Well things fell into place pretty quickly, I only have to cube 12 more affixes and get 3 gems to 75 and I'm done with the season and get to collect a goblin angel pet. Now I have to decide if I want to farm up the new crusader set to give that a try.
Yeah I just need to Cube some more stuff now. If I run the new challenge rift maybe I can avoid having to do to many bounties.
I hate the set dungeons so much. Worst part of the season. The monk ones seem to be quite painfully deviating from normal playstyle as well that makes them worse.
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
+5
KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
Uliana one is the worst. Try the one that has dashing strike buffs - I don't monk, so I can't remember its name - or the sweeping winds one. Both are pretty easy to achieve the primary and secondary achievements, especially if you have a UE DH cleaning up the trash behind you.
Or make a barb for the sole purpose of doing the IK set dungeon. Hands down the easiest in the game. EVERY necro dungeon is 2nd easiest in game.
Set dungeons are also the only thing holding me back from season completion. Well, that and cubing a bunch of stuff.
PoJ monk is going well - right now i'm just farming GR90/T16 normals solo - it's a nice chill way to slaughter all the things. Managed to get ancients in most of my slots, though i'm still missing an Ancient OROTZ, Ceasar's Momento, Laminars of Justice (I have seen ancients of every other set chest piece at this point except that. Multiple.). And Ancient pants, but that requires mindlessly doing bounties and crafting to get ones that'll drop with double slots and decent stats and aaargh. Screw you bounties
Turns out Wreathe of Lighting plays real nice with a PoJ lighting setup - you get the +lighting damage bonuses on wreath, it contributes to GOTTA GO FAST, and it picks up the 15x multiplier, so it actually hits semi-hard. Bane of the Stricken is still better for anything past GR100, but at that point i feel like gotta go fast stops being a thing, and you're mostly foucsing on abusing tankyness to slowly rip everything down. (Also fun: a lighting setup plays real well with area damage & AS. and unlike Sunwuko, you can affoard to go for those since you dont need RCR).
At some point i'm going to gear up a crusader, and if Sunwuko's set dungeon proves too annoying, i'll gear up a barb - which i'll probably do anyway, just to compare flavors of Spinning To Winning
Is it me, or are goblins not piñatas like they used to be?
Regular goblins got nerfed pretty hard a long time ago. To make up for it now we have uhh, miscreants? that drop a guaranteed legendary and the blue fellas that split repeatedly and all drop a big pile of stuff.
Is it me, or are goblins not piñatas like they used to be?
Regular goblins got nerfed pretty hard a long time ago. To make up for it now we have uhh, miscreants? that drop a guaranteed legendary and the blue fellas that split repeatedly and all drop a big pile of stuff.
Plus normal rifts can spawn a Goblinfest (Something like 30+ gobbos all in one spot), the Vault always has at least 3-4 of them, out in the world you've got Bandit Shrines (Spawn 10-15 gobbos), as well as being able to find the Rainbow Gobbo (Portal to whimsydale, which is loot heaven, as well as chance on kill of any gobbo to a Vault portal)
I love those ooze goblins if for no other reason than the fact that if you kill them all in a short enough window of eachother they freeze the game while it tries to process all the drops.
I think lightning PoJ is officially my new favorite speed build. I swapped evasion for conviction, flash to dash, and of course tempest rush electric field. The dash is the key- it’s like someone mashed aether walker’d wiz teleports into whirlwind barb, and it’s so much fun.
I think lightning PoJ is officially my new favorite speed build. I swapped evasion for conviction, flash to dash, and of course tempest rush electric field. The dash is the key- it’s like someone mashed aether walker’d wiz teleports into whirlwind barb, and it’s so much fun.
Isn't it great? Especially on t16 when you can just slam into packs and the gibs go EVERYWHERE
I think lightning PoJ is officially my new favorite speed build. I swapped evasion for conviction, flash to dash, and of course tempest rush electric field. The dash is the key- it’s like someone mashed aether walker’d wiz teleports into whirlwind barb, and it’s so much fun.
