Was thinking about this the other day but I noticed the introduction of a lot of new legendary sets recently, and there’s definitely a collector/hoarder side of me that’s excited to collect them and complete them and also base new build ideas around them.
BUT – there’s a stronger schizo side which kind of hates that we’re seeing more powerful sets. The reason is that powerful sets are a combo of equipment already tailor-made with wonderful synergies. It makes a lot of players converge towards the exact same combination of gear choices.
My fear is that years to come, we start seeing everyone wearing the same complete or near-complete sets – build diversity is diminished. And that’s what powerful BiS or near-BiS sets do for the game in my opinion long-term: they kill diversity and make all the players start converging towards the same combination of gear. A lot of sets even seem like they were made specifically for a particular mastery, which constrains them even more when choosing an outfit.
A game with no sets might still have a very popular chest piece that everyone wears, for example, but one guy might wear it with one helmet, another with a different helmet. That’s still a tremendous amount of greater diversity and richness than if both players were wearing the exact same combination of chest and helm.
I kinda wish there were more “set-breakers” – individual items powerful enough on their own to make people abandon their sets, and enough of those so that people aren’t all converging to the exact same combination of equipment. I feel like that’s still possible just introducing more equipment if less powerful sets were introduced and more powerful set-independent items were introduced that were “set killers”.
You probably shouldn’t worry about people “converging” and wearing the same things. At its heart GD is primarily about single-player and Crate approaches it in this fashion intentionally.
Given that mindset, who cares what others are doing? Play how you want with what you want.
Wise advice, though this was something already formulating in my mind just seeing people talk about Markovian this, Ultos that, Clairvoyant this, Isakandra’s that – a set-dominated endgame.
My reaction was already formulating a bit just because I was a bit sad that so much of the endgame BiS gear revolves around sets.
That’s very true. I might be approaching this too much from a hardcore and geeky kind of side which might not be shared with a lot of the fan base. So much of the interest and richness to me of RPGs comes from variety, especially endgame. A lot of what makes me feel turns a game stale over the years is that convergence where everyone has converged to making the same choices after exhausting the game play.
If people can’t agree on which helmet goes with which armor, then that to me is a wonderful form of balance where no one can decide, given the pros and cons, what is clearly better or worse when matching one thing with another. Sets simplify the choices of what combines with what because they already come with synergies spoon-fed to you, but in doing so, I feel like they encourage more and more people to choose the exact same combos.
It’s even the subtlest deviations here and there, to me, that is the type of richness I think one can practically expect. All RPGs do suffer this problem for sure – everyone is going to start converging at some point to the same choices.
But the game manages this beautifully to me already with masteries – it’s hard to say which mastery is the strongest, and picking two with such a complex devotion system makes everyone diverge quite a bit (subtly, perhaps, but the subtleties often make the practical difference).
Very true, and I get so excited when I see someone coming up with build ideas based on greens! But then I get disappointed when they’re wearing 4/5 pieces of a popular set and just breaking it for a green weapon, e.g. because the 5-piece bonus is not so good.
The sets still seem to exacerbate the issue of build/design convergence – which is why I’d like to see more of those “set breakers” that really start making people abandon their sets. I’d like to see an “Ultos-breaking” armor, for example, for those shamans out there who absolutely feel the need to abandon Ultos because of that one chest piece, and this one head piece, or maybe that one, etc.
It’s a state of competition from my perspective to mitigate convergence. If some item competes for another and makes it difficult to tell which is overall better, then choices are tougher to make and fewer people converge on the exact same combination (even if there are similarities, where they chose to diverge is where the magic happens). Sets feel to me like they monopolize the market. They make it so people are kind of buying in bulk – whole outfits instead of considering one thing at a time when wearing the whole outfit or almost all of it gives tremendous bonuses.
Sets are always going to be popular. They are easier to obtain and their benefits are static and known. Greens require a bucket load of luck and then some to get that perfect roll that would make you turn your eyes away from set bonuses. Combine that with needing more than just one green to make a set breaker and you can see why any popular build guide is going to focus more on known and accessible items that most anyone could reasonably obtain thru gameplay/trade.
Think there’s a double green combo that might make an AAR sorceress abandon most of Clairvoyant, e.g.? I have to study further if double rare green affixes could really start to be arguably BiS for every slot and not just for like an occasional weapon or amulet or ring.
I would definitely like to see more of this. I’m admittedly drawing appeal from the game in probably a way that is different from most of the market, so listening to me is probably poor for business.
I’m also not intending to be argumentative or in official game suggestion mode, just geeking out on game design. This game’s design interests me so much in the way of build choices for masteries and skills and devotions, but gear-wise I often feel too constrained to where whole set combos of items are clearly sticking out to me as quite obviously BiS or close endgame. It’s when I feel a bit disappointed when I am trying to craft a build of my own that I’m being compelled to choose entire sets instead of carefully choosing set-independent items individually for every single slot.
