Chop Finale .... ROLL DAY~

Fantastic (if expensive) experimentation, and excellent commentary in this thread so far (ignoring the occasional melodramatic whine).


Wall-of-text notes (tl;dr bold):

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Chris wrote:

I was playing an MMORPG a few years ago. I spent a fair amount of time getting some pretty decent items. When the expansion came out, those items were completely inferior to simple quest rewards given in the starting area of the new content. That did not feel good to me as a player.

This is a big worry for me in the future of PoE. New content raising the gear ceiling by a large margin in a short amount of time will either piss off those who played a lot (the quote above) or be so rare that it stratifies the playerbase (and causes an entry cost to PvP, reduction in party play, etc).
Lots of content can be added in the 'seams' of the game, not just the super high end, that make it a lot more enjoyable without raising the ceiling, such as new _types_ of things, not just bigger numbers on existing things.

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ptt_frmr wrote:

My point is, given the odds here, I see no reason to ever spend orbs on crafting because trading is much more profitable. When everyone starts to realize this, demand for orbs will drop and they will devaluate more and more until only exalted and gcp are worth anything, because they are the only orbs with guaranteed success. That is exactly what is happening on the beta realm right now.

I'm not sure what the original connotation was to this, but it sounds fairly ideal to me. It's very liberating being able to expend jeweler's, chromatic's, alchemy's and the occasional fusing/regal on gear picked up through the game. Vendor recipes also enable this. A good number of them are used for crafting high-end rares, but it's pretty amazing that the exact same currency can be used elsewhere. pgems in d2 were indeed similar (namely shoring up resists with the color of choice and 6 psapphire caster armor).

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Sairony wrote:

I certainly agree that items are under valued & orbs over valued. However, it's currently a buyers market. When there's like ~20 people actually using the market forum and you get an awesome drop that interests perhaps 2 - 3 of those there's not going to be a whole lot of bidding action. At that point the alternative is to either accept the somewhat low bid ( but you know that you can buy rares at the same rates from those orbs ), or sell it to the vendor. This will probably get better when release hits and the player base grows.

The absolute worst is knowing that there's only one guy that has the unique you're looking for and plays in your (relative) timezone but is a complete asshat, rude or otherwise. I'm sure finding liquidity/reasonable traders will be reached with a larger playerbase (although that'll make forum and global chat trading pretty much impossible).

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Lo4f wrote:

Just as you have mace and scepter with different implicit mods and affix pools, the same should be done for dagger, staff, and wand. Leveling up a wand witch on spell damage wands is unfortunate. All my passives are in wand nodes, and firestorm is more efficient (using found items, level 14). I'd like to see better itemization instead of diluted affix pools:

Caster wand (implicit spell damage)- excludes physical scaling, accuracy, elemental damage (1-12 lightning), and attack speed modifiers

Hybrid wand (implicit elemental damage)- biased towards rolling mid-grade spell, and physical scaling modifiers

Pew pew wand (implicit accuracy)- excludes spell, cast speed, spell critical chance/damage modifiers

This is an amazing idea and deserves its own thread/redpost. Loads of new content and art would spring from this as well. Same with the "2h int weapon" that's currently MIA. I would be a bit worried about shrinking the affix pool too drastically, might be better to just push the curve on random affixes and make sure only the pure int wand can get the Foo% best spell damage mod, the hybrid gets the best elem damage from weapons, and the pew pew gets the best ed/aspd. New item types (with relevant affix pool changes) allows for optimization in super-rare/crafting land but also gives better, more flavorful items through normal gameplay, and enables new builds. Should definitely be a priority target (yeah yeah, next to the other 800 high priority targets on the beta list).

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Plethora wrote:

I get that if I want good items, not great, I should just buy them. The orbs are just so damn tempting to use! especially when i have a 5link. So i'm pretty demoralized and not wanting to play PoE any time soon, knowing that my weeks of grinding and seemingly exciting drops have yielded such a bad item.

Yes, trade trade trade. I imagine a large number of good but non-godly items go to Gruest just to save stash space. There's a huge difference of utility baked into the system until muling takes over with multiple accounts per person, and connecting people is a fairly large problem right now. I would love to see a simplified auction house which is simply "Host this item for all to see. If no one contacts you about it in X hours, auto-sell it to Gruest/Tarkleigh (your choice)." (Digressing pretty hard again.)
Just for the record, wanting a high-ed 5link is not exactly just a "good" item, but I'll leave that alone too.