I want to try to play tonight but no promises, feel free to crash my game if I’m on
We'll check and see if you're on. I'm just kidding since we both have UE fully kitted out of course. The new monk set is fun though and a nice change to autocasting.
Hit 70 and ~340k damage. I got a legendary gem that gives me 18.75% more damage for every legendary I have, so long as I don't have and set bonuses. Since I am the opposite of good at math, does that mean I do 93.75% more damage since I have 5 legendaries?
Hit 70 and ~340k damage. I got a legendary gem that gives me 18.75% more damage for every legendary I have, so long as I don't have and set bonuses. Since I am the opposite of good at math, does that mean I do 93.75% more damage since I have 5 legendaries?
I thiiiiiiink so. Just a note that the "damage" stat on your character pane is pretty misleading. The source of TRUE ULTIMATE POWER in D3 tends to be finding what stuff is damage multipliers, and stringing as many of those together as you can for a given attack. like my damage pane shows that i have 1351k damage right now. In truth at baseline i start hitting for several hundred million damage, and once i actually flip the switches my build needs mid combat, i start doing BILLIONS of damage. (I'm yet to pull off getting a T behind my damage, but i've seen my necro hit for 900b before, so it's doable!)
Like i'm using the PoJ set, which is focused on tempest rush. So amongst other things, i've got a 15k multipliers (Yes, really), a 600% multiplier from my cubed weapon, a 25% multiplier for channelling skills from my cubed armor a 524% multiplier from my mainhand, my bracers give me another 787% on tempest rush if my enemy's blind/frozen/stunned, one of my legendary gems gives me 51.6% more on everything once it's stacked, another gives me 37.50% to everything if they're under cc... you get the idea.
My first take on this is that angelic/demonic/ancestral sounds more annoying than interesting. The example items were like halfway disabled, that’s weird to me. Maybe if it were 3-4 mods + 1-2 “power mods” or whatever that might be better?
The consumable that applies legendary powers to a rare actually sounds like a cool way to “craft” an alternate version of an item... but since it sounds like it could be applied to any rare, that sounds bad. I don’t want good rares and consumables piling up in my stash while I wait to ensure I’m not duplicating effects. Also, part of the decision making that comes from “if I use this I can’t use this” goes right out the window.
Oh, but that last part is referred to as “ancient legendary replacement”, i.e. no d3-style ancient legendaries, so at least there’s that.
Honestly, i'm pretty cyncial about all of this until we see how it works as a whole. Like D3's ancient legendaries do not in and of themselves bother me. They're just an extra plateu of power (And a useful on/off switch for LoN/Augmenting). What IS a problem is that you can only re-roll a single stat on an item, and there's no way to take a good item and push it closer to being what you need. Which results in some pretty crazy "This ring didnt roll this exact three stats, so it's worthless" situations. That and there's no way to upgrade an item into Ancient status, which seems like an oversight (Even if it took like feeding ten other ancient items to upgrade one into ancient, it'd be worth it)
If i had my druthers, i'd take something like D3's system as a base, then add a way to take say a legendary fist weapon, do soething akin to disgea's item world to it so you can max out a stat it did roll (or you rolled onto it), and then smash it apart to extract that - So you have say, Legendary Essence of Fist Attack speed - which you can then drop into another Legendary fist to give it that stat.
Like one of the strongest parts of D3's itemization is that build-complete is pretty achievable in a reasonable amount of time, but build perfect requires a lot of additional work. The flaw is that build perfect is mostly down to the mercy of pure rng.
Agreed on the Angelic/demonic/ancestral sounds annoying. I think the intent is cool, but frankly my experience is that you'll just end up with "This is the mandatory of these stats you need and the rolls you get". It might work better if it was a respectable paragon-points style thing, and if items came with at least two modifiers from different fields (So this item is angelic and demonic, and these act as extra bonuses you cna pick up beyond the baseline of what the item gives you).
