Exalted Orbs are worthless

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feike wrote:

The problem is that... well it dont make much sense to consider just the viewpoint from the big playerbase and ignore the crafters because, as much as how crafters are indeed a very tiny pool, if you think about it, they were the ONLY ones that really got affected by the change

You are partially right, but ignoring a huge part of this argument: exalt perception. I can only agree with you that the change itself didn't functionally affect that many players.

HOWEVER

It DID functionally affect ALL players in the perception of the iconic exalted orb. Part of the OP was how tone-deaf this change was to the HISTORY of exalted orbs: all the paid-for div cards, all the t-shirts, all the merchandise. Divines were simply NEVER used for any of that for a decade. And the reason exalted orbs were so popular on merchandise and cards was because they held value for ALL players, either as crafting material or as currency. But now, they hold NO value in either sense for 99% of the playerbase. It was completely gutted as the "iconic" currency overnight, with no concern for the out-of-game historical and financial backing that exalts had from the playerbase AND from the devs.

So from an in-game standpoint, it totally makes sense that the divine should hold more value than the exalt based on functionality. BUT it shouldn't have been ignored that years of financial development and marketing were created solely around the exalted orb and NOT the divine, and that should have factored into the decision to effectively erase them.

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feike wrote:

Okay, pick any item that have all prefix/suffix done

Ok.

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feike wrote:

To make the other half, for every process that dont allow eldrich orbs the next step is put cheap unrelated table mod and exalt at least once.

Lets take caster ring. If I exalt it and Aisling eats the metamod then I cant get rid of the exalted trash mod anymore without overpaying for the whole thing. So wouldnt the following be better? lock suffixes, aisling, block mana, unveil life, Crusaders exalt, craft elreon.

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feike wrote:

If you want to aisling or harvest 4th affix, you exalt once and replace trash mod with protect metamod and go for it,

Why exalt here - I cant get rid of the exalted mod cheaply anymore if the metamod is taken away. This leaves me with a random mod. (Not saying there are no cases where this makes sense. However I do not see this as a generally beneficial approach.)

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feike wrote:

old-school metamoding you exalt twice, if no good result, metamodprotect and scour/annul

This is very expensive. And may be useful for mirror tier crafting but otherwise I dont see this either.

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feike wrote:

You speak like a 7% increase translated into a 7% increase in map clear

No, I dont. Its worth >1 passive point though.

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feike wrote:

It dosnt, what matters is not exactly how much damage you do, but how many strikes it takes to kill stuff.

Context Ballista build. Number of strikes hardly matters.

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feike wrote:

Even if we take a 14% difference, its hard for such a difference to mean having to strike again to kill the mob, monsters where it would make serious difference are not numerous enough to justify going for that 14%

Just translate it into passive points. With clusters its pretty much arbitrarily possible to exchange dps for survival. Lets say improving DPS by 7% more costs me 1-2 passive points. So I dont need these and can put them into life. Upgrading gear to get the equivalent of 9% increased maximum life is going to be a lot more expensive than the 2(?) Divines if gear is already good.

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feike wrote:

Basically, if you kill mobs in 1 blow, increasing dps is hardly gonna affect your speed, if you take 2, its still extremely unlikely a 14% increase would enable killing with 1, even if you have the damage treshold where sometines its 1 sometimes its 2, the difference is still hardly there as this situation will condition you to click twice.

Ballista build needs one click to place ballistas.

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feike wrote:

Yellow mobs in general are too inconsistent in their internal variation to make such a difference show

I want to min-max my build. Whether this "show"s on a single rare mob isnt what Im interested in. More DPS on such a build means a higher percentage of rare mobs will die and fewer will be left alive. So I get more XP and more loot. And for notable single targets (bosses) it pretty much translates to lower fight time anyway.

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feike wrote:

And theres the matter that gear almost always have more than one usefull affixes, rolling more than 1 affix increases divines usage almost exponentially

Math says: More affixes => higher expected benefit of Divining if the starting point is worse than average. And yes - if you want to Divine all affixes beneficially then it gets overly expensive. But my goal here is just a cost efficient upgrade. I dont need all affixes good. The net "sum" needs to be improved sufficiently by Divining. And for that more affixes make it more likely that a Divining is worth it.

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feike wrote:

(and for that matter, poison totem ballista isnt better off using triple elemental prefixes?)

In Crucible league with the Artillery Ballista Crucible notable its probably much better to add elem damages. And you would have to add the phys->fire damage from the bow also then. Outside of Crucible I dont know, probably depends.

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Zrevnur wrote:

Lets take caster ring. If I exalt it and Aisling eats the metamod then I cant get rid of the exalted trash mod anymore without overpaying for the whole thing. So wouldnt the following be better? lock suffixes, aisling, block mana, unveil life, Crusaders exalt, craft elreon.

