While this is great in most cases, it is really bad in some others. In my case, I was farming for a Night Herald with a vitality dmg affix, any would do. The weapon has both cold and vitality dmg so I thought it’s gonna be easy to get one with an affix that boosts vitality dmg.
Long story short: Nope.
Long story: After about 60 runs, I had 35 Night Heralds. Out of these 35, only 1 had a vitality dmg affix, 2 had a chaos dmg affix and all others had elemental dmg affixes of some kind. Now that’s some bias… I even got a nice double rare with tons of cold dmg but unfortunately that’s quite useless for my build. An Essence Drinker’s of Insanity would be neat, but yeah at this rate it ain’t gonna happen.
Please consider extending the affix bias to all damage types present on the item. This might make it slightly harder to get crazy good rolls for the main damage type but it would certainly help diversity if the other damage type was supported as well.
As this was the first MI I was target farming after the patch I don’t know about any others with this kind of bias towards only one of the damage types on the item. So please take a look at the other items too, some useful affix combinations might have become extremely rare after the change.
I think it’s the problem of MI’s that have bonuses to 2 different types of damage.
For example, I’ve been farming Gargabol a lot, got two Devastating of scorching and two scorching of scorched ends and tonns of other with fire affixes, yet no physical ones.
Obsidian War Cleaver is biased to physical instead of Chaos.
I realize it has +% Physical Damage, but it also has base chaos damage.
I happened to focus a build entirely on chaos forcewave, which it is not well supported, so I greatly depended on some strong chaos-related affixes but they are now exceedingly rare.
My suggestion to this problem would be to bias towards synergising affixes rather than or minimizing the focus on single elements favoured by the weapon.
For example, the prefix would have an equal chance of any element, but a 50% chance for a suffix of the same element.
vs the current:
50% chance for two affixes of a predetermined element.
There is already a substantial lack in MI affix variety now. The bias is so strong, many users are just receiving several duplicates with the exact same affixes every time in a single session. We only need one, so there is room for the variety to return and once again diversify the affixes.
We can definitely tune the loot pool further on a case by case basis.
I think exotic combinations being harder to get than the ideal option is unfortunate, but a realistic price to pay for having better synergy in what affixes items generate. The exotic options still exist and are possible.
It’s all a matter of degree. Previously, I nedeed around 3 runs of Dermapteran Hive to get one Puncturing of Alacrity, now I get 3 of those per one run, at least.
Reducing this somewhat, to say, one per run, would be reasonable.
Started writing a huge wall of text before I realized I was essentially rehashing this sentiment:
During leveling, it’s not such a big deal, but for endgame farming there’s a clear conceptual distinction that I think needs to be made between making standard synergistic affix pairs readily available during target farming and increasing their frequency in excess of this point (the latter coming with no meaningful benefit to the player, instead merely diminishing the odds of the useful “exotic” affix rolls). I don’t know where this sweet spot of “readily available” is, and I suspect it varies quite a bit depending on the monster that needs to be farmed, but it seems clear to me that the 1.1.7 update sometimes overshoots the mark.
That being said, I feel I should qualify my words above with a couple of things:
Retuning affix drop rates (potentially even on an item-by-item basis) with the above in mind would clearly require more than just a little tedium, so it’s perfectly understandable to me if the devs choose not to focus their energies here for what may only be a marginal improvement in gameplay experience.
Full disclosure: I’m personally willing to remedy the situation in my own game via GDstash should I become impatient with the current state of affairs. (I.e. I don’t actually have much stake in this matter.)
For me, my standards have raised and I no longer accept double yellows for common MIs, even if they are ideal affixes. For common MIs, it’s single/double ideal rare or bust.
For uncommon MIs, double ideal yellow is still OK.
Perhaps there can be a system where “ideal-ness” of affixes depends on overall session drop rate? I don’t really see how this can be accomplished, but it’s an idea.
I don’t really understand how this newly introduced drop bias works. For instance, will the drops bias damage bonuses if an item has no innate flat damage? I’m thinking about Terrnox’s Aether Tome, which has no flat damage, but has innate aether damage bonuses.
Suppose I want to build a Vitality Devastation char. I get the amulet that converts damage on Devastation to Vitality, and now I want to get Terrnox’s tome for cooldown reduction. Does this change mean it will now become very hard to get Terrnox’s tome with Vitality damage bonuses? Because if yes, it kinda sucks, and is actually working against enabling a build made possible by the the new amulet for Devastation?
I do admit I’m not sure thai ti works that way, so I apologize if I’m overly critical here.
You still can get a rare good vitality affix easily, because plenty of affixes have both bonus for aether/vitality dmg, but it will be hard if you want an acid one for meme.
If you’re taking requests for this, may I suggest that items that add retal to attack to any skill get weighted toward rolling retal affixes, even if the damage types don’t match? For instance, builds that use a Spectral War Shield (i.e., retal Drain Essence builds) are much more likely to want Caustic, of Wildfire, or of Thorns than they are vitality-related affixes.
In general, I agree with this thread’s feedback that the change pushed the weights toward matching affixes a little too hard. I like that it’s easier to find synergistic rolls now, but the effect is so strong that over on the subreddit we’re seeing a bunch of posts like this and this where people are confused and think the game is bugged because they’re seeing specific rolls so often.