Dunno! These are just my thoughts - it's worth noting that i tend to like having discreet, easily achievable builds rather than trying to figure out what i can put together baed on what drops (I enjoy that more in an Rougelike style context, when the game is balanced around that)
If the angelic/demonic effects were cumulative somehow and allowed for some sort of skill choices that could be interesting. Kind of lightside/darkside thing. Pick a side, get some powers, maybe a skill tree you can pick through. The more powerful you become, the further along a path you go, the more graphical affects you start to attain. Halos, angelic wings, demonic flames, etc.
Malthael was disturbed by the thought that mortals get to choose to be good or evil. So maybe in D4 let us actually choose to be angelic or demonic. Maybe have that add some flavor to the skills we use.
My first take on this is that angelic/demonic/ancestral sounds more annoying than interesting. The example items were like halfway disabled, that’s weird to me. Maybe if it were 3-4 mods + 1-2 “power mods” or whatever that might be better?
The consumable that applies legendary powers to a rare actually sounds like a cool way to “craft” an alternate version of an item... but since it sounds like it could be applied to any rare, that sounds bad. I don’t want good rares and consumables piling up in my stash while I wait to ensure I’m not duplicating effects. Also, part of the decision making that comes from “if I use this I can’t use this” goes right out the window.
I agree. And not only that, having to loot and evaluate every single Rare, even in the end game, since it might have the potential to be a top tier item can be a real drag on game pace.
One of the things people clamor the most for is rares being endgame viable. I'm not sure I understand the appeal. But this would accomplish it.
I do like that they're committing to legendary affixes as necessary for builds. Build-defining items are fun.
On angelic/demonic/ancestral power, I like that they're giving evocative, flavorful names to attributes that would otherwise sound technical, and I like the idea of stats you want to bring to certain breakpoints (like resistances in D2, without the downside of sudden death if you don't fulfill the requirements) but I'm not sure these are the right stats to use. They might be generic enough that every build wants at least some of each, but the pace of ARPGs makes it so that prolonged negative effects on enemies is a lot less useful than prolonged positive effects on yourself and your allies, for the simple reason that you change enemies quickly.
And random procs can be useless or great, all depending on how they're balanced.
+1
KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
oh i think I figured out why I dislike the idea of using angelic/demonic/ancestral to gate upgrades or abilities or whatever
Its because requiring a certain amount makes them stat requirements and D3 has no stat requirements for anything which is awesome because stat requirements are boring
Though weirdly if it was just "have X pieces of demonic gear equipped unlock this demonic upgrade" that seems fine to me because that is just set bonus gating rather than stat gating
I wonder how many players enjoy the process of trying to assemble a build from an inventory full of items with minor variations in stats. I have no meaningful way to evaluate what the D4 designers are proposing, because I don't enjoy deckbuilding (or the genre-appropriate equivalent of that). I don't have the mental knack for it, and the act of doing it feels (to me!) like groping around in the dark without feeling progress. I netdeck and look up cookie-cutter builds all day every day, because setting that goal and heading off in that direction feels more satisfying to me.
Obviously, there are some people who enjoy sifting the grains of sand and building the decks and builds that I then shameless crib. Is that the majority of players?
Anyway, I'm not really sure what the point of "end-game viable rares" is. I don't understand the motivation behind it. Are the designers saying that rares will have a larger stat budget, while legendaries have a smaller stats budget but a special and unique effect? So stapling a legendary power onto a rare would be strictly better than just a legendary? Or are they saying that if you have a perfectly-rolled rare, you won't need to replace it with a poorly-rolled legendary just because the legendary has a strong power? I mean, I guess that's useful, but I'd rather they just gave us more tools to tweak the stats we want on the items we get. I think D3's enchanting - while often frustrating - is so much better than the alternative. I know that a defining characteristic of ARPGs is showers of loot, but 99% of it ends up being completely disposable. D3's disenchanting system lets you turns unwanted loot into a resource you use on improving the loot you do want, which is cool; however, what if instead of giving you generic resources, the "disenchanted" version of an item somehow reflected the stats of the item? What if you could distill stats out of items and then pour those stats into other items? I feel like that would be less frustrating due to a smoother RNG curve, but at the same time it might get more frustrating in the long run - rather than getting some decent items and going "OK, this good enough to live with", you might feel like you have to keep farming the resources to optimize those items.
