That’s only fun until waiting’s all you end up doing. If you regularly level on Ultimate, you’re currently in a situation where no fixed item rewards (Sister’s Amulet, Fortified Doublet etc.) are usable. They don’t scale with level, so if you’re starting on Ultimate, they’re easily 40+ levels beyond you. The items that are supposed to be the guaranteed slot filler, in case you’re struggling for gear, aren’t. You can’t coast on faction gear cause you won’t have rep if your first playthrough is Ultimate. So you rely on drops. With this change, the most impactful of those drops are out of reach too. So you can’t upgrade with quests, you can’t upgrade with rep, you can’t get a boost from MIs. You’re just scrounging around in basic garbage gear on the hardest (and also the most time-efficient, least repetitive) difficulty, dozens of levels at a time, with no recourse. Your only option if you need an upgrade is to start jumping back to lower difficulties so that you can actually get MIs fit for your level. That is so ass backwards. If you’re looking to upgrade your gear, you’re supposed to go to the easier difficulty? That’s the exact opposite of how it’s supposed to work.
This change to item scaling was supposed to be a fix, not a nerf. It should be restricted to max level only cause that was where the problem occurred. In levelling, you only care about item level in the sense of “can I equip this or no”. If the game is systemically saying “no”, then that’s a borked fix.
4 Likes
I agree.
It’s common to stash gear that you can’t equip yet, only to find that by the time you finally reach the required level, you’ve already replaced the slot with something else. That’s usually not a very enjoyable experience for me.
With MI items, “something else working well enough” may be less common, but having them consistently drop above your usable level still isn’t particularly fun.
Isn’t the whole point of lower-level versions of items that players can actually use them when they get them, even if the stats are somewhat weaker?
3 Likes
Eh, I usually make use of Viloth rings early if I’m levelling an acid based build, same with other MI’s for their buffs on skills. So them dropping far past my current level when levelling is going to be rather annoying, especially in higher levels where levelling is slower.
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I totally could see that MI drop change cause such problems for leveling… And again, “was it really necessary”? If main issue was lvl 84 bases dropping at char lvl 100, then it could be solved by adjusting min lvl formula in MI tables. Yes, this would affect leveling a bit, but not as much as always forcing higher lvl variant, making ~100% MI drops not immediately usable.
2 Likes
Not just that. There are level ranges where mobs drop either level 75, 84 or 94 MIs (the -Sect guardians, for example).
It’s generally been a pain.
What this does is not make MIs hard to get at the right level. It means you need to be mindful of when you go get MIs. That’s different. Don’t go pick up new Solael pants at level 75, cos you’ll get level 84. Go fight him at level 70 and you’ll be fine.
It means no more trying to get a level 18 Shambulet for the Demo bonus and constantly getting a level 8 version due to the coin flip landing wrong.
This changes makes the level range for obtaining MIs very clear and straight forward, which is an overall win.
Having the possibility of getting an item you can use now and an item you can use later, is good imo.
It only becomes a “problem” when you’re farming for good affixes, which is mostly an end game concern. Also, like, there are only two affixes on items in this game having a coin flip to the mix isn’t the end of the world.
edit: also most of the “good” affixes aren’t rare, in fact it was one of my complaints that Rare affixes usually don’t even feel good when alacrity and celerity enable so many builds and are just “better” than most rares
I personally love farming GG rares in endgame, but “being forced” to farm during leveling just to get a drop (that hopefully doesn’t have awful affixes) can feel really annoying because how the game is structured.
One of the main issues I’ve had during my recent testing runs is that, if you have to farm a non boss specific MI, you’ll probably end up leveling a bunch which also scales the monster levels if (and when) you have to restart the game to respawn them. This again can cause you to get even higher level MI’s requiring you to level up even more.
This gets even more annoying with the new boss hp buffs (which I overall like) since that again increases the gap between having and not having your “op MI”.
edit: Also this kind of incentivizes vendor farming MI’s instead of killing mobs, in the cases where it’s possible. For example I was not able to drop the upheaval mace from act2 arkovian ghosts in a reasonable time on one of my test runs but I was able to just rush the SoT vendor for it, which feels a bit lame imo.
2 Likes
I agree with all this. Especially vendoring feels awkward to me. It’s nice to have another source of these MI’s in blueprints, and them being locked in a Dungeon I think is a good thing. Infinitely resetting a vendor being the best way to get good drops is unacceptable I feel. I really think it should be a once per entry inventory with high quality, no resetting.
i think i wouldn’t like it if that was the case but it hasn’t been for me.
literally just had a majority of lvl 40 mi’s drop for a char going from 44 to 46. maybe no lvl 35 fleshwarped casques though.
nope. lvl 40 lucius arm after reaching lvl 46.
do i have to lvl in elite/ultimate to see this? can everyone reproduce this?
I find it mostly gets annoying between level 61 to ~88. I particularly dislike it with Murderer’s Breastplates and Cowls as they drop bugger all of the time as it is.
Getting to L72 and having a lvl 84 item drop that would be a direct upgrade to the lvl 50 same item you’ve been using sucks. Now I know I have to just plod on underpowered gear even longer.
And no, not all of us are packed with speed-levelling gear to make the in-between irrelevant, some of us like to enjoy the full levelling experience.
5 Likes
I get where you are coming from and even agree on it to an extent if it comes down to proper random loot. It’s also reason why i’m not too fond if ARPG’s/Looter-Games do the smartloot system where you get only(or it generously / mostly) for your class, because it diminish part of replaybility and core experience (working towards something, encouraged of alt characters for new builds/classes).
But when you have a concept like MI, which introduce in such a Genre basically ‘targetfarming’ - it is kinda anticlimatic if it’s then at the drop being often pushed at the highest possible level which may be out of your range.
As this is the PTR which i assume is about 1.3.0 (and FoA i guess)… i’m kinda surprised that this isn’t a feature build into the ascension-altar, because for that it would make sense, if you give the player a deliberate option where you can upp the ods to get the highest level outcome (for people who don’t want to regrind the same items that often over and over again with another random factor of it being item level).
1 Like