Patch 1.002 introduced a lot of changes, but this feedback won’t focus on balance-related ones – it’s purely about how 1.002 changed gameplay.
Treasure Troves
- There’s still one fixed trove pretty close to the riftgate, one wandering trove in the Tyrant’s Hold and one wandering trove in the Mountain’s Deep. These appear every time and obviously worth checking once you log in, if not farming. Arkovian Undercity also has one, although I’m not sure if it’s guaranteed but wandering or random.
I’m puzzled about the idea behind them. Were they supposed to make us farm areas different than SoT/BoC? Then it’s a partial success – I do Tyrant Hold and Mountain’s Deep runs. Or they were supposed to make us revisit dark corners of the world? Stumble upon them randomly while doing bounties? Hardly, unless it’s yet again a bounty to Mountain’s Deep.
It seems their drops were nerfed, at least I haven’t seen a single legendary dropped from them, otherwise we would have to admit that the gold rush that happened once the patch was released was just a grand fluke.
Which is a shame actually. They do give off this “sealed evil” vibe, so the drop is pretty anticlimatic atm, yet I have to admit they are quite practical the way they are now.
Dynamite
- Dynamite is pretty cheap, I think even cheaper than before. Suppose the real reason of removing dynamite from shops is to make Isaiah quest less important (which is a good thing). The early bottleneck is Searing Embers, so finding one partial of it equals to finding one Dynamite, give or take. Later in the game Searing Ember is plentiful from random farming, so bottleneck is the necessity to farm Aether Crystals (not a big deal, unless you’re struck with 80+ level on elite).
Dismantle
- One day exploit of fixed troves sort of diverted attention from this, but blue items now reward player with rare crafting regs. I’ve broken down 250+ blue items and chance to get a rare reg turned out to be around 15-20%. Most of them were classical trio though. Chance to get a key or manticore eye is much lower than that.
Paired with the new blacksmith, this is basically a mechanic to convert blue items to legendaries. And I think it’s pretty good – I would had just sold those epics otherwise to save space. Roughly 1 random legendary per 50 blue items + 50 dynamite. For comparison’s sake – high end character that farms BoC will have roughly 1 legendary per 10 blue items if he goes for heroes only.
One peculiar feature is that the game doesn’t seem to care about if dismantled epic was level 20 or level 65. Consider you’re struck with your main – start a new character and while you level it up you’re slightly going forward with your main too – you’re sure to find some epics you don’t need.
Gambler-wannabe Blacksmith
- There wasn’t any big & centralized discussion on this, but one can find a lot of mentions how this blacksmith devalues legendaries (e.g. here). Well, high-end farming builds said to get 6-8 legendaries per hour, with the above trick it would be 8-10 legendaries per hour (if they chose to waste time farming aether crystals for dynamite). Not a vast difference here, I think. But for fresh starters who just got into the game it’s a huge difference. So yup, this devalues legendaries, sort of. But hey – legendaries from one-shot chests devalue them too, still noone complains.
On the other side, it still doesn’t help to deal with a vast discrepancy between builds – some builds can farm legendaries on elite/ultimate with whatever comes at hand (looking at you, saboteurs), while other characters need very specific gear pieces to reach comparable clear speed. And given how blacksmith works it will yet again make life easier for the former rather than the latter, I think.
Scrap Crafting
- For starters, if you want to get anywhere you would need to dismantle. There’s no other way to get enough scrap. Now, let’s say you have 200 scrap (enough for 100 attempts) and you want to replace your yellow gloves with +15% attack speed with with yellow gloves that give +15% attack speed but have higher armor. What are your chances to get such an item?
Fairly low, actually. There’s just too much bad affixes like of spellweaving (all kinds of completely useless combinations like aether+poison) or animistic ones. I think out of 100 crafted gloves 2-3 may be with desired “of Alacrity”, but that’s it – if you want a good prefix then chances are abysmal. If you think that I just need to craft 100 more, or even 200 more – a price for scrap crafted items starts at around 1500, is somewhat around 2500 midway and peaks at around 4300 @level85. 100 items, each costing 2500 makes it 250k iron bits.
The above example is pretty extreme though – if you want a good item with +health then your chances are better, mostly because there are plentiful of affixes that provide hp.
Another issue is that time frame for scrap crafting is really narrow. You get your blacksmith @lvl15, at that point there’s no way you get a lot of extra scrap, as well as cash. Scrap really becomes available when you reach Homestead, which is around level 30-32. And it’s almost 35, when faction gear becomes available. Nothing you can craft can compare with faction items, they are just too good. Scrap crafting briefly becomes decent again at 50-55, since by that point faction pieces, while possessing superior bonuses, will have way too low armor. But then you reach Celestial Blacksmith and can forget about scrap crafting again – you simply won’t have enough iron. And then there’s level 70, if you haven’t filled your spots with decent epics by the time you can yet again buy updated faction gear, and it’s borderline impossible to craft something better than a faction piece. Probably the only viable investment later in the game is crafting rings – but only if you have cash to spare, might turn out you won’t.
Blacksmiths not rolling a yellow items with a single affix was a good change, but still lacking. It especially hurts that scrap crafting, which is supposed to be mosly useful early/midgame, actually sucks the most during these. So what’s this really – a useful feature to help new characters or a masked scrap/iron sink for lategame?
My suggestions are: - Improve/Overhaul blacksmith bonuses. The only somewhat useful ones right now are +health from Homestead and resistances from Cursed Blacksmith. Blacksmith bonuses should give a slight edge to crafted items – not enough to make them OP, but enough to justify crafting rather than rerolling a shop/killing monsters.
- Clean up the affix table from the most useless bonuses, like improbable combinations of spellweaving. It’s fine for them to drop from enemies, but disheartening to receive them from blacksmiths over and over again.
- More ‘green’ blueprints. These are completely different league than regular scrap crafting. How about decent low level rings that use Polished Emerald for crafting?
- Reduce price for characters below 50-60 levels.
Bounties
- I won’t go in detail why bounties desperately need a rework – it’s been done plenty of times already (here is a good post). I’ll just point out to two minor issues. The first one is iron reward @normal difficulty, it’s just around 900-1000 iron. It may be an okay sum for level 20 character, but not for level 40-50. I think bounties could use a character level component in the reward. The second one is component rewards. Removal of low-tier components was a good step, but sadly I think it was step to the side rather than forward. Right now I’m swarming in partial components I can easily craft but don’t bother to. Why would I need ammo pieces? Amber? I could’ve easily crafted them if I wanted. It’s even more pissing off for components like Purified Salt – so, ok, I have a partial, how do I complete a component if I can only craft a full one? Do more bounties and hope for the same reward? It just clutters stash without meaningful purpose – from the beginning it’s an easily accessable craftable component. I think the good option would had been rewarding either a full low tier component or 3-4 random partials of low tier components, as well as generic rare/semi-rare component pieces like it’s now. Only craftable bottom-tier needs to go. It could be very well complemented with additional sinks for components. E.g. Scavenged Plating and Searing Ember is used for Dynamite, Mutagenic Ichor is used for Jelly Essense. Potions could be a neat sink, with a few adjustments.
I think I’m done. Thank you if you actually read any of that.