But two components that used to be semi-useful long before Ashes of Malmouth have now become obsolete: Focusing Prism and Arcane Lens. Reason: they are outperformed by Seal of Annihiliation, Seal of Ancestry and Tainted Heart (and even Runebound Topaz).
How to ressurect them? Enable them for a medal slot. They would still be very niche components (because most builds would prefer literally anything else in this slot), but at least some builds will find them useful.
I see 0 reasons for not having them available in a medal slot. Moreover, they are completely and utterly useless in an amulet when you have Seal of Annihiliation and Tainted Heart.
Why not make players be able to choose? What’s the deal with that? I understand that having double seal of annihiliations/ancestry would be unbalanced, but why not allow Focusing Prism and Arcane Lens in a medal? Seems illogical to me.
Don’t forget as well that AoM is an optional expansion and not everyone will have this, so just because AoM items are possibly more useful, there are, and will be players that only have the base game and thus still have uses for these items
So is that argument for making it available for a medal slot or against it? Because I don’t see how enabling it in a medal slot will affect players who don’t own AoM.
So, you claim that Focusing Prism and Arcane Lens are useless because there is Tainted Heart. Tainted heart can be put into medal. How exactly allowing Focusing Prism and Arcane Lens into medal will change anything?
Enabling these for the medal slot does open it up a bit …and that would be an easy change.
The main impact would be 6-10% less skill cost for energy-hungry builds. Basically trading 15 OA and some %resistance for -10% skill cost.
However, this might warrant a balance reduction to -5% skill cost on these.
And this particular OP nestled point reminded me of even less variety on the ring slot component:
(and even Runebound Topaz).
*I’d estimate that 99% of builds ultimately use Runebound Topaz on rings due to the flat 52 DA, once the blueprint is known.
(with the rare cases of energy problems using Ectoplasm or maybe the even rarer special case of soul shard leech resist).
RT likely needs a nerf to ~15 DA (imho) to make anything else remotely competitive .
For the amulet/medal slot my main levelling components are Aether Soul and Black Tallow. They are still not bad even for endgame setups. That’s why I’m pretty pessimistic about the proposed change.
I’d estimate that 99% of builds ultimately use Runebound Topaz on rings due to the flat 52 DA, once the BP is found.
(with the rare cases of energy problems using Ectoplasm or maybe the even rarer special case of soul shard leech resist).
RT likely needs a nerf to ~15 DA (imho) to make anything else remotely competitive .
It was 3% on AoM release then was supposed to be nerfed to 36 flat DA but pretty much every praetorian said it’s too harsh since some caster builds struggle to get even the bare minimum of 2600 DA, hence ended up at 52.
Agreed, but it would still be nice to have the option to use something else. Or maybe the less used components need some love, to make them sexy. I mean, attractive…eh… you know what I mean.
Interesting.
But if most people use just this one “endgame” component, clearly we need some more options. Or more/better sources of DA, ´cause the other stats on the component are very meh for most builds.
