I think grinding for an exact prefix&suffix greens are very annoying. Without using 3rd party programs or mods may take nearly life-time finding them. It is hard and don’t newbie friendly things or even a veteran player.
Here is my idea to solve the problems.
NPC service
Equipment Extract
Use to Extract Green Items. There are 2 Options for Extract. Cost … gold or else
Get “Prefix Stone”
Get “Suffix Stone”
[The name of Item is prefix/suffix name, Item catagory is Prefix Stone, Effect is its original stats and lv.]
Crafting
There is 3 slot. One for Prefix Stone. One for a green item.Last one is for Suffix Stone. Every slots need to be filled. Cost … gold or else
Then crafting result will be the green item with new prefix and suffix as the stone you put it in.
Note : May be you can add 1 more currency. like some special currency for a guild or New expansion.
Edited About the service
The prefix, suffix stones may get category lock. [Like it’s extract from pants, it must use only for pants crafting]
Answer for some Question
What problems this service may solve?
People can stored only good Suffix, Prefix Stone as the 1 slot other than 4 slot random good greens.
Easy access for everyone than using 3rd party programs or mods for this purpose
Will it be too easy to get those specific MIs?
No, It just make something nearly impossible to possible
You can find all prefix and suffix in this. There’s tier lv among many names. The sample space is so high. So the chance to get only one exact prefix/suffix you’re looking for is rather low anyway. Even you can random craft something with 2 scraps and 4XXX iron bits.
About Random craft with 2 scraps and 4XXX iron bits
It is good in term of economy. People often get scraps and iron bits but don’t have anythings worthy to spend them.
Mostly for crafting boots and wish it’ll have exact prefix&suffix they want.
So it is good place for recycle iron bits and scraps into the game and saving against inflation of something. (Even this game isn’t MMO that economy is very important. Anyway it’ll make scraps and iron bits worth more)
In term of BiS gear
[li]IMO. BiS isn’t meant to be only exact greens. To get everything else you want to wear then use greens to complete them. So greens is needed for the things purple or blue cannot fit. It is more flexible and may important for some builds. [/li]“BiS for me is getting good rolled on items”
I thought about implementing this in a mod but in reality it’s not as simple as it seems. Peeling away the abstraction a bit, and assuming there’s a good way to detect an affix on an item to produce the ‘affix stone’, you’d need to generate a loot table with one output for each and every affix combination on each and every possible item. Some rough scratchwork suggests that you’re looking at a couple dozen quintillion files (10^18). Even assuming you could make them programmatically, which you could, the storage requirements and computational requirements to use them would be infeasible for the game to handle.
TL;DR if this is to happen it’d need to be in the form of a complete overhaul of the loot/crafting systems with probably dozens or hundreds of manhours of theory, planning, and implementation.
The thing is, you don’t “need” greens for the vast majority of builds. Epics and Legendaries are most of the BIS gear. So having greens as they are provides a small chance of being able to upgrade past those by getting a really good drop. I like having that chance of extreme rarity, as long as I’m not forced to need it.
IE, when I played POE, Skyforth’s would have actively enabled three different builds I wanted to try, because those builds required the ring and amulet slots, and CI. The boots extreme rarity was annoying as hell, because of that. In GD, I’m not annoyed that I don’t have, say, GG Nemesis Shoulders, or Solael-Sect pants…Because I don’t NEED them. I want them, they’d be great, they’d be an upgrade…But my builds work 100% fine without them.
The prefix, suffix stones may get category lock. [Like it’s extract from pants, it must use only for pants crafting]
FAQ
What problems this service may solve?
People can stored only good Suffix, Prefix Stone as the 1 slot other than 4 slot random good greens.
Easy access for everyone than using 3rd party programs or mods for this purpose
Will it be too easy to get those specific MIs?
No, It just make something nearly impossible to possible
You can find all prefix and suffix in this. There’s tier lv among many names. The sample space is so high. So the chance to get only one exact prefix/suffix you’re looking for is rather low anyway. Even you can random craft something with 2 scraps and 4XXX iron bits.
About Random craft with 2 scraps and 4XXX iron bits
It is good in term of economy. People often get scraps and iron bits but don’t have anythings worthy to spend them.
Mostly for crafting boots and wish it’ll have exact prefix&suffix they want.
So it is good place for recycle iron bits and scraps into the game and saving against inflation of something. (Even this game isn’t MMO that economy is very important. Anyway it’ll make scraps and iron bits worth more)
In term of BiS gear
IMO. BiS isn’t meant to be only exact greens. To get everything else you want to wear then use greens to complete them. So greens is needed for the things purple or blue cannot fit. It is more flexible and may important for some builds.
I though about suggesting something similar, but I would not use the affix stone idea. Instead, what I though about a Enchanter NPC was something among those lines:
The Enchanter will add/modify the affixes on an item at the cost of Iron Bits and Arcane Dust, plus components for Rare affixes. Arcane Dust is acquired by a service the NPC provides where he destroy an item of Magic quality or higher to generate them for you, the amount is determined by the overall quality of the item:
So, for example, a DrainingSpectral Battle Axeof Wildfire would grant 5 Arcane Dust. (1 for the Magic preffix, 2 for being a Rare MI, and 2 for the Rare suffix)
Affixes would be learned like blueprints and shared to all characters, but the way to learn them is different. Instead of blueprints, they would become available when the Enchanter destroy a item with the affixes you don’t know yet.