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__Z__ wrote:

back in old rpg time : you can have a +1 sword with no mod, or +1 sword with other mods, but you can't have a +0 sword with mods. more damage and hit power is the first mandatory power for a magic weapon...

Absolutely, and it was a wise choice. This ties in very well to Lo4f's idea. Every spell wand will get some kind of spell damage (say, 20 implicit and ~20 on the lowest mod), every hybrid gets elemental damage or aspd or something, etc. In general, just shaping the affix pool curve per item type from a horrible hockeystick into a smoother exponential slope (combined with a step function) would do a whole lot of good.

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zriL wrote:

They should just make other mods better. Right now some mods could have their value doubled, people would still ignore them.

Buffing bad mods is also a way to make rolls more rewarding without making it easier to get the godly items, (which will need the damage mods anyway).

Adds 200-300 fire damage on a rare? Yes please, I'll take seven (and make it incompatible with the best %ed, ala Lo4f (I'm mentioning that idea a _lot_)).

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Deathtiny2266 wrote:

mirror: you could also use the actual "duplicated" system that prevents cloned items to be cloned again to the org. item too.

I wouldn't bother until this is an actual issue. Even then I doubt I'd bother. Unless Mirrors become suddenly more frequent or godly crafting becomes suddenly much easier (via any of the suggestions to allow '-1 mod' orbs or other such no-drawback orbs), this will take a very long time to reach. It will however make PvP a stellar pain in the ass, probably worth just disallowing mirror'd items in PvP at all. Again, until it's an actual problem, no point tackling it.

There seems like a fairly simple change that could be made which could improve item generation and smooth out some currency issues. Which is to have either guaranteed improvements at the cost of more orbs-- it would be easiest to apply this to something like fusing orbs.

Imagine you have a 5 socket item with no links, and you know that

1 fusing: 0 links -> 1 link
2 more fusing: 1 link -> 2 links
4 more fusing: 2 links -> 3 links
8 more fusing: 3 links -> 4 links
16 more fusing: 4 links -> 5 links.

Now you know you have a guaranteed result with N fusing. For instance you know you can go from 0 links to 4 links for 15 orbs, etc. Having fixed numbers like this would give the currency a more predictable value, which would be better in the long term, because people would actually continue to use it to trade rather than just trading rares for rares. I'm pretty sure the numbers I use in my example would need to be adjusted for higher links, or at least fusing drop rates changed, but it it's just an example anyway.

The second issue I haven't seen people mention is that it's a little odd as far as currency is concerned, that it takes the same amount of currency to turn a level 10 item into a rare that it takes to rare-ify a level 60 item. The level 60 item is certainly going to be used much longer if it turns out well, and it can easily roll better mods, so why does it take the same amount of currency? It just encourages people at low levels to deal with terrible equipment and save their orbs for later.

The simplest fix is to make orb'ing higher level items take more orbs, and to increase the drop rate of orbs at higher levels, so that both the low levels and the higher levels have appropriate amounts of currency for the expected duration of use for a piece of gear.

Finally, a suggestion for a new kind of orb, would be one that lets you destroy an existing item to pull one of its mods into the orb, which you could then apply to a different piece of gear. It would allow very deliberate crafting of rares, but to get the best mods they would still need to drop in the first place (and you might want to limit kind of mods can spawn on magic items compared to rares in that case).

Making sure the currency and crafting works smoothly is going to be key to PoE's long term success, as it's one of the main things that bothers me. The devs might also need to remember that being rewarding item-wise in the short term is just as important as the long term, because if the short term is too frustrating (ie. 1500 currency only produces a handful of useful items) players won't stick around and there wouldn't be a long term to worry about.