I dunno, I guess I think I want more direct control, but it's possible that this would be a less satisfying experience.
Really, my take-away from all of this is that the devs are trying to find ways to get away from cookie cutter builds.
D3 is pretty much always boiled down to cookie cutters. There's always a "right way" to build for each set, and if you deviate from that, your performance will drop.
All of their new systems, from the angelic/demonic/ancestral, to being able to apply legendary affixes to rare items, to the general philosophy of the game, it all feels like they're trying to make gear a more fluid process where there isn't necessarily one right way to do it. It seems as if they are trying very hard to give players the ability to be successful with whatever gear they find, whether that gear meets some arbitrary cookie cutter threshold or not.
All of this, to me, feels like they are trying to push players into "play how you want" and "use what you have."
0
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
One of the things people clamor the most for is rares being endgame viable. I'm not sure I understand the appeal. But this would accomplish it.
I do like that they're committing to legendary affixes as necessary for builds. Build-defining items are fun.
On angelic/demonic/ancestral power, I like that they're giving evocative, flavorful names to attributes that would otherwise sound technical, and I like the idea of stats you want to bring to certain breakpoints (like resistances in D2, without the downside of sudden death if you don't fulfill the requirements) but I'm not sure these are the right stats to use. They might be generic enough that every build wants at least some of each, but the pace of ARPGs makes it so that prolonged negative effects on enemies is a lot less useful than prolonged positive effects on yourself and your allies, for the simple reason that you change enemies quickly.
And random procs can be useless or great, all depending on how they're balanced.
I think the PoE system where Legendary/Unique items have interesting properties that synergize with your build, while Rares are much more powerful in base stats, really allows for interesting builds. This can potentially kill 6 piece sets dead, which I think would be an actual boon to the D3 design when it comes to viable builds. Having build-defining items is always a good feeling when that particular item drops and I think they'd be crazy to remove it.
I also love the idea of demonic powers as outlined in that dev manifesto. PoE has builds that improve your damage when you self inflict harm of some kind, or put yourself at low life either through said damage or Blood Magic reservation. It's a cool way to really push the advanced features of the games system forward and I think they're on the right track so far.
I don't know what to think about the stat-gated affixes. It seems like a potentially interesting mechanic, where you design a build around a stat specialty. But it's only really interesting if each stat has a meaningful and understandable identity. They describe angelic/demonic/ancestral as being defensive/offensive/proc stats respectively, but then they show an example where demonic is required for a resist bonus, just because it's Fire I guess? If the role of each stat is not clear then it becomes confusing and feels like an arbitrary restriction on what items you can actually use.
I'd rather see the stat definitions be centered around play styles than simple offense/defense. Like one for mobility, one for tanking, one for glass cannon. They all would have damage buffs because every build always needs to optimize for damage. So it's sort of like Str/Dex/Int, but not tied to any one class at all, rather how you want to play your class.
Zek on
+1
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I don't know what to think about the stat-gated affixes. It seems like a potentially interesting mechanic, where you design a build around a stat specialty. But it's only really interesting if each stat has a meaningful and understandable identity. They describe angelic/demonic/ancestral as being defensive/offensive/proc stats respectively, but then they show an example where demonic is required for a resist bonus, just because it's Fire I guess? If the role of each stat is not clear then it becomes confusing and feels like an arbitrary restriction on what items you can actually use.
I'd rather see the stat definitions be centered around play styles than simple offense/defense. Like one for mobility, one for tanking, one for glass cannon. They all would have damage buffs because every build always needs to optimize for damage. So it's sort of like Str/Dex/Int, but not tied to any one class at all, rather how you want to play your class.
I don't like the idea of arbitrarily tying your fire res to a demonic thing, but I think it would be cool if your fire resistance was increased 2 times or whatever when you were burning, and there was a weapon that applied burning to you when it ignited the enemy. Then you could regen out whatever damage tics happens with the ignition, and bam, huge fire res ready to go plus your dude looks fucking awesome because they're on fire.
