Design questions about the affix / suffix system.

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Mydi wrote:

In the context of a game like PoE or D3, I agree that allowing players a full customisation of their items is a bad idea. In my game, it will not be about farming items to drop the one you want but spend time figuring out what kind of item would better suits your needs.

Something I really liked in D2 was that you could plan with your RNG drops. This was mostly possible due to runewords (countess farming + 4 os sword -> spirit sword), the cube (crafting caster amulets) and some builds only needing certain vendor items (like a trap assasin).

And personally I'd like it much more when you can work towards goals than just being slave to the RNG.

I want a nice goblin party knife. So I go to the next dwarven smith, buy some cheap dagger with bonus crit to goblins. Then I travel to the goblin party district and begin to murder a few hundred to a thousand goblins until I have a few knifes with decent basic stats.
Now I only need to go to the volcano island where I can find the required ore for crafting the additional stats I want - and hopefully not get killed by the drakes living there.
Finally, some farming for whatever enables me to bring up the quality of the knife and some quest that grants me crafting an additional stat on the knife.

When everything is done, I realize that an orcish butcher knife would have been much better, so I do it all over again. On my first test run with my new orcish butcher knife, a random opponent drops the legendary elvish war dagger - making all farming obsolete ;)

The Ux is for this game is terrible. Just pedestrian. The prefix suffix listings are just another example of lazy the UI is. There is no reason NOT to have the prefixes and suffixes separated so the player doesn't have to constantly check and learn which is which. Moreover even crafting is a hot mess when it comes to stats and how you roll them on gear.

Additionally GGG also needs to add min-max rolls if you hold down ALT. There is actually little reason JUST to hide the iLevel of an item till you hold the ALT key. They could pack more in there to help players.

Just do what D3 does. They make mistakes too but they have a way better and far more modern Ux. But they know to put your life and mana pools closer to the middle of the screen so that information is more easily accessible rather than having the player constantly have to scan the far left and right side of the screen to get the info. A player can enable bars over their heroes but giant life/mana pools are way easier to see.

There are lots of little UI/Ux issues that could greatly improve the flow of this game.

Separating buffs and debuffs would be more ideal too. Right now they are thrown to the top left but constantly mixed up and there's no way you have time to deep scan when particles are flying everywhere and you can't even see the bleed orbs flying around you let alone tell if you have your onslaught buff up.

@carnivore2k4 Thank you for the detailed answer, it is really appreciated!

If I sum-up the first half of your post, there are basically two main ideas:

- assign a category to each stats slow, following a template of:
-- slot 1: few stats
-- slot 2: more stats
-- slot X : all stats

- restrict the type of stats of following slots based on the first one to create more "coherent" items


This restriction regarding spell caster / melee stats are something that may seems appealing because it often makes item drop more elegant and less prone to RNG. It may be fine in some games but I do think it is a restriction a bit too heavy since it makes hybrid builds very hard to gear toward. I'd like for players to be able make "crazy" builds, builds that might benefit from spell power but also from a heavy armor or bonus to stealth or bonus to big 2-handed mace close combat. And since stats can be freely customized in my game, there is no issue about having item drops that are not suited for your character.

The few/more/all stats assignment per slot is an idea that I'm keeping on my mind as well. I'm having a hard time deciding what is better/worse about it than an all/all/all system or a few/few/few one for example. The first thing to distinguish is whether or not the stats category defined by” few”, “more” or “all” are similar for all item slots or are defined per item slot.

For PoE for example, it is defined per item slot. I can see the following implications:
- on some items you will never be able to get your preferred stats.

- Stats on item can be made a bit more impactful (powerful) knowing that the player cannot have it on every slot. It does not change the overall final value that the player could get of that stat considering all his items but he can get there faster since he may need to have it on 4 item slots instead of on all his slots.

- It forcers the player to diversify a bit since not all stats are available on all items. I’m torn regarding the benefits of such an approach. Designers may use is to prevent full offensive or full defensive character depending on stats restriction, which is not something I find appealing as a player. Extreme build may not always work, but given proper balance, they should be doable (it is often fun to make a one-dimensional character)

- It forces the player to choose some stats that he does not want. Example: I want C and you give me the choice between A and B? Ok I’ll choose the least terrible for me but that does not leave me satisfied. But hey… maybe always getting what we want is also not optimal since it may feel less exciting over time. Humm...