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pneuma wrote:

I wouldn't bother until this is an actual issue. Even then I doubt I'd bother. Unless Mirrors become suddenly more frequent or godly crafting becomes suddenly much easier (via any of the suggestions to allow '-1 mod' orbs or other such no-drawback orbs), this will take a very long time to reach. It will however make PvP a stellar pain in the ass, probably worth just disallowing mirror'd items in PvP at all. Again, until it's an actual problem, no point tackling it.

there should not be 5+ (that i know of) mirrors in this short of a small beta ladder. hard crafting further improves mirrors worth, not easy crafting. if ggg wands god mode super drop orb like mirror to spice things up thats cool, but make it much more rare than it is now.

me and lo4f have had talks about things like different weapon types for caster / hybrid / phys wand. its good part of the reason i rolled wands. id also vote for at the very least pure spell / pure phy wand/staffs every 20 levels of content if splitting them all up is to much of a headache.

(i feel honored that you put that much effort into a post in my thread, i almost feel my reply is inadequate lol)

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mailius wrote:

There seems like a fairly simple change that could be made which could improve item generation and smooth out some currency issues. Which is to have either guaranteed improvements at the cost of more orbs-- it would be easiest to apply this to something like fusing orbs.

made similar system post few pages back. im all for that type of system but against the fusing going past 4 for 100% success, and would vote every time to keep 5 rare and 6 super rare. or at the least make 4-5 cost 100+ for 100% and 5-6 be redic like 500.

going up +1 link in this game is a lot stronger than a lot of people realise. in many cases its almost and sometimes is better than doubling your weapon. thats how good links are. they cant come even somewhat easy at higher tiers.

id like a system that allows for 100% somehow also, but im also well aware that a system like that would cost enormous amounts of currency to use.

i would however rather the chances to link apply to +1 rather than a total re-roll. that was and is the biggest turn off to me of any system in the game. even item rolls.

i hate not being able to roll my huge near perfect dual mf chest with double defense mods for 6 link because its 5 link and cant risk messing it up.

id like to see the same odds rolls applied scaling upwards from 2-3-4-5-6 links. Fusing Orb: "Chance to add a link between existing unlinked sockets"

ive said this since day 1 long ago, and still feel the exact same way.

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mailius wrote:

The second issue I haven't seen people mention is that it's a little odd as far as currency is concerned, that it takes the same amount of currency to turn a level 10 item into a rare that it takes to rare-ify a level 60 item. The level 60 item is certainly going to be used much longer if it turns out well, and it can easily roll better mods, so why does it take the same amount of currency? It just encourages people at low levels to deal with terrible equipment and save their orbs for later.

you pay for waiting in leveling speed and difficulty of content with bad gear. i personally blew alchs on neck/ring/belts as leveling to get advantages to get to better items to farm. after your first char if you re-roll alts you will twink them out anyway with gear found on higher up or low level uniques imo. thats how its always been done. twink items become fairly valuable as games age.

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mailius wrote:

Finally, a suggestion for a new kind of orb, would be one that lets you destroy an existing item to pull one of its mods into the orb, which you could then apply to a different piece of gear. It would allow very deliberate crafting of rares, but to get the best mods they would still need to drop in the first place (and you might want to limit kind of mods can spawn on magic items compared to rares in that case).

neat orb, extremely strong orb. would be valued multiple times higher than exalted. scour 3.0!

agree 100% with currency / craft concerns... thats where 99% of my resources / feedback went to help out as much as i could with it.

good currency and crafting will make the game fly.

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Mailius wrote:

Finally, a suggestion for a new kind of orb, would be one that lets you destroy an existing item to pull one of its mods into the orb, which you could then apply to a different piece of gear. It would allow very deliberate crafting of rares, but to get the best mods they would still need to drop in the first place (and you might want to limit kind of mods can spawn on magic items compared to rares in that case).

That's really, really cool. Would be awesome to release this orb at the same time as a "show explicit affixes on items" UI component.

I don't think there'll ever be such controlled crafting, I see perfectly rolled mods ( or very close to ) all the time, just not on the same item. Alteration -> perfect cruel, and then with 5 such orbs I'd be able to craft the ultimate rare by just cherry picking stats from random drops.

And I don't think the mirror will ever destroy the economy, even at its current drop rate. In fact I quite like the dynamic it offers and hope the devs keep it as is at least through open beta. But we'll see about that :)

For crafting I'm hoping they change it to a more normalized system. My suggestion is that fusings, jewelers etc which have a clear distinction between "good" & "bad" increases chances of linking the more you use. So first fusing might have 1 / 10000 to link 6, but after you've spent 300 fusings on an item it's up to 1 / 100 or whatever. This way using a batch of 100 fusings without success gives you at least some sense of progress.