"Play with whatever gear you've got!" is a noble goal, but I do not believe that "no cookie-cutter builds" or "best-in-slot" is achievable in a game based on numbers and stable item-generation rules.
I believe it's possible to make best-in-slot items rare enough to be unattainable, though, sure
+2
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
"Play with whatever gear you've got!" is a noble goal, but I do not believe that "no cookie-cutter builds" or "best-in-slot" is achievable in a game based on numbers and stable item-generation rules.
I believe it's possible to make best-in-slot items rare enough to be unattainable, though, sure
I think if you make the top tier/perfect rolls significantly better than typical rolls, this can be achieved.
"Play with whatever gear you've got!" is a noble goal, but I do not believe that "no cookie-cutter builds" or "best-in-slot" is achievable in a game based on numbers and stable item-generation rules.
I believe it's possible to make best-in-slot items rare enough to be unattainable, though, sure
In D3 the bar is really low because the designers themselves are picking BiS in so many cases and making it the obvious choice by a thousand percent or more, between such a focus on set items and unique gear effects buffing specific skills a billion times. Just getting away from that design philosophy itself is notable and I think that is all the D4 devs are saying at this point.
There can be no build diversity when your legendaries have synergistic damage multipliers that stack with each other, or entire sets are designed around specific skills. D3's itemization is designed to actively reduce diversity in favor of hand-designed builds. I think getting away from skill damage multipliers as legendary bonuses is the very first change they should make.
0
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
There can be no build diversity when your legendaries have synergistic damage multipliers that stack with each other, or entire sets are designed around specific skills. D3's itemization is designed to actively reduce diversity in favor of hand-designed builds. I think getting away from skill damage multipliers as legendary bonuses is the very first change they should make.
Synergize with damage types as opposed to skills or specific things.
I hope that D4 will balance legendary powers, and single vs aoe damage, such that you can effectively use multiple attacks.
1 Mobility + 4 cooldown/support + 1 Damage, all eggs in one basket style, is so shallow.
Conversely, it is important to have some builds that don't require complex juggling of which buttons when.
To steal an example from MMOs,ff14 has very fixed builds, and relatively fixed rotations/priority systems for characters. So instead the complexity is found in the boss fights, which at their best resemble very intricate dances
There can be no build diversity when your legendaries have synergistic damage multipliers that stack with each other, or entire sets are designed around specific skills. D3's itemization is designed to actively reduce diversity in favor of hand-designed builds. I think getting away from skill damage multipliers as legendary bonuses is the very first change they should make.
What's funny is all these things are how D3 used to be and was basically until Seasons started.
There can be no build diversity when your legendaries have synergistic damage multipliers that stack with each other, or entire sets are designed around specific skills. D3's itemization is designed to actively reduce diversity in favor of hand-designed builds. I think getting away from skill damage multipliers as legendary bonuses is the very first change they should make.
What's funny is all these things are how D3 used to be and was basically until Seasons started.
Yeah, ignoring vanilla (with its total absence of interesting itemization), RoS had much less obscene legendary affixes at launch. They were amazing compared to 1.0, but no silly 10x damage bonuses anywhere. I'm not entirely sure why they started blowing up the set bonuses in every subsequent patch. I think it was mostly because they overcompensated for vanilla's shitty difficulty with the "no nerfs" philosophy they adopted in RoS. Keeping the classes balanced without nerfing anybody means out of control mudflation. I think greater rift leaderboards further exacerbated it when they started aiming to balance the game for perfectly min/maxed builds - that's way easier to do when you tightly control itemization by putting all the power in set bonuses and their assist legendaries. D3's itemization design is not without its merits, and they didn't end up pushing the game for longevity anyway after a few years, but I hope they learn something from all that.
On the other hand, the builds enabled by the crazy set bonuses tend to be more fun to play than, say the Vanilla/early RoS experience (or basically the 1-70 experience as it still is). It's a blast being able to rapid fire spray Multishots in between vault dodges for a long time before running out of Hatred compared to, for example, firing 3 Cluster Arrows and then slowly building back up Hatred while plinking out Hungering Arrows.