Since there’s many versions of the same affix that require different levels to be equipped, you will learn all versions when you destroy a item with one of them. The version applied when enchanting is according to the player level.
Items that had it’s affixes changed/added through the Enchanter will change their color to Silver (or any different color the devs choose if they decide to implement this), indicating that item was changed and can never be changed again.
Epics can also be altered with this service, but only Magic affixes or only one Rare can be added. Legendaries cannot be altered.
The Enchanters are available among the Order of Death’s Vigil, Kymon’s Chosen and The Outcast, and you would need a high reputation to access their services. They would also offer affixes unique to them, that would not appear on regular drops.
One alternative that may be easier to implement would be to have a recipe that re-rolls an item’s affixes. GD wouldn’t have to track or manage specific affixes and it would save players time from farming specific MIs that are infrequent drops on top of looking for the right affixes.
I would prefer something that reroll affixes too, if you find a green that has 1 crap affix and 1 good affix, you can reroll the crap one. But getting what you want directly? No
I know you probably tired to hear this from me but random re-rolls -> save scumming.
If something like this would ever be implemented i’d like a system that would get you the exact affixes you want but for a high cost (10-20+ rare mats or so).
Or with a loss of overall quality like: you can change a random double rare affix item to have 1 rare and 1 magic affix of your choice, a rare + magic one to have 2 magic or 1 rare, etc.
This way double rare mi’s will still be those nearly-impossible-to-get-but-when-they-finally-drop-with-the-exact-affixes-you-need-you’ll-shit-your-pants type of stuff but you could make any weird/useless double rare combo into a specific rare+magic one which could be still bis for many builds (some magic affixes like of attack or of vitality suffix or the resist givig prefixes (impervious, warding, etc.) are pretty good it their own right)).
I’d recommend you to try it with crafting exalted treads and aim for only 1 affix. Then you can spend your 2 scraps and iron bits for multiple times until you get the one with the following affix.
My idea is to random first, keep the result then combine them with others to create custom of your own choice. It’s rng anyway.
You may get good affixes through campaign or casual play then keep it for the future. I think it’s fair enough. This way is more reliable.
Or you can re-roll by crafting multiple times until you get needed affixes then extract it to the affix stone.
It may be RNG what affixes you get when, but by level 50 you have seen 99% of them, so no, this is not ‘rng anyway’, it is the opposite of that.
To me it makes getting the best affix combinations on the best non-unique items way too easy. Pretty much everyone will have the best possible non-unique gear by level 80 without farming.
The feel of it would be very different. Currently, grinding in hope of a rare drop feels a little boring, but you hope for the RNG to swing your way. If you can suddenly grind for an assured version of whatever you want, it feels worse, like you’re simply killing time until you acquire the exact amount of materials needed. Feels worse if it’s not purely random. Feels worse if it’s RNG crafting too. Leave it as is.
I think it’s good to know what odds you are up against. So if you know what % chance each ‘run’ you have of getting what you want versus how much each run takes then you know essentially if something is possible. Like just for a particular MI you know it’s going to drop. But it might be ‘forever’ (or rather never) before a specific affix MI comes out. I’m not sure I like this stone idea though. Not sure if it is just a buff to gear or if it will (would) really be something I enjoy. It will make faction gear relatively not interesting because you have an easy (relatively) alternative to faction gear. But faction gear could still be something you wear in the mean time while waiting to make your ideal stones. I’m guessing that game designers don’t like to make labor they gave to make content (faction gear) irrelevant but there might be enough room to have new ideas?
Wait, I hope I’m misunderstanding you but are you saying we should be able to simply craft the exact equipment we need even for very specific builds? Well, sorry for the irony, but, why not starting the game with a lvl 85 character and choosing the equipments you want on some NPCs then? The game is about grinding, and I may even agree with you that finding the perfect MI is almost impossible and this is definetely not the ideal solution, but probably the best one (without having to almost re-do the game)
I think some of you people underestimate just how powerful specific affixes are if you could actually pull them out of your hat practically at-will. A lot of blues and even low-end/transitional purples would suddenly lose pretty much all their appeal.
While I agree that the current system is much too random, the ideal system would have to be something about midway between what OP is suggesting and what we currently have.
I think it would be nice to be able to move the prefix and suffix of one item to another.
Basically, I’m thinking you’d ‘combine’ two items, where one gets destroyed, but the prefix and suffix get put onto the other weapon.
That way, you don’t have to hope that the right combination drops on the right item, you just have to get the right combination. Which also means you won’t be stuck farming the same area for hours at a time. I’m sure we all like a little variety.
It would be great for a single prefix or suffix as well - I’m sure we’ve all had a “stonehide _____” that was on a caster armor piece when we wanted heavy armor. Or similar stuff like that.
Obviously, you could only combine two weapons, or two armor pieces, etc. Meaning, they can only be combined if both pieces could roll that affix anyway. And two-hander affixes’ stats would be changed to their one-hander counterparts.
Actually greens affixe system should be a bit simplified and more accessible.
The current design of this feature is for ONLINE game with ACTIVE & HEAVY trading community.
AFAIK Grim Dawn is mostly designed as a single player game, so the current design feels awkward.
Anyone who spent hundreds of hours farming MI/green items can tell you how ridiculusly hard it is to get what you want or something close to it.
I voted “yes”, maybe not for the exact system the OP propose, but mainly for a rework of the current design of affixe system.
I would increase the MI drop chance and the chance for rare affixes for the drop, esp for MIs that can drop from a single boss / creature only