yeah, I’m mostly farming and trading sometimes, just kinda got fed up today after finally beating this quest from Mogdrogen. Then thinking about all the other times I got a trash reward from an npc. I know it doesn’t work like D3 does but that sure would be nice, lol
Don’t vendor trash those yet. Just save them for other characters or trade with your friends.
I have played on character throughout all quests, and all three levels, and all special quests. In playing, I’ve found all one-shot chests.
Let me first say that I find the mechanics fun. But mechanics are not everything.
During the actual campaign, I can honestly say the none of the quest rewards were actually useful for my Pyro/burn character.
Yes, I did find a variety of greens and eventually useful drops throughout the game and after completing the game and vigorously farming (probably a thousand runs) I did find some nice final gear.
So I suspect quest rewards are from a limited pool, and my RNG was poor. Based on how many of certain Legendaries I found in the farming run, I often wonder if the random-seed needs a fix or if the drop list is limitied in cases too.
However…
I originally thought, wow! this is fun and I think I’ll do Hardcore. But after seeing the length you need to go to just…get…something…practical for the current character= Nope. I really am not a fan of creating a farming character first. Note practical to me does not mean BiS. Just something appropriate for the level.
Why can’t quest rewards be something useful to the class combination. Even if it is just a green!
To be blunt, it hinted at lazy reward design (aka diablo 1) and soured me on trying other combos from scratch.
I’ve not used grim tools for items, but I certainly would not fault anyone for doing so to avoid wasting time on thousands of runs purely for items. Many of the proposed build guides do just that to promote their ultimate build.
I dunno - I’ve done a couple of playthroughs of vanilla (Pre AoM) entirely self-found, without even much farming. The only thing I’ve found myself farming are components, and that’s three runs at most.
The crafting system in GD definitely lets you fill in gaps. You also can’t be afraid to respec a few times - when you find all those Forcewave and/or ABB items, sometimes it’s best to roll with it. 
That’s good. But it really has nothing to do with the topic, which is quest rewards that are appropriate.
If quest rewards are not, the quests might as well reward xp at the moment the quest is complete and not bother with the return to sender/item reward for the story-line.
Welcome to RNG dude, there is also shared stash you know 
Quest rewards that are ‘appropriate’. By appropriate, we’re talking talking about an item reward that has a better chance of fitting into your class or build, right?
To what end, exactly? My point was that you don’t need class specific items to finish main content, because the crafting system is quite robust. Having ‘practical’ rewards as quest items would make the crafting system obsolete. You don’t have to farm for items to complete the game - it’s something you chose to do.
There are a wide variety of quests, and a wide variety of rewards for them. E.g., the reward for ‘Burn the Taken’ is a solid caster off-hand (or dagger), especially on your first or second playthrough - if you have a caster that wants an off-hand. There are similar rewards all throughout the game, fixed ‘MI’ type rewards that can fill gaps in your equipment. Point being, some quest rewards are good class rewards, depending on your class. And there are enough of them that you will find something good on a playthrough. Save the rest for Altitis!
Personally it motivates me to skip the first 2 difficulties if I make an alt and just start ultimate with some trainer like GD stash to estimate the leg-work of xp and shrines to that point.
I’ve been using GDItemAssistant to basically record what kind of numbers and drops of blue+ and MIs on those farming runs. So its not like I don’t have a ridiculous amount of items to outfit an alt build.
However, knowing the chances are pretty bad at getting quest rewards and it will be the same RNG search…meh. the middle game loses all interest. An appropriate quest reward to your class combo -whcih could be a green with some particular skill or % that you have…would be more motivating to do the first two over and over. In terms of game flow and repetition.
It’s not thrilling to constantly get reward class items of unrelated distinct builds such as pet items for soldier builds, just as an example. Even if I’ve luckily found better prior to that, at least it is tailored.
I think since they went the extra mile to do a HC mode, the rewards could have been slighlty tweaked to also promote self-found fun for repeat running of the campaign. Or include the option to simply skip the first 2 if a farming/sharing build is so inherent to the design.
It’s RNG, deal with it. Also, how would the system know which exact items to give for your build? What if you are a Demo + Soldier using Fire Strike, but then get a legendary Grenado item? And what if the system tracked what skills you picked and get an item for it? What would stop anyone for abusing this system by literally respeccing out of one skill and spec into another, so that you can get an item that supports another skill?