Eh, dunno, sounds like its better to just fossil spam and start from the other end tbh...
Even a spam of the +life and +casters fossils yield a rather decent chance to get T2 life, T2 spell dmg and a T2 atribute, and since you can swap resists around with harvest, you dont need to target a specific resist and in a crusader base, you are giving yourself a chance to get curse effect reduct
Going for suffix on rings on the first step dont seem optimal to me: rings suffixes are notable for being rather easy to roll and being flexible, it takes a very uniq-heavy build for you really need those high tier resists
Even if you start from a triple t1 suffixes that dropped, it would kinda fall into the realm you woudnt want to set for any result on the crusader slam, wich would mean you wouldnt want to discard the metamod. I wouldnt bank too hard on a 20% roll

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Zrevnur wrote:

Why exalt here - I cant get rid of the exalted mod cheaply anymore if the metamod is taken away. This leaves me with a random mod. (Not saying there are no cases where this makes sense. However I do not see this as a generally beneficial approach.)

The metamod is expensive, exalting gives you a coinflip to save it and a low chance to get a good mod. Back when metamod costed exalts, it varied chase by chase if it was worth spending an exalt, but with the flip, i dont think theres many scenarios you want to readily relinquish it
Your ring situation is a rather specific one where you can direct aisling tremendously with a mana block because its a slot with a small pool of mods that tend to block each other and many are mana-related, boots prefixes are also like that if you want movespeed mods, but such instances with super reliable aislin are not rule and assuming failure and future need for scouring or annuling is the better way to go

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Zrevnur wrote:

Context Ballista build. Number of strikes hardly matters.

Arent you tunnel-vision a bit much at this point? I mean, not only its a specific build, even taking the chaos damage for an example is super specific, as its one of the affixes where divining makes most difference, and its not a very used affix

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Zrevnur wrote:

Just translate it into passive points.

Like people say: The difference between level 93 and 100 is something you can only really notice if you trow on pob. Looks huge if you look on paper, but on actual gameplay, you would need to run maps with a chronometer in hand and make a statistical analisys of a dozen maps to notice a difference

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Zrevnur wrote:

Math says: More affixes => higher expected benefit of Divining if the starting point is worse than average. And yes - if you want to Divine all affixes beneficially then it gets overly expensive. But my goal here is just a cost efficient upgrade. I dont need all affixes good. The net "sum" needs to be improved sufficiently by Divining. And for that more affixes make it more likely that a Divining is worth it.

The problem with your math is that you seem to be assuming starting with min rolls. That is simply not a common scenario, and especially not when dealing with multiple affixes
Yes, divining affixes rolled near minimum may make sense, but 1 or at most 2 divine should be all you need because its likely that one divining will bring it to 50%-ish, anything above 50%, you are going against the chances, increasingly more so as you move up. Apply that to multi-affix stuff and what is likely to happen is that divining will hardly move the average at all. If getting a single 80%+ roll on one affix takes 5, moving above even just a triple 60% takes almost 30

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Zrevnur wrote:

In Crucible league with the Artillery Ballista Crucible notable its probably much better to add elem damages. And you would have to add the phys->fire damage from the bow also then. Outside of Crucible I dont know, probably depends.

I might be wrong as my exp is very limited and you might correct me, but im fairly sure crucible sort of enabled the chaos aproach for the first time, the previous aproach that i know of involved that uniq ring that converted elemental damage to chaos and was suuuuper niche, and also involved ele dmg prefixes and not the chaos one

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jsuslak313 wrote:

You are partially right, but ignoring a huge part of this argument: exalt perception. I can only agree with you that the change itself didn't functionally affect that many players.

Yea, i said myself its largely just a matter of perception

From my point of view, if Chris had kept with the standard policy of mantaining absolute silence around drop rates, it wouldnt have happened, but because he decided to open his trap and put the numbers on the table, people reacted immediately and the market fliped upside-down overnight

Im quite sure if he have kept this piece of information around drop rates to himself, the market would have reacted more slowly, the exalt deflation and divine inflation would have happened gradually and people would ingrate more naturally the currency swap over time

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Esubane wrote:

I think they over-delivered on this change. A much subtler change would accomplish the same thing and didn't turn these currencies value upside down.

Simply swap the function of Exalted and Divine orb currency. As in, Exalted rerolls explocit mod values, Divine slams a new mod on a rare item. That's it.

This would preserve ex value and wouldn't require them to remove 6L -> div recipe or have them print divine div card sets.

Have you taken a good look at exalted and divine orb's art?

Divining an item is perfecting an item, that is why the orb resembles a perfect face, a symbol for the divine.

Exalted orb is multiple faces because the item can add random modifiers to a rare item.

You can't just swap them.

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Reinhart wrote:

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Esubane wrote:

I think they over-delivered on this change. A much subtler change would accomplish the same thing and didn't turn these currencies value upside down.