Similar arguments can then be made for the few/more/all vs few/few/few vs all/all/all general stats system. To be honest, I’m not seeing something clearly wrong or clearly better with any of them. Maybe it does not matter that much in the end? What do you guys think?

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A different approach would be to limit the quality of stat rolls on an item:
- A sword can either have godly +damage and moderate attack speed or the opposite.
- A chest armor can either have high +life or a high armor stat.
- A rare helmet can have one very high, two moderate and two low stats of Life, two individual resistances, armor and movement speed.

I was thinking of something along those lines: having stats slot with varying degree of power. Ex: slot1 100%, slot2 75%, ect…
Or, as a compromise to stats restriction per item slot, having a stats efficiency per stat and per item slot. That way a player could get crit everywhere if he wants to, but maybe at 50% of efficiency on certain item slot. It does allow players to build whatever they want they at a cost. It seems ok but I’m still afraid that it will have a strong tendency to “force” player to min/max and use only 100% stats on their items and then we are not far off of a system with stats restriction per item slot. But I think it still is a step in the right direction.

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I'd suggest reading "Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games" * and thinking about how the conflict mechanics in your RPG are going to work.

I’ve started to read it…. And wanted to finish it before answering but it is way longer than I expected  Thank you for the link, good read so far!

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Been mulling about this some more - you'll need to look at your game balance as a multidimensional optimization problem. You want build diversity, so you need to make sure that there is not a single optimal build, but a set of multiple optimal builds (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency). Designing a stat system and content so that "find the optimal build" leads to a large variety of solutions is highly non-trivial.

That is indeed what I am trying to accomplish. I’m on the right track so far I think since the combat mechanisms are fairly complex and the outcome of a single stat is very hard to assess when you take into account everything that is happening during a battle.

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At the most basic level, you could look at damage dealt and cast speed:
Skill A - 1 dmg per seconds
Skill B - 0.5 dmg per 0.5 seconds

Both skills have a dps of 1, so this trivial example would have 2 viable builds.

Adding different damage types and resistances, damage over time and defensive skills - it becomes much more complex ofc.

I’ve balanced my skills that way (sort of). I’m not sure thought it will be feasible to balance every stat in the game as elegantly as this. I’m even pretty sure it is not since there are so many interactions between stats that it would be a real nightmare and also something downright impossible since many stats have situation values (try factoring fire resistance or life regeneration or a percentage to stun the target into something such as DPS or EHP and you are in for so many assumptions that the end result will be “meh” at best). [been there….]

A few notes about further considerations I’ve come across:
- A goal of an item / stat system is to make each item SLOT somewhat unique / exciting compared to the other slot. A ring slot shouldn’t feel the same as a weapon slot
- A player should feel attached to his items.
- I haven’t seen any comment on this yet but most people seem to accept / embrace the convention of having one stat of the same type per item (ex: only 1 crit stat per item). Maybe it is something worth revisiting?

Thanks you guys for your inputs! I’m off to read/think some more about all this….

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Mydi wrote:

Similar arguments can then be made for the few/more/all vs few/few/few vs all/all/all general stats system. To be honest, I’m not seeing something clearly wrong or clearly better with any of them. Maybe it does not matter that much in the end? What do you guys think?

Regarding loot drops:
Restricitng the possibilities potentially results in more meaningful items with recognizable patterns. Quite ok and good items would probably be rather common.
No restrictions result in lots of trash items, a few pleasant surprises (allowing out of the box thinking) and make good items really something special - that's basically what we have in POE.

A higher grade of randomization may also lead to a higher necessity for trading. And for some reason, trading seems to be one of the things, poeple complain the most about, another is RNG.

Regarding crafting:
I agree with you: It has to be understandable, meaningful and in a way balanced that it allows more than just min/maxing stats. Restrictions can be a way to achieve this, but most likely they aren't the only one.

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Mydi wrote:

A few notes about further considerations I’ve come across:
- A goal of an item / stat system is to make each item SLOT somewhat unique / exciting compared to the other slot. A ring slot shouldn’t feel the same as a weapon slot
- A player should feel attached to his items.

While thinking about these points, I came up with a new idea:

For each item type you define a set of stats that are "natural" to this type.
A piece of armor has: a defensive stat, a moving penalty/bonus and base resistences against elements or other damage types.
A weapon has: damage, attack speed, accuracy and crit chance.

