Itemization

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
21

I am pretty sure that most people when given the choice would rather have more good items drop than fewer, regardless of actual drop rate

Of the 99.9% trash item, 99% are also trash for other builds, that is just how loot works, so I do not mind the .9% so much :wink:

Does anyone agree that the loot structure could be more regular? Does anyone enjoy going 3 hours without an item upgrade?

I have no problem going without upgrades a few hours, but it is rare (while levelling).

The upside of good loot being rare is that you see it as a reward when it finally drops, rather than taking it for granted (better item every 5 minutes) or even as a burden (have to compare every 5th drop to my current gear to see if it is better, what a pain).
For those dry spells, look at faction vendors…

22

Sorry, I don’t accept the defense that, if a drop doesn’t occur for 3 hours and suddenly one does, that somehow forgives the 3 hour waiting period.

23

Not sure what a run reward cycle is, but going from 35 to 45 as you did only takes a few hours and you have faction vendor gear at level 40 to fall back on…

Also, if you did not get any upgrade in that time, I doubt you were looking hard. It might not be a straight upgrade (better at everything), but an improvement in some (more important) areas while not being as good in others. I find most of my upgrades fall into that category.

24

fine, and I don’t buy into a drop cycle that gives me a ‘guaranteed’ upgrade every few minutes.

25

When did I say that I wanted it to be reconfigured to give me an upgrade every few minutes? When has that been my stance or argument?

26

when you said 99.9 or so percent of drops should be for your build while currently 0.01% are…

If you now get one upgrade every 5 hours (I’d argue it already is more often, but hey, as good a number as any), improving your chance by a factor of 1000 easily gets you there, simple math

27

That sentence does not mean I want an upgrade every few minutes.

Be careful – don’t put words (or a string of logic) in my mouth.

I don’t know what the best interval for upgrades is. At least 1 or 2 per level, I think, is a good starting point.

28

@MarleVVLL:

First: I’m not with the people who think your idea to be trash. I believe that quite many players have wished for such a functionality, not just in GD but also in similar games before it.

But, appart from the reasons already portrayed here, I can foresee some additional complications.

1. Giving better loot would not always be easy.

Quite often you may find that this cool epic that you had laying around in your stash for ages, hoping to some day use it, turned out to not even be on par with that well-rolled other epic or even that well-rolled simple yellow that you’ve been using for several levels.
Heck, I got a level 50 Empowered Bonesnap Gavel that is rolled so good that it even outperforms similar level 75 weapons when used on my shield-using Cadence Soldier.

The only way that the algorithm could top that would be by giving you something even better than this “one of the best” gear, which could quickly get stale and which would also not always be possible at all as base items’ levels follow fixed intervals, as do many epic and legendary items.
E.g. most of the time you will have an epic at level 50, one at 58, one at 65, very seldomly there will be an item at level 66, for example.

2. How should the algorithm know if your strongest stats are what you are really aiming at with your character?

After all it’s quite possible that you are just using the items that you are using because you haven’t found anything better or because they offer you the highest clearing-speed at that time and you are planning on switching to another play-style once you got the skillpoints necessary.
Simply looking for what stats you boosted and what skills you picked would not necessarilly be enough for the algorithm to give you the loot that you really want.
You could simplify it by making the algorithm just rely on your masteries, but…

3. GD’s build system is so complex that characters with almost identical skills may need significantly different gear.

And how would the algorithm know what build you are aiming for?
For this to even have a chance of working, the algorithm would have to know any and all possible combinations and play styles, something that, it would seem, a whole community of dedicated humans has not achieved in several years. Which is a good thing in my opinion.

So, in the end, the algorithm could only narrow down the selection of possible drops but would still not guarantee satisfying loot.
Compared against the drawbacks I am not sure if it would be worth it.

29

  1. I have suggested that the new loot filter wouldn’t always give better gear. Instead, it offers more relevant affix/suffix mixes with a range of values which are +/- based on what you currently are using/what is average for a toon of that level. I don’t want automatic upgrades. I want more relevant ones.

  2. Since it would consider your class combination, it would prefer mods which work with those mixtures. Therefore, even if your temporary items don’t reflect your eventual end game build, you can still get items for them, because they are part of your class combination. While it would still preference your particular current stats, it would still give voice to the larger context. So, I don’t think this would be too big of an issue.

