Continued on this front though, my thoughts don’t even focus around GD in particular – just the set concept in general for any game.
It comes back to my fundamental question, “How does giving people major bonuses when wearing the exact same combination of gear for multiple slots encourage people to diversify their builds?”
I’m mostly just nitpicking the idea of sets in any game design. GD happens to be an amazing game that has them, and it is so rich and diverse already but I never understood why sets are a popular design choice.
GD does some wonderful stuff to mitigate and diversify even when everyone’s wearing the same set – so there are pockets I find very interesting from a design standpoint like having both components and augments for gears to tailor them to a particular need. That does wonders for diversity and gives players even wearing identical sets to still mix and match on top of it. And then we got the RNG on top of that which generally makes subtle deviations and sometimes ones significant enough to account for during augmentation (and sometimes so significant it changes the whole appeal in some exceptional scenarios).
But I guess I just never understood the rationale for sets from a game designer’s standpoint all the way back from Diablo 2 expansion that introduced them. I never understood the end goal. I might be too obsessed with maximizing diversity and longevity as the ultimate goal and overlooking a lot of those kinds of collector-side benefits of collecting a complete set and things of that sort (which I personally do enjoy and feel, but in my opinion at a significant cost to diversity).
I think the idea of sets blocking diversity is only an issue if looking at your build based on the items you have instead of finding items for builds you want. Yeah, some skills are not as represented, but that has nothing to do with sets.
All builds will have BiS items. Doesn’t matter if it is a set, or not…People will a gravitate to the items that are Bis for their build. I think it would be a bigger issue if everyone