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Yeah I just need to Cube some more stuff now. If I run the new challenge rift maybe I can avoid having to do to many bounties.
Nintendo ID: Incindium
PSN: IncindiumX
Origin: KafkaAU B-Net: Kafka#1778
Or make a barb for the sole purpose of doing the IK set dungeon. Hands down the easiest in the game. EVERY necro dungeon is 2nd easiest in game.
Meh I'll get around to it
PoJ monk is going well - right now i'm just farming GR90/T16 normals solo - it's a nice chill way to slaughter all the things. Managed to get ancients in most of my slots, though i'm still missing an Ancient OROTZ, Ceasar's Momento, Laminars of Justice (I have seen ancients of every other set chest piece at this point except that. Multiple.). And Ancient pants, but that requires mindlessly doing bounties and crafting to get ones that'll drop with double slots and decent stats and aaargh. Screw you bounties
Turns out Wreathe of Lighting plays real nice with a PoJ lighting setup - you get the +lighting damage bonuses on wreath, it contributes to GOTTA GO FAST, and it picks up the 15x multiplier, so it actually hits semi-hard. Bane of the Stricken is still better for anything past GR100, but at that point i feel like gotta go fast stops being a thing, and you're mostly foucsing on abusing tankyness to slowly rip everything down. (Also fun: a lighting setup plays real well with area damage & AS. and unlike Sunwuko, you can affoard to go for those since you dont need RCR).
At some point i'm going to gear up a crusader, and if Sunwuko's set dungeon proves too annoying, i'll gear up a barb - which i'll probably do anyway, just to compare flavors of Spinning To Winning
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Regular goblins got nerfed pretty hard a long time ago. To make up for it now we have uhh, miscreants? that drop a guaranteed legendary and the blue fellas that split repeatedly and all drop a big pile of stuff.
Plus normal rifts can spawn a Goblinfest (Something like 30+ gobbos all in one spot), the Vault always has at least 3-4 of them, out in the world you've got Bandit Shrines (Spawn 10-15 gobbos), as well as being able to find the Rainbow Gobbo (Portal to whimsydale, which is loot heaven, as well as chance on kill of any gobbo to a Vault portal)
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Isn't it great? Especially on t16 when you can just slam into packs and the gibs go EVERYWHERE
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Ooh, tell me more about you carrying me?
Steam: betsuni7
We'll check and see if you're on. I'm just kidding since we both have UE fully kitted out of course. The new monk set is fun though and a nice change to autocasting.
Steam: betsuni7
https://us.diablo3.com/en/blog/23230076?linkId=100000009338616
D3: HexDex#1281, PSN: DireOtter, Live: DireOtter
I thiiiiiiink so. Just a note that the "damage" stat on your character pane is pretty misleading. The source of TRUE ULTIMATE POWER in D3 tends to be finding what stuff is damage multipliers, and stringing as many of those together as you can for a given attack. like my damage pane shows that i have 1351k damage right now. In truth at baseline i start hitting for several hundred million damage, and once i actually flip the switches my build needs mid combat, i start doing BILLIONS of damage. (I'm yet to pull off getting a T behind my damage, but i've seen my necro hit for 900b before, so it's doable!)
Like i'm using the PoJ set, which is focused on tempest rush. So amongst other things, i've got a 15k multipliers (Yes, really), a 600% multiplier from my cubed weapon, a 25% multiplier for channelling skills from my cubed armor a 524% multiplier from my mainhand, my bracers give me another 787% on tempest rush if my enemy's blind/frozen/stunned, one of my legendary gems gives me 51.6% more on everything once it's stacked, another gives me 37.50% to everything if they're under cc... you get the idea.
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Ill be playing over the next few days. Can't tonight unfortunately.
My first take on this is that angelic/demonic/ancestral sounds more annoying than interesting. The example items were like halfway disabled, that’s weird to me. Maybe if it were 3-4 mods + 1-2 “power mods” or whatever that might be better?