If I remember correctly, the drop rate of Mirrors has been set higher than intended throughout beta so that it can reasonably be expected to drop in such a small community. I believe GGG intends to make it significantly more rare when Open Beta begins and the number of players jumps by an order of magnitude.

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Chopatron wrote:

going up +1 link in this game is a lot stronger than a lot of people realise. in many cases its almost and sometimes is better than doubling your weapon. thats how good links are. they cant come even somewhat easy at higher tiers.

Still a difference if you compare casters and melee here ..
Supports that as x-y cold/chaos/lightning damage (integer values) vs supports that add % physical or % elemental damage will blow the melee over the top as your screenshots show with your tardrapier. Still 6linked is best for casters too - but if i see that i can add 3k+ dps with every support i add to things like groundslam and if i check the manacost of a 5linked melee-skill vs a 5linked spell - i just cry ;)

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Mailius wrote:

Finally, a suggestion for a new kind of orb, would be one that lets you destroy an existing item to pull one of its mods into the orb, which you could then apply to a different piece of gear. It would allow very deliberate crafting of rares, but to get the best mods they would still need to drop in the first place (and you might want to limit kind of mods can spawn on magic items compared to rares in that case).

Still this could lead to "too fast, too good" items. Things like this should be 50 times more rare than exalteds if implemented at all.
I don´t like guaranteed mod-crafting orbs (what this orb does) in a complete random-generated loot game. If this would be limited to 2nd highest tier of each pre/suffix maybe .. but if you could "catch" a 149% cruel and a 74% Conqueror's in two of those orbs and put them on an item that allready got like 32 or 33% attackspeed suffix and elemental damage or pys x-y prefix it would be too easy.
I don´t like an item construction kit (at least for this kind of games where finding is and should be the real deal).

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Deathtiny2266 wrote:

Still this could lead to "too fast, too good" items. Things like this should be 50 times more rare than exalteds if implemented at all.
I don´t like guaranteed mod-crafting orbs (what this orb does) in a complete random-generated loot game. If this would be limited to 2nd highest tier of each pre/suffix maybe .. but if you could "catch" a 149% cruel and a 74% Conqueror's in two of those orbs and put them on an item that allready got like 32 or 33% attackspeed suffix and elemental damage or pys x-y prefix it would be too easy.
I don´t like an item construction kit (at least for this kind of games where finding is and should be the real deal).

Totally agree, guaranteed crafting should happen less, not more. A good idea for a new orb in this case could be scoure 2.0, which delete a random mods from a rare. This will make exalted more desirable

A LOT of good posts in this thread. Nothing I can contribute that hasn't already been said, but almost all of this talk is centered around Default. Chop can attest to the player pool being that much smaller in Hardcore, and with death removing some of the best stuff from the economy (give or take), the trading problem is exacerbated even more.

Based on that, though, I'm hopeful that open beta will bring a huge influx, as the larger the player base, the smoother the economy will be.

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Pyrocon wrote:

A LOT of good posts in this thread. Nothing I can contribute that hasn't already been said, but almost all of this talk is centered around Default. Chop can attest to the player pool being that much smaller in Hardcore, and with death removing some of the best stuff from the economy (give or take), the trading problem is exacerbated even more.

Based on that, though, I'm hopeful that open beta will bring a huge influx, as the larger the player base, the smoother the economy will be.

is very hard to give feedback for a league that is pretty much single player but based on thousands of players to find / trade items =(.

i think balance in default will directly transfer to hardcore but with added time to attain + rip's taking tolls on best items at some point. thats the reason HC appeals to me and why i played their to begin with. economy is more apt to stay fresh for much much longer and even has a built in sink to filter things out.

it just needs players =)

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tpapp157 wrote:

If I remember correctly, the drop rate of Mirrors has been set higher than intended throughout beta so that it can reasonably be expected to drop in such a small community. I believe GGG intends to make it significantly more rare when Open Beta begins and the number of players jumps by an order of magnitude.

thats definitely good news if true.