What you are talking about is mostly an utopia. If a chest A is better than wearing Ultos chest then everyone would wear chest A and another player would complain ‘Please, make another good chest so there’s more diversity’. I don’t think it is a problem that some items are better than others. It will be desperately dull and boring if all items were ‘equal’ and lackluster. Good it is never gonna happen
Path of Exile has the best itemization on the ARPG market. They achieved it in two ways.
No sets, only unique items, this way people are not shoehorned into wearing all parts of the set and using the skills the set boosts the way both Grim Dawn and Diablo 3 approach things.
The unique items themselves barely offer vital statistics like life and resists. This means that strong rare items to fill up holes will always be popular and expensive, they don’t need to be sought from specific monsters, they can drop anywhere.
The Grim Dawn approach with sets is all the same I am afraid. They have
Damage boost to one or several damage types
Several resistances
+skill increases to usually two different skills.
Some utility stats like critical damage and cooldown reduction.
The only difference apart from numbers are the unique powers given by the set, which don’t change anything fundamentally but rather give you a new passive or active skill.
Well, this is how they’ve chosen to make things and I am sure its the easiest way to create hundreds of legendary items to hunt. They need to keep the game interesting for as long as possible after all.
My thoughts have a bit of history in that I played the crap out of Diablo 1 & 2. With 2 there was a time pre-expansion where sets didn’t exist, and I felt like there was less “combination convergence” among the player base. There were definitely popular items but they were popular individually – not as whole combos, so there was still a lot of design divergence in terms of builds even if they had a lot of similarities.
In the early era some items were way too obviously BiS for too many builds though, like Stone or Jordans became so popular early on (before they started getting competition) to the point of becoming trading currency, so there was that, but at least it was converging towards individual items and not towards whole combos.
I personally detest convergence among the player base but I might be an exceptionally weird one. Sets to me have a collector appeal but they have that tendency of encouraging players to converge to the exact same entire combination of gear (or very close).
I see, yeah – I feel like that is the trend. And it would be silly for me to make it out like it’s the end of the world for a game which has been my favorite game to play in years (I haven’t even been an active gamer for years, this made me active again).
Introducing more and more sets would definitely kind of help prevent everyone to converge too much. I was always like an oddball though even from Diablo 2 expansion era that didn’t care for sets – though in D2 a lot of the sets weren’t really anywhere close to BiS.
The other part I’m not so big of a fan of (but nitpicking my favorite game as of late) is a lot of items have constrained utility. I find too many things like amulets or even entire sets which are clearly designed for nightblade or something like that, or sometimes even a specific type of nightblade (ex: a set so obviously tailored to one using PB).
It is far more interesting to me when an item is arguably useful for any mastery, because that makes it harder for people to decide what to wear – again fighting convergence.
You think so? I agree that equality in terms of being rather a different skin of the same thing is so, so, so boring! Games that try to achieve balance by pulling everything down to the same common denominator kill all the diversity and richness of the game.
But to me there can be like a form of equality among diversity. It is hard to choose, for example, in this game what mastery is most effective. “Effective for what?” immediately comes to mind, and the criteria to measure what is good or bad becomes all hazy.
That, to me, is balance of a kind that’s interesting – one filled with diversity where no one can agree on what is best, one where effectiveness cannot be easily measured or calculated on paper – a feeling that there are too many possibilities to consider (some obviously bad, some better, but too many to choose from and converge to one precise combination). It’s when two players wearing, say, the exact same outfit can’t agree on which weapon is better, for example, that you already have a spark of diversity.
But when every AAR sorceress feels the need to wear the bulk of the Clairvoyant set, then that’s where I feel like a lot of diversity and richness is lost. Sets to me pull players towards very specific directions IMO, and individual items can do that too but not towards entire combinations.
Imagine if the game awarded bonuses for choosing exactly falcon, tree of life, and kraken combinations. That would be like the analogical equivalent of a “devotion set”, and that would probably pull more and more people to making the exact same three choices of constellations. It’s like a preset with bonuses but it pulls people strongly towards whole combinations. It’s easier to encourage diversity to do without that kind of “preset combination” (which the game thankfully does) so that one person ends up choosing kraken without falcon, e.g., as already a spark of diversity.
I might have been explaining poorly but my thinking was towards encouraging mixing and matching.
As an example, pretend none of the sets in this game existed. Now I ask a group of experts, given an AAR build focused on AAR and devastation and aether damage, try to come up with BiS endgame gear among all the items available (but no sets).
Suddenly it’s a lot harder without that sexy Clairvoyant set in the mix, no? I’m betting that not every one of those experts would design anything close to the exact same outfit combination (maybe some items in common but nowhere close to all).