Simply swap the function of Exalted and Divine orb currency. As in, Exalted rerolls explocit mod values, Divine slams a new mod on a rare item. That's it.

This would preserve ex value and wouldn't require them to remove 6L -> div recipe or have them print divine div card sets.

Have you taken a good look at exalted and divine orb's art?

Divining an item is perfecting an item, that is why the orb resembles a perfect face, a symbol for the divine.

Exalted orb is multiple faces because the item can add random modifiers to a rare item.

You can't just swap them.

Lol swap the art too if you're that picky.

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feike wrote:

Eh, dunno, sounds like its better to just fossil spam and start from the other end tbh...

I dont know what the best approach is. The issue with rings is that typically I want a crafted prefix - either Elreon or mana/recoup. I dont see how else I can get that without overpaying.

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feike wrote:

a chance to get curse effect reduct

IMO this has been devalued with new resistance mastery 'ele resistances cant be lowered by curses'.

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feike wrote:

I wouldnt bank too hard on a 20% roll

How many of the Crusader rolls are good depends on build.

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feike wrote:

The metamod is expensive, exalting gives you a coinflip to save it and a low chance to get a good mod.

Its the 'low chance' I have the issue with. You seem to aim for a '4-affix + crafted'. Far as I understand in trade league this is a waste of (metamod, Aisling, the expensive stuff) currency that would be better spent buying what you need. So my POV here is 'how to craft a 5-affix + crafted' item.

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feike wrote:

Your ring situation is a rather specific one where you can direct aisling tremendously with a mana block because its a slot with a small pool of mods that tend to block each other and many are mana-related,

Yes its specific but due to its power (which you just desribed) its also frequently used. And there are 2 rings per character which doubles its importance.

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feike wrote:

Arent you tunnel-vision a bit much at this point? I mean, not only its a specific build, even taking the chaos damage for an example is super specific, as its one of the affixes where divining makes most difference, and its not a very used affix

There is a number of mods that even individually have a wide power range so that they can be worth Divining for someone with already expensive gear. Of course I pick an affix where Divining makes sense. Im not trying to say that Divining makes sense for most affixes. Just that there are some that even individually have such a wide range that Divining them can be worth it. One other case which I personally encountered was chaos leech on Hunter amulet: IIRC I had a very low roll and wouldnt have been able to cap leech vs single target with that. And the 'reduced flask charges' used I already mentioned - and it wasnt a ward build: Max roll has potentially >100% more effect and its a critical mod for 'Pathfinder defense'.

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feike wrote:

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Zrevnur wrote:

Just translate it into passive points.

Like people say: The difference between level 93 and 100 is something you can only really notice if you trow on pob. Looks huge if you look on paper, but on actual gameplay, you would need to run maps with a chronometer in hand and make a statistical analisys of a dozen maps to notice a difference

I dont agree with this "it needs to be noticeable" perspective, thats not how the game works. If I have more power I will get more XP/loot whether I can 'notice' the difference or no - this is also easy to proof. (And personal experience completely disagrees with your 93->100 isnt noticeable here.)

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feike wrote:

The problem with your math is that you seem to be assuming starting with min rolls. That is simply not a common scenario, and especially not when dealing with multiple affixes

No I did not assume that. I did however (for the sake of simplicity) assume that the starting point is worse than average. There is a ~50% chance of that.

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feike wrote:

Yes, divining affixes rolled near minimum may make sense, but 1 or at most 2 divine should be all you need because its likely that one divining will bring it to 50%-ish, anything above 50%, you are going against the chances, increasingly more so as you move up.

I am not arguing that you should use a lot of Divines. My math example with chaos damage kind of suggested that its unlikely to be worth it if you would need a lot of them.

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feike wrote:

Apply that to multi-affix stuff and what is likely to happen is that divining will hardly move the average at all. If getting a single 80%+ roll on one affix takes 5, moving above even just a triple 60% takes almost 30

Doesnt change that having more affixes on an item makes it more likely that Divining is worth it. (Somebody with proper math knowledge could probably point to a simple mathematical proof for it too. If you dont believe it - maybe do run a few experiments on https://www.craftofexile.com/ : Pick 1-mod item vs 5-mod item. Discard examples which have higher-than-average rolls. Divine once per sample. Compare net results. )

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feike wrote:

I might be wrong as my exp is very limited and you might correct me, but im fairly sure crucible sort of enabled the chaos aproach for the first time, the previous aproach that i know of involved that uniq ring that converted elemental damage to chaos and was suuuuper niche, and also involved ele dmg prefixes and not the chaos one

That ring ('Original Sin') doesnt drop anymore so its Standard only. There are also some unique boots but they have drawbacks. I am not arguing the 'niche' part. It may currently be somewhat popular because of the Crucible Notable. Artillery Ballista has strong base numbers but comes with mechanical issues which diminish the practical power of the skill.