The consumable that applies legendary powers to a rare actually sounds like a cool way to “craft” an alternate version of an item... but since it sounds like it could be applied to any rare, that sounds bad. I don’t want good rares and consumables piling up in my stash while I wait to ensure I’m not duplicating effects. Also, part of the decision making that comes from “if I use this I can’t use this” goes right out the window.
Honestly, i'm pretty cyncial about all of this until we see how it works as a whole. Like D3's ancient legendaries do not in and of themselves bother me. They're just an extra plateu of power (And a useful on/off switch for LoN/Augmenting). What IS a problem is that you can only re-roll a single stat on an item, and there's no way to take a good item and push it closer to being what you need. Which results in some pretty crazy "This ring didnt roll this exact three stats, so it's worthless" situations. That and there's no way to upgrade an item into Ancient status, which seems like an oversight (Even if it took like feeding ten other ancient items to upgrade one into ancient, it'd be worth it)
If i had my druthers, i'd take something like D3's system as a base, then add a way to take say a legendary fist weapon, do soething akin to disgea's item world to it so you can max out a stat it did roll (or you rolled onto it), and then smash it apart to extract that - So you have say, Legendary Essence of Fist Attack speed - which you can then drop into another Legendary fist to give it that stat.
Like one of the strongest parts of D3's itemization is that build-complete is pretty achievable in a reasonable amount of time, but build perfect requires a lot of additional work. The flaw is that build perfect is mostly down to the mercy of pure rng.
Agreed on the Angelic/demonic/ancestral sounds annoying. I think the intent is cool, but frankly my experience is that you'll just end up with "This is the mandatory of these stats you need and the rolls you get". It might work better if it was a respectable paragon-points style thing, and if items came with at least two modifiers from different fields (So this item is angelic and demonic, and these act as extra bonuses you cna pick up beyond the baseline of what the item gives you).
Dunno! These are just my thoughts - it's worth noting that i tend to like having discreet, easily achievable builds rather than trying to figure out what i can put together baed on what drops (I enjoy that more in an Rougelike style context, when the game is balanced around that)
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Malthael was disturbed by the thought that mortals get to choose to be good or evil. So maybe in D4 let us actually choose to be angelic or demonic. Maybe have that add some flavor to the skills we use.
I do like that they're committing to legendary affixes as necessary for builds. Build-defining items are fun.
On angelic/demonic/ancestral power, I like that they're giving evocative, flavorful names to attributes that would otherwise sound technical, and I like the idea of stats you want to bring to certain breakpoints (like resistances in D2, without the downside of sudden death if you don't fulfill the requirements) but I'm not sure these are the right stats to use. They might be generic enough that every build wants at least some of each, but the pace of ARPGs makes it so that prolonged negative effects on enemies is a lot less useful than prolonged positive effects on yourself and your allies, for the simple reason that you change enemies quickly.
And random procs can be useless or great, all depending on how they're balanced.
Its because requiring a certain amount makes them stat requirements and D3 has no stat requirements for anything which is awesome because stat requirements are boring
Though weirdly if it was just "have X pieces of demonic gear equipped unlock this demonic upgrade" that seems fine to me because that is just set bonus gating rather than stat gating
Obviously, there are some people who enjoy sifting the grains of sand and building the decks and builds that I then shameless crib. Is that the majority of players?
Anyway, I'm not really sure what the point of "end-game viable rares" is. I don't understand the motivation behind it. Are the designers saying that rares will have a larger stat budget, while legendaries have a smaller stats budget but a special and unique effect? So stapling a legendary power onto a rare would be strictly better than just a legendary? Or are they saying that if you have a perfectly-rolled rare, you won't need to replace it with a poorly-rolled legendary just because the legendary has a strong power? I mean, I guess that's useful, but I'd rather they just gave us more tools to tweak the stats we want on the items we get. I think D3's enchanting - while often frustrating - is so much better than the alternative. I know that a defining characteristic of ARPGs is showers of loot, but 99% of it ends up being completely disposable. D3's disenchanting system lets you turns unwanted loot into a resource you use on improving the loot you do want, which is cool; however, what if instead of giving you generic resources, the "disenchanted" version of an item somehow reflected the stats of the item? What if you could distill stats out of items and then pour those stats into other items? I feel like that would be less frustrating due to a smoother RNG curve, but at the same time it might get more frustrating in the long run - rather than getting some decent items and going "OK, this good enough to live with", you might feel like you have to keep farming the resources to optimize those items.