These attributes can be enhanced by better base materials or craftmanship.

All stats that aren't "natural" to an item (or stats that enhance the natural capabilities even further) are magical. Jewelry would most likely have magical stats only.

Both kind of upgrades follow individual upgrade paths (in terms of cost, effort, ingredients).

To make a meaningful game mechanic out of this, we decide the following:
The more processed an item is (either by using according materials or by enhancing the natural stats) the less magical it can be and vice versa.

Example:
A standard dagger has 8 slots for stats. 3 of them are used for the natural upgrade path, 3 for the magical and 2 can be either.
A dagger made of dwaven steel would have better base stats and slots: 5n, 2m, 1e
A dagger made of a bone of Harpy would have worse base stats and slots: 2n, 5m, 1e

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Mydi wrote:

- I haven’t seen any comment on this yet but most people seem to accept / embrace the convention of having one stat of the same type per item (ex: only 1 crit stat per item). Maybe it is something worth revisiting?

It is.
Let's forget about the concept where each stat is available in different power levels and just define one value (or value range) for one stat for an item slot. And allow multiple picks of the same stat for multiple slots with some kind of diminishing returns.

Example:
We want to craft our dwarven dagger which has 5 slots for natural attributes:
Enhanced damage grants us 40% in one slot. If we take it multiple times, this gets penalized by a certain percentage for each slot after the first, let's say: 80% in the second slot, 60% in the third, 40% in the fourth and 20% in the fifth.
Resulting in (40 + 32 + 24 + 16 + 8)% enhanced damage.
While having the maximum damage per hit might make sense under certain conditions, picking different stats, like crit chance or attack speed, at 100% is probably the better choice most of the time.

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With those two concepts you have two important decisions to make for every item:
- Do I need the item for its primary function or do I need it as carrier for some magic abilities?
- Do I want to pay the price for maximizing a single value or is it better to diversify stats?

If you keep magical and natural stats for items more or less disjunct (at least on any specific kind of item, i.e. only way to get a better defensive value on your chest armor is to upgrade the natural stats), the decisions get even more important. Adding unique, natural stats for each kind of item could make this even more interesting (example: boots as only source of movement speed bonus).

If you have it so that any stat type can go on any item, and players can choose which stat type goes on each item, and the strength of that stat type is dependant on something else other than the item, then basically what you have is just skill points.

In order for the stats to be interesting to put on items (instead of just assign to a slot on a generic skill tree or something), they need to have some interaction with that particular item. Maybe they combo with other stats on that item, or maybe they have a different effect depending on which item you put them on. (eg: weapons vs armour, etc...)

Depending on what the stats do, you might want to restrict particular combinations for balance reasons. As you say, PoE's affix system isn't really set up this way for balance reasons - so why, then?
I think to find the main reason, you need to consider magic items, rather than rare items. On magic items, you can see exactly why they are called 'prefix' or 'suffix' mods, because of how the magic item is named. Also, it makes perfect sense for there to be a limit of 1 prefix and 1 suffix for magic items. Remember that as well as items (including flasks), this same system also applies to monsters, maps and Vaal areas, strongboxes, etc...

Once you can see how that works, then you can see how rare items (and monsters) are just an extension of that system.

But if you only have rare items, then what are the arguments for keeping this system? How else does having rare items work like this benefit the game? Here are a few arguments I can think of:

1) Adds more certainly and therefore (paradoxically) more options while crafting. eg: you can block off a prefix with a master craft, to guarantee a suffix. Also crafting a +2/+1 bow or staff, and mods like 'prefixes cannot be changed', etc...
2) Helps make sure items that drop aren't too wacky (which helps new users - they don't want to be inundated with gear that will only work for a particular build.)
3) Adds an extra level of skill/knowledge/etc which experienced players might enjoy. (ie: Complexity.)

1 & 2 only apply because of the random nature of drops and crafting in PoE. If your crafting system is deterministic, then there is less need to do these things.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

D2 did it right. It reserved the top tier of affices for blue items and made rares select from lower tiers. This gave blue items a limited role in the game. In PoE here, the only thing blues are good for is turning into rares... "crafting". D2 did much better simply because they put that limit on rare items.

This is def something to take into consideration. It always felt cool picking up a blue monarch knowing it could be one of the most expensive and sought after items in the game.