augments making gear soulbound/unique belt value

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

figured i’d tackle two issues at once since they’re related

first, augments making gear soulbound is a really bad game mechanic. swapping gear between characters at end game is needlessly frustrating; if your intention is for this to be an iron sink, you should consider alternative methods, as there are many more potential iron sinks that don’t inconvenience the player so heavily. this is probably the only mechanic that actually discourages me from testing new builds. if i want to try out some gear that i’m wearing on another character, i need to spend 5000ish iron per piece, manually remove each one, swap them over, then either test the build with a suboptimal (as in sans augments) setup or spend more iron on this new character to re-equip the augments and even more iron afterwards to remove the augments to send them back to the first character again.

iron is not super difficult to accrue, but since we can’t transfer iron between characters for some reason, i need tens of thousands of gold on each individual character in order to facilitate this needlessly onerous process. since there is basically nothing to do in this game after clearing ultimate other than try new builds, it shouldn’t be so taxing for the player to do so.

second, the problem is exacerbated further by the bizarre value of unique belts in this game. epic and legendary belts are worth absurd amounts of iron relative to other uniques. rare belts do not exhibit this behaviour, but any high level epic belt will sell for 8000 gold while other epics of comparable level will sell for 1/8th to 1/4th as much. while this benefits the player greatly, it also makes removing augments from belts a complete nightmare since augment removal is based on a percentage of the value of the item. legendary belts cost between 50,000 and 60,000 iron for augment removal.

is there no way to simply make the equipment gain the faction requirement of the augment it’s applied to? it prevents twinking in the exact same manner without causing a total headache for players. i really cannot imagine a reason for this not to be the case other than those few errant quests which cause you to lose reputation with a faction, which is not even a good reason since it could just cause the item to display as red on the character sheet until the faction rep is restored, and the situation is basically impossible to encounter on normal difficulty so it’s not like it would be too complicated for casual players.

i could always just dupe the items but come on. i guess i could also just try to farm another set of adjudicator’s signets but after a couple thousand hours it doesn’t look like that’s on the horizon!

2

My guess for why augment items can’t be transfered between characters is to make the choice between Kymon’s Chosen/Order of Death’s Vigil and killing/sparing Anasteria actually matter.

Because if you could transfer augmented items, then you could just augment your items with a character that picked a different faction (Order of Death’s Vigil) than the one you are playing while still keeping the benefits of the faction your current character (Kymon’s Chosen) is aligned to.

It’s the same reason why you can’t transfer faction items like armor and the epic jewelry.

Yes, it’s really frustrating having constantly remove augments to transfer some stuff, but i can see why they did it.

3

as i said, if the augment were to attach the reputation requirement to the item it’s apply to, then if you switch from kymon’s to death’s vigil or whatever, you can no longer wear the item (it would display in red on the character sheet, same as if you go below the physique/spirit/cunning requirement for an item while wearing it), forcing you to remove/replace the augment before you can re-equip the item.

the irony of what you wrote is that with the way it’s currently set up, you can wear kymon’s augments while being aligned with death’s vigil by simply grinding to revered on normal/elite, stockpiling their augments, then switching sides on ultimate difficulty, allowing you to keep your augments, whereas with my proposed system you can’t do this

4

There are a lot of annoyances like this in the game.

In your particular case, get GDStash and move the items around as needed. You can do it without duping the item if you are careful (“move” instead of “copy”).