I dunno, I guess I think I want more direct control, but it's possible that this would be a less satisfying experience.
D3 is pretty much always boiled down to cookie cutters. There's always a "right way" to build for each set, and if you deviate from that, your performance will drop.
All of their new systems, from the angelic/demonic/ancestral, to being able to apply legendary affixes to rare items, to the general philosophy of the game, it all feels like they're trying to make gear a more fluid process where there isn't necessarily one right way to do it. It seems as if they are trying very hard to give players the ability to be successful with whatever gear they find, whether that gear meets some arbitrary cookie cutter threshold or not.
All of this, to me, feels like they are trying to push players into "play how you want" and "use what you have."
I think the PoE system where Legendary/Unique items have interesting properties that synergize with your build, while Rares are much more powerful in base stats, really allows for interesting builds. This can potentially kill 6 piece sets dead, which I think would be an actual boon to the D3 design when it comes to viable builds. Having build-defining items is always a good feeling when that particular item drops and I think they'd be crazy to remove it.
I also love the idea of demonic powers as outlined in that dev manifesto. PoE has builds that improve your damage when you self inflict harm of some kind, or put yourself at low life either through said damage or Blood Magic reservation. It's a cool way to really push the advanced features of the games system forward and I think they're on the right track so far.
I'd rather see the stat definitions be centered around play styles than simple offense/defense. Like one for mobility, one for tanking, one for glass cannon. They all would have damage buffs because every build always needs to optimize for damage. So it's sort of like Str/Dex/Int, but not tied to any one class at all, rather how you want to play your class.
I don't like the idea of arbitrarily tying your fire res to a demonic thing, but I think it would be cool if your fire resistance was increased 2 times or whatever when you were burning, and there was a weapon that applied burning to you when it ignited the enemy. Then you could regen out whatever damage tics happens with the ignition, and bam, huge fire res ready to go plus your dude looks fucking awesome because they're on fire.
I believe it's possible to make best-in-slot items rare enough to be unattainable, though, sure
I think if you make the top tier/perfect rolls significantly better than typical rolls, this can be achieved.
In D3 the bar is really low because the designers themselves are picking BiS in so many cases and making it the obvious choice by a thousand percent or more, between such a focus on set items and unique gear effects buffing specific skills a billion times. Just getting away from that design philosophy itself is notable and I think that is all the D4 devs are saying at this point.
Synergize with damage types as opposed to skills or specific things.
Like, fire damage, or one-hander, or melee.
1 Mobility + 4 cooldown/support + 1 Damage, all eggs in one basket style, is so shallow.
Conversely, it is important to have some builds that don't require complex juggling of which buttons when.
To steal an example from MMOs,ff14 has very fixed builds, and relatively fixed rotations/priority systems for characters. So instead the complexity is found in the boss fights, which at their best resemble very intricate dances
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Yeah, ignoring vanilla (with its total absence of interesting itemization), RoS had much less obscene legendary affixes at launch. They were amazing compared to 1.0, but no silly 10x damage bonuses anywhere. I'm not entirely sure why they started blowing up the set bonuses in every subsequent patch. I think it was mostly because they overcompensated for vanilla's shitty difficulty with the "no nerfs" philosophy they adopted in RoS. Keeping the classes balanced without nerfing anybody means out of control mudflation. I think greater rift leaderboards further exacerbated it when they started aiming to balance the game for perfectly min/maxed builds - that's way easier to do when you tightly control itemization by putting all the power in set bonuses and their assist legendaries. D3's itemization design is not without its merits, and they didn't end up pushing the game for longevity anyway after a few years, but I hope they learn something from all that.