My point is smart loot in any capacity doesn’t work in this game because of how many builds each mastery combo can have. And also, they are not gonna add green items of all things to these quest rewards.
if (Character.getNumDeaths() > 0 && Character.isHardcore() == true) {
PlayButton.setEnabled(false);
}
That’s a mile for sure. What you’re asking for is comparatively a lightyear.
@medea fleecestealer Thanks for the thread and I read it.
Hmm. That’s a bit more tailored than I was thinking of, but I can see it’s a lot of work for that.
I was thinking more of a tailored green, in that: check a few things on the sheet then pick a prefix and suffix suitable for the level and with those in mind. But peeps like their purples, I guess.
[In my experience, half a dozen farm runs give more purples than the entire quest rewards. So I’m not so dedicated to quest reward purples personally - but no matter.]
Alright. I can accept that.
On the other tangent, but related to the gameplay flow:
Code-wise, it would not be hard to add an option to skip the first 2 difficulties if campaign has been previously completed on ultimate:
If exists character @ ultimate, then add option: start on ultimate difficulty with certain xp and devotion points. No gear.
Not gonna happen. And have fun fighting Ultimate enemies with -50% resistance. You won’t totally die constantly :rolleyes:
Ultimate is balanced with you already having gear obtained from the previous difficulties. And no, the “you don’t need to use it” excuse doesn’t work because stuff like this actually takes work. Work has to be repaid by a lot of people using it. Dev time is based on priorities.
Lol.
If you already have an Ultimate character and thus the sharing aspect, this new toon will have access to a ton of stuff (not faction, yet, though). And knowing the areas means that many resistances can be bumped around.
Further, it would be an extra option - which mean you could start from normal, if you liked anyways. :rolleyes:
From the 25th May stream:
“Do you will remove 3 difficulty levels? and make one ?
I don’t think we’d remove 3 difficulty levels. We’re looking at possibilities of streamlining the difficulty levels, but nothing to announce quite yet.”
Did you actually read anything in my post? Or just select some of it to make your argument seem better? Being “an option” is not an argument for something to be in the game, dev time has priorities and stuff takes time to make.
It also doesn’t matter if you have gear in the shared stash, that’s not a factor to anything. Also, have fun not having access to factions augments and losing a lot of resistance potential. Same with no augments for rings and amulets. It’s not like these are taken into consideration when balancing Ultimate :rolleyes:
The closest thing that they could do with relatively little effort is offer you a choice of 3 or 5 items as a quest reward. You still only get one but the chances of it being something you want are better.
eyerolls, eh? Gonna have to start charging.
And just remove the item pool it picks from and let it pick a few truly random legendaries. The current pretty limited pool is not helping.
Most of the salient points on why Smart Loot doesn’t really work for the type of game GD is have already been made but on my own personal experience side having gone back to play D3 and its smart loot system, I find that I dislike it because it pigeon holes the player pretty hard.
There are ways around getting pigeon holed by smart loot but it mostly relies on multiplayer focused cooperation, which is a little tougher in GD. I think smart loot sounds good for the first character or if you treat the game like you might treat D3 where you tend to focus on fewer characters. Once you get past one character you find that in a smart loot system you have to start over completely and grind everything over again since you’re not able to farm loot from an already high level character to pass down. Hence the whole implementation of the shared loot stash, one of GD’s original founding ideas. Plus in a smart loot system, at least in the way D3 does it, you’re just going to get the other problem of having overly repetitive loot.
I personally tend to roll a lot of varied characters, focusing on GD’s strong offering of class variability, in which highly randomized loot synergizes the best. If you don’t come at it from that approach, then you’re not really going to maximize the potential enjoyment GD offers. Which is fine, you just have to realize that the onus for your frustration is on your decisions, not GD catering specifically to you or trying to be everything to everyone.
There’s probably an argument to be made about the quality of loot coming from quest rewards but honestly I think too that people need to adjust their risk-reward metrics a bit. Sometimes completing the challenge is the reward in itself, you don’t always also have to get rewards with “stuff” all the time.
OP beat Gargabol on Ultimate, props to you! That’s awesome stuff! You’re already in the top tier of players, celebrate that achievement for what it is.