Legacy items

"Legacy" items are a natural consequence of our implementation of the mod system. When a mod is rolled, the result is stored in the item. The maximum and minimum values are never used except for the initial roll and any subsequent rerolls (Blessed Orb, Divine Orb, etc).

This means that if we change the max/min values for a mod, e.g. the +life mod on Kaom's Heart, this does not directly effect any existing items, only new ones that drop or old ones that are rerolled. Another way to create legacy items (at least for Uniques) is if we add or remove entire mods from the item.

This also means that we do not have legacy items of skill gems or currency, because they do not have mods. We do not have legacy passive skill trees because we do not support multiple trees.

[Edit]Of course, if we stop an item dropping entirely, any existing copies of that item are essentially "legacied" too, regardless of the item's type.

So legacy items only happen when we make numerical changes to min/max values of mods, or if we add/remove entire mods from a unique. We do not create legacy items when we change what mods do (this is fairly rare, though).

If we really wanted, we could painstakingly go through every item on the realm and perform an "item migration" to update legacy items to their modern equivalents. However, this is something of a last resort; it has several downsides:
-it requires substantial downtime of the entire realm for an unknown-but-lengthy period of time.
-it requires manually looking at every individual item we wanted to update and writing a custom upgrade script for each one.
-any mistakes or reversals of balance affect the entire realm's items, rather than a handful of new items dropped between patches.
-pissing off often long-time players by (potentially) destroying significant wealth right out of their stash.
-we'd have to do it all again every time we made changes that would result in a legacy item.

I'm not saying legacy items are all sunshine and rainbows, but they are at worst a necessary evil.

Hi guys, I've had to remove and edit a few posts here. Please try to keep the discussion civil and on-topic.