 | On Enchanting Legacy Items(1) | Category: GeneralFebruary-5-2014 2:34 PM PST (9 years ago)  |
| Okay, please don't redirect this to the Reaper of Souls forum because I actually want more people to see this and/or give their input. So this whole "Legacy items can no longer be enchanted" news got plenty of players riled up, understandably. For the people who managed to miss everything: As far as I know, legacy items cannot be enchanted to level 70 quality. The base stats, especially main stats, will be lower. Keep it that way. As for the fear of third party sales, bind the legacy legendaries as you would Loot 2.0 ones. Currently, items enchant values that are equivalent to the item's level. However, there's a major change coming in the next build, and this thread was the most appropriate to communicate it in given the topic at hand. In the next Beta patch, Legacy items (or items that drop prior to Patch 2.0.1) will no longer be able to be enchanted. This was a decision we ultimately made because certain Legacy items, when enchanted, became disproportionately strong compared to new items, which isn't the intent. However, there's an interesting "bug," if you'd like to call it, that will result from this change in the next Beta patch - all items gained up until the patch will no longer be able to be enchanted. This is an artifact of the fix implementation, and we felt it prudent to communicate this as soon as we could for those of you in the Beta. All items that drop in Patch 2.0.1 and forward will be able to be enchanted, so this shouldn't be an issue as we move into the live patch and onward to the expansion launch. *Edited in some additional clarification* There are many Legacy items that qualify as "disproportionately strong" when enchanted. These include: - Chantodo's Will (innate APoC and high APS) - Calamity (high IAS and crit damage) - Echoing Fury (high APS if all you care about is DPS and not its annoying Fear) - high-end trifecta or quadfecta jewelry pieces ...etc. Of course, some level 70 items in the current Closed Beta can beat out enchanted Legacy gear, but that's the problem. Only some of the new items are good enough. How come no one really uses Lacuni Prowlers in RoS? Because bracers like Warzechian Armguards (+movement speed on destroying object), Ancient Parthan Defenders (boosts damage reduction when stunning enemies), Reaper’s Wraps (replenishes resources through picking up health globes) offer the high base stats and the special powers to beat out generic stat sticks like Lacuni Prowlers, even when enchanted. How about powerful items like The Witching Hour and Mempo of Twilight? Honestly, it's actually much easier to replace the latter. I personally haven't even used a Mempo my entire time playing the Beta. There are many desirable items that can replace it, especially those that aid in resource management. But for The Witching Hour, the IAS and CD can be really, really difficult to give up. However, like for Lacuni Prowlers, there are quite a few desirable belts out there that players can see as viable replacements. Belts like Harrington Waistguard (+100% damage for 10 seconds when opening a chest/flipping corpse, etc.) are epic—try snapshotting this effect—and its high base stats can at least trounce the EHP offered from an enchanted Witching Hour. Then there's Razor Strop (deal 100% weapon damage within 20 yards upon picking up a health globe) that can add a ton of eDPS to your farming build when combined with other health globe items such as Ira’s Glass Of Life and Rakoff's Glass of Life (amulet and ring, respectively; enemies killed have a bonus chance to drop globes), Solanium (mace, critical hits have chance to spawn globes)... synergy! Now, Solanium is a great item and can be used in very interesting ways as previously mentioned. However, it is very, very likely that it can be beaten by an enchanted Legacy weapon simply because it is a mace (low base APS at 1.20), it's Loot 2.0 so it cannot have high bonus weapon%, and it cannot roll crit damage. Let's say it rolled 2100 DPS, 700 main stats, and a socket to be generous. So now let's say the player has a fantastic Legacy Echoing Fury that he enchanted to 2500 base DPS to go with its 1.45 APS, 90% crit damage and socket. Just comparing the two weapons on my current wizard set up, the enchanted Echoing Fury beats out Solanium by nearly 20% extra sheet DPS. No matter what kind of health globes build you're running, it's going to be really tough to replace the solid base DPS. This is a weapons issue. When I was playing in the F&F Beta, I ditched my Legacy weapons almost instantly upon hitting level 70. Why? Because the weapons in the F&F Beta reached 3K+ base DPS. If that were the case in the Closed Beta, where enchanted weapons like Chantodo's Will and Calamity can only reach 2500 base DPS, players will have to think twice before picking which weapons to use. Do I go for the 3K base DPS Loot 2.0 weapon with the special power? Or do I pick the old enchanted Chantodo's Will for way less damage, but with better resource management? Also, in the F&F Beta, main stats (str, dex, int) on Legendary items could reach over 900. Currently, in the Closed Beta, enchanting a Legacy Legendary item got you into the 400ish range. Which would you prefer? The old Legacy Natalya's set (+2 Discipline regen per sec) with 400 dex, little to no vitality (or 400 vit, little to no dex) on four pieces for the Disc regen, 130 dex and 7% crit chance bonuses? Or the Loot 2.0 Natalya's set where you can get 900+ dex and vitality across the board, AR or armor, plus the set bonuses of 250 extra dex, 20 bonus Disc, 7% crit chance, and a special Rain of Vengeance bonus? Yes, you can probably stay in Smokescreen forever in combination with Night Stalker running a Legacy Nat's set, but is it worth it? Perhaps? At least you'd think twice? I say bring back the Loot 2.0 stats from F&F Beta and allow Legacy items to be enchanted, however, only to the levels they currently enjoy in the Closed Beta. That way, they will never be better than Loot 2.0 level 70 items in terms of raw power. However, you still allow players who want to bring in their old gear the freedom to choose how long they want to hold onto such gear before they inevitably (important: this must be the case) give them up for better items. Worried about players getting stats that are way too high and tackling higher difficulties too soon? Well, just up the monster HP and boost their damage to balance out the increase in player power. Boost Loot 2.0 level 70 items up, or scale down how well Legacy items can reroll in comparison to the max stats on level 70 items. One or the other. Edit: from my beloved wizard community: What would the reaction have been if they buffed all RoS loot (and difficulty) to the point where a rerolled legacy gg WH, quint ring, etc. was complete garbage in comparison? Would it not have been the same? Ah, but basic human psychology. Buffing/giving hurts less than nerfing/taking away. Humans are generally very loss averse. With "sunk cost," people also tend to "dig in" with losses and continue to try to recoup them, until they reach a psychological breaking point where they feel like "all is lost." But yes, you are correct. The effective result would have been the same. The psychological hit though is much worse. It's kind of like the F&F beta where the drop rates were super high -- then they nerfed them to super low. People freaked out because it was a nerf, and it hit them right in the psychology. Another observation regarding enchanting Legacy gear: Enchanting Legacy gear doesn't necessarily only benefit the currently "GG geared" players. I play with all sorts of players. Elitists, family men and women, the working class, super casuals, players who dedicate 10 hours a day running the game, and players who dedicate 1 hour a week running the game. When I was running the F&F Beta and the current Closed Beta, even the super casual players were able to "catch up" to me in terms of character "power" because of the ability to enchant Legacy items. They were then able to utilize the enchanted Legacy items to speed up the acquisition of Loot 2.0 Level 70 items and start their progression toward higher difficulty levels. These are players who currently have less than half my characters' DPS and EHP levels. Enchanting evens the playing field a little more, if that's a concern for players right now. If anything, highly geared players gain a little power, lesser geared players gain a ton of power. Removing the ability to enchant Legacy gear leaves everyone where they are and the high end players still have a leg up on everyone else... again, if that's a concern at all. Thoughts? Comments? Try to be civil, please. ________________________________________________ Diablo III MVP | Forever a Wizard YouTube Channel: http://youtube.com/Jae7ch Twitter: @Jaetch | Twitch: http://twitch.tv/jaetch | ||
 | On Enchanting Legacy Items(395) | February-6-2014 7:00 PM PST (9 years ago) |
allow Legacy items to be enchanted, however, only to the levels they currently enjoy in the Closed Beta. This isn't a bad idea, and one that we'd totally be open to... if we weren't this close to launch. Simply put, at this juncture, we don't have time for working out the bugs and doing the tuning passes to make sure this feature works properly. It was something we considered, but had to pass on in favor of working on other areas of the game. Ultimately, we'd be working on a feature where, in either case, players will eventually replace the gear in question. This just happens a little sooner now. why are people afraid of inflation in stats for a game anyway - its just a game not our world economy. Inflation can, at a certain point, cause numerical values to become less meaningful. When numbers get too big, it's often overwhelming. During the Friends & Family Beta, we received exactly that kind of feedback from both our internal and external testers. The jump in power was too significant, and the journey lost some of its oomph in the process. That's why we scaled it back. We may have scaled it back a bit too far, and there are some changes in the new Beta patch (especially for 2-handed weapons) that should help some of the items that were impacted the most. We've also been working on tuning other aspects of the game, such as monster health and power, to make sure it aligns with the current itemization design. Buffing adding to the game is much better then nerfing and taking away. Increasing power isn't always the answer, and decreasing power is almost never the popular route for players. There are times, however, when these adjustments are necessary. With patch 2.0.1 and the expansion, we are making a huge fundamental shift to itemization, and that shift is intended to create more meaningful decisions and an item game that’s better balanced on the whole. We want there to be a noticeable and potentially difficult choice when you're picking between raw power or survivability. And we want you to consider balancing those stats, and swapping some items around to account for something new. Currently, items have too much power potential, and it’s made many stats feel disproportionately strong compared to others. Balancing those stats on your characters was often not much of a choice, because you could simply have all of them in nearly every slot. This resulted in limited decision making, and the item game itself wasn’t as interesting as we’d like it to be. It probably wasn’t as interesting as many of you liked it be, either – or at least that’s the feedback we’ve received. In order to address those issues, we effectively had to create a new baseline for itemization. Simple tuning wasn’t going to cut it. As a result of those changes and with that new baseline in play, characters are not as powerful (in terms of raw numbers) are they are currently on the live game. That’s intended, and likely what a lot of you are reacting so strongly to. However, we didn’t just make adjustments to items; we also revisited monster power, difficulty, skills, pacing, density, and more with the new baseline in mind. The entire game has undergone significant rebalancing to help support new itemization and make sure everything works well together. It's a major design change, and I understand that it's jarring. I also understand that it might not feel great right now, either. It sucks to have power taken away; we totally get that as gamers, and it’s not something we like to do willy-nilly. But ideally the adjustment period should be temporary, and what’s more is that these changes should be better for the long-term health of the game and your experience as well. This is actually why it’s important (or why we feel it’s important) for Legacy items to attrition a little more quickly than what we had previously designed when beta launched, as they’re artifacts of an older system and don’t really mesh well with the new item game. They’re effectively outliers, and what we found is that players with these items would feel like they never found upgrades while playing, because they could simply enchant those older items continuously. And yes, they would be more powerful, because they were designed under what’s effectively now a different system where items had much more power potential, albeit less variety. Rather than retroactively change these items or wiping them, we’re simply restricting them from being enchantable; this seems like a fair compromise to us, especially since enchanting was tuned and balanced under the new itemization baseline. These items aren’t going anywhere, and you’ll still get to use them for a while – but upgrades will come more quickly because new items have more options and variety. Think of it like a new coat of paint. I understand that the old one was nice to look at, but this one really brings the whole room together instead of just being an appreciable shade. :) | ||