  3. The game would know based on your current configuration. If you made changes, it would take those into account, first due to the class combination and then through your stats.

I.e., if you had +800% poison damage, it would prefer mods with deal with poison skills/damage. If you then changed to having only 400% damage and added 400% acid, then the loot would adjust accordingly.

30

It depends on when those levels are. In the early game, one gets upgrades quite frequently. In the later game, not so much. I do, in eager honesty, believe this is fine. It keeps a casual audience engaged earlier on and it gives a more hardcore audience something to strive for over time.

  1. The game would know based on your current configuration. If you made changes, it would take those into account, first due to the class combination and then through your stats.
    But how would you make those changes? Isn’t this self-fulfilling?
31

  1. I find waiting ten levels for an upgrade post level 20 unfulfilling.

  2. Let’s say you had a poison build for leveling, yet wanted to transition into a bleed build at 85 to use a legendary. All throughout the leveling process, the item filter is preferring mods which grant poison related boons. However, once you respec into your bleed build at level 85, your stats and skills change. The filter notices then, and then readjusts your loot catalog.

32

Well good luck killing anything - and thusly acquiring any drops - in any respectable amount of time without gear support for such a build at levelcap.

33

The problem would be to have gear to support that new bleed damage - as you would have been generously dealt only poison and acid gear until that point.
This way, once set, a build would be hard to change; maybe respecing your skill points would be enough, maybe it wouldn’t, probably forcing you to import gear from other characters or to resort to using faction gear or monster infrequents to be able to make the transition.

34

I disagree entirely.

Once you change your skills, devotions, augments, and components, you’ll have a fine set up to get started on farming gear at level 85, not to mention any gear saved up for that event.

35

of which there won’t be any because you efficiently removed it from all possible drops :smiley:

I think your idea goes way beyond a reasonable measure. Increase the drop rate for uniques and rares by 5 and we are all set… make a mod for that :wink:

36

And how did we obtain this gear in your system? :smiley:

37

Have either of you been reading my posts?

Gear would still drop for other builds.

38

yes, I read them, but given the below makes it hard to believe there would be anything dropping, so the question is: do you actually read your posts ? :wink:

You complain that you find nothing for your build but at the same time now claim that we still would get items for other builds even once the drop chance for those has been reduced 1000 times compared to what the drop chance for your build is today… you cannot really have it both ways

39

According to your other posts, at 0.01% frequency.

If we then consider that maybe roughly 10% of gear that drops is good gear (a fairly generous estimate, in my opinion), then 0.001% of all the gear that dropped up to this point is good gear not of the gear archetype we were previously using.

But wait! How many possible gear archetypes are there? Let’s say there’s around 150 reasonable builds in Grim Dawn (possibly an over estimate, but I’ve made ~110 reasonable builds already, and I’ve still got more ideas, so who knows?). In looking for good gear that fits a particular build we weren’t using out of 150 build archetypes, we can narrow down our results further from 0.001% to 0.000067% (1/(150-1)*100%, as we were previously using one of the 150 archetypes and have now swapped) of all gear that had dropped would be good gear relevant to our particular build that we’re now swapping to.

How much of that 0.000067% of gear is usable by a max level character engaged in Ultimate difficulty where they’re facing enemies of monstrous power? Chances are some of it dropped at lower levels. Let’s say a levelcap character can make use of anything from level 50 to 85, and that drop rates are fairly even across all levels (not actually true, due to difficulty modifications to droprate). This means that 41% of that 0.000067% is actually usable at levelcap. That drops us down to 0.0000275% of usable gear.

Think that 0.0000275% will cover all (or most of) 11 gear slots (not counting weapons, so either 12 or 13 gear slots in reality) for our character? I don’t.

So the question is…have you been reading your posts? :slight_smile:

40

The above actually poses an interesting question…what is a reasonable (Edit: AND MAXIMAL) % of gear to drop that isn’t of the build you’re presently using, if we make the same assumptions as above?

I’d postulate it’s somewhere around 70%, meaning ~30% of the gear you drop is build-relevant. 30% is definitely a higher value than where we are now. Edit: Converting the 0.01% to 70% brings our chances of having good, level-relevant gear for a new build up to 1.9% of all gear dropped. I could get behind that.

These two posts brought to you by an excessive amount of xkcd 'What-if’s having been read yesterday…