However, throw in Clairvoyant set and probably all of those experts would converge towards using all or most of the set. That’s what I mean by convergence – it’s the killer of build diversity which is the killer of build design creativity (at least for those seeking to try to create the most effective builds).
I want to pose the question, “How do sets encourage people to mix and match their gear more? How do sets encourage people to make different choices for different slots?” They don’t as far as I see – they do the opposite. They encourage people to make the same combination choices for multiple slots, especially since a lot of sets in this game are so incredibly powerful when combined (too sexy to pass up unless you get something so incredibly rare and good to deviate). That’s okay though if diversity is not the top goal, but that’s where I was always not the biggest fan of sets. I’m a fan of build diversity – the more the merrier even if everyone is pursuing the most effective destroyer.
Let me know when Grim Dawn has a “build diversity” problem. From what I have seen (and used), there is plenty of diversity and it’s only going to grow with the latest patch. Some items being BiS for certain builds is a non-issue. This is going to always be the case. Whether it is a set or some other random assortment of items does not matter. The key is providing several alternatives which for the most part there is.
So much agreed! But in my opinion the amazing diversity of GD comes from dual masteries, devotions, all which make people branch out into so many different paths which also affects their gear choices.
But once on a given path, that’s where I feel like gear diversity is seriously constrained by amazing sets and ones constrained in utility (ex: a set obviously designed for AAR arcanist/x combo).
It is a personal critique from someone who loves the game though and is nitpicking what I consider the most fun and diverse game I’ve played in years.
I just never understood why item sets are pushed so often in game designs from the time they were introduced in Diablo 2 expansion. I just feel like they push people towards a similar wavelength, and to me the longevity and freshness often comes from doing the opposite and having everyone go a different direction (maybe just a slightly different path, but that’s still a different path).
I can definitely see the appeal of sets from a collector’s standpoint. I even got overjoyed the other day for completing the Dawnbreaker set which I have no use for (was never a huge fan of shaman builds), but just collecting the last piece – the elusive chest piece, felt gratifying from a collector’s standpoint (“gotta catch them all!”). So there is definitely that appeal I understand, but I do feel like they discourage diversity.
They also kind of clutter up my stash rather quickly since I tend to collect duplicates of the same pieces many times before I end up completing the set… though I digress.
A lot of gear that people gravitate to for particular builds, provide + skills for those builds. AAR sorcerer isn’t going to want to deck them selves out in gear that provide plusses to PRM. They would have to add more + general skills which would make the gear itself less diverse or add a lot more items.
Right now, the game has an amazing built in function that will prevent most non-extreme hardcore time investing players from gravitating to all the same gear pieces. And that is RNG… People can get around this if they want and hit up the trading forums, but if just playing the game as it… RNG does more then enough to prevent everyone from running around with the same gear.
There are a lot of sets out there already where there are 1-2 “set breakers”… Outcasts hood is good one… Vileblood mantle is probably another one for the new bloodrager set…of course there are many more too…
Right now, the game has an amazing built in function that will prevent most non-extreme hardcore time investing players from gravitating to all the same gear pieces. And that is RNG… People can get around this if they want and hit up the trading forums, but if just playing the game as it… RNG does more then enough to prevent everyone from running around with the same gear.
The RNG is wonderful and it reminds me of Diablo 1 era when hardly anyone wore the same gear since most of the items in the game were just affix-type magical items and only some uniques (just white, yellow, gold if I remember correctly).
But that didn’t feel gratifying enough somehow to lean that heavily on RNG with predominantly affix items, the uniques were maybe too exciting, so Diablo 2 came out with loads of unique items. And then I saw more convergence of people towards a particular item (Stone of Jordan, e.g., as like BiS for almost any class)… then expansion came out and the introduction of sets. Then I saw people not only wearing the same items, but the exact same entire outfit, and that’s where I felt like the idea of sets might have gotten people converging a little too much.
Then GD if I can kind of tie it into this history introduced like uber sets – sets so powerful that they dominate a lot of endgame build designs. And that’s where I see, from a gear standpoint (constrained to a particular build) – the most convergence – a little too much for my personal taste.
The RNG to me is a wonderful thing to encourage diversity – amazing idea, but I think often from the perspective of build designs (not trading) the random ranges of stats are often somewhat negligible except for ones that make an epic difference, like badge of mastery or the RNG used for affixes instead of within a given epic/legendary. What I mean by “negligible from a build design perspective” is that no one substitute an epic or legendary in favor of another and completely rethinks their gear choices because of RNG rolls to my knowledge.
There are a lot of sets out there already where there are 1-2 “set breakers”… Outcasts hood is good one… Vileblood mantle is probably another one for the new bloodrager set…of course there are many more too…
I love those and those items which are exceptions which tempt people to at least partially break their sets if not completely abandon them bring me joy – provided not everyone is converging towards the same exceptions, that there’s some healthy competition there from one item to the next.
