if this item hasn't dropped by X, drop it next".
Like Rolo said plans are one of, if not the, highest weighted drops until you get them all leading to situations like that. The good thing is, at least I'd swear a blue post confirmed one of these two things a while back and it wasn't just idle speculation, plans don't cost you a legendary. However plans roll within the drop system bare minimum plans don't count as a found legendary for the mystical, oh crap we haven't given this person a lego in hours system, while best case scenario it was confirmed as an entirely separate roll that never means you got a plan over a "real" legendary.
I assume most of the gold drops in treasure rifts come from breakables/chests, so...
Edit: Heh, 9550%+ GF on T6.
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I'm also spoilering this since there's no reason to clutter the thread with a wall of text I wrote while eating lunch.
It's a goose argument because you're not putting a carrot on a stick that's truly obtainable. It's using a stick with effectively no carrot. It's just not fun to go into a game knowing there's items you may truly never see no matter how much you play, so why bother continuing to grind? You can't ignore the items, they're not cosmetic where they're nice to have but unimportant in the grand scheme. A lot of them with that low a drop rate are game changing not just in a min-maxing way but a fun way that can drastically alter a skill or even whole class. Plus it's not like there's any skill attached to them, be it usually superficial grind skill like world firsts or genuine skill like winning Evo or breaking a world record speed run, warranting craptastic drop rates to embellish the reward aspect.
The gold exploit ruined the economy, not the AH itself. Hell, truly best in slot, end game items were traded via third party sites so you could charge more money for them than the max buyout prices on gold and real money AHs. Even with the gold flooded AH there wasn't a single item I couldn't sort by cheapest price and buy to try out a build. It would be abysmal rolls, like truly lowest possible rolls in every slot abysmal, but I'd be able to buy it just to mess with eventually. I care far less about being in T6/whatever endgame than being able to cycle whatever build I want on all the classes. While I'd be okay with it's return just so I could buy cheap, terribly rolled items again to mess with builds, we're past that stage where the AH likely matters. Which then gets into trading and other aspects where, as already mentioned, Blizz just spouts ruining your friend's experience over and over again.
The other ideas people already mentioned not covering boss farming seems telling. I agree that's a step back like the AH would likely be. It doesn't appear anyone liked the system when you had to do it for blacksmithing items, although there was additional baggage there too due to other RNG factors. But other games do it better if boss farming is what you find fun. You've got actual D2 and PoE for that. Or you've got completely other styles like Monster Hunter, where you're spending the bulk of the game boss farming, but the fights are so much more involved and different. Farming bosses doesn't offer anything compelling gameplay wise, there's other ways to make itemization more fun than running Ghom for twelve hours.
What would likely bring the most fun for everyone is buffed drop rates of some kind. One of the biggest complaints, possibly even just behind the AH complaints, for vanilla was never getting any gear meaning you could not ignore the AH to gear up. Things aren't that bad anymore, by any means, but there's definitely items that make or break your enjoyment, whatever and however serious that enjoyment might be. Prior to all the classes getting some love, and especially the Crusader's own buffs, it full akkan or bust. Just a shit class or best class in game with very little middle ground. SMK takes you from a demigod to full blown god status. Those things matter for tiered rifts because people are going to climb higher by the nature of it's current deign, regardless of their desire to make a leaderboard. The topic also comes up, a lot, since people are constantly hunting for one or two specific items.
If the argument shifts to player retention, like, what keeps people playing once they have every single drop in the game, then you move into where the items already are, and should be, balanced going forward; the rolls. Even if we spitball the perfect system for drops between Kadala, monsters, chests, whatever, giving us the perfect drop rate for items whether I play ten hours a day or ten minutes a week items still have to roll well. That's a great carrot to chase with the new content coming out whether you care about leaderboards or not because it keeps side grades coming while allowing the ever shrinking, but still possible, chance for upgrades. Then you have other carrots to chase in your legendary gem upgrades which will take some time as well. It looks like the game has plenty of things to chase and grind out in a good way going forward without needing to string along what's left of the player base with 1% drop rates.
The other aspect to all of this is just how good the game as whole truly is. Drop rates arguably need some love, and some of the stuff on 2.1 needs and is already getting some work, but overall we're all still here talking about and playing a very fun game. Issues like never seeing a SMK stand out that much more because of how solid everything else is.
Also, I'm assuming legendary gems are a subtle buff to the gearing curve, in that their power will facilitate moving up a Torment level.
The few that I did felt great. I think I got all of the gems now, and was getting 2-3 legendaries off each end boss at the higher rift levels after I did. Note, I've only done like 3 passes through the system, but overall it feels good. I may be weird in the idea that I actually like that they removed gold/item drops from the trash, and you can just focus on killing stuff and keep moving all the way to the end.
Nice, that sounds pretty good.
As far as going to the next level... does the key get upgraded for you to return at your leisure, or do all the grift levels have to chain together as one continuous session?
First thing I got?
Quetzalcoatl.
And then a bunch of other random shit that I turned into a pile of dust/shards.
Not what I was hoping for, but hey, at least I started off with a bang.
For a flip of that, I actually DO find that fun. I think it's really cool if there's some stuff that's so rare I may not ever even see it much less own it. It kind of gives me a reason to always play the game no matter what and whenever I play I always have a goal even if I've maxxed everything else out.
I'm not saying games SHOULD be made that way since it's a wildly unpopular opinion but I certainly don't mind if they are.
Probably licensing and other crap like that.
I think it's because Diablo 3 was NEVER out on the PS4 while it was on the PS3. They want the PS3 version cheaper so people that already own it will buy it to get the new stuff.
I feel like, even if I did this, I'd just be running around letting things do damage for me to even more of an extreme. At least now I feel like I'm doing something shooting off Explosive Toads with my Flayer to generate fetishes.
Trying to figure out if I should try to gamble Zuni chest & mojo or focus on getting a Harrington or better Taskers (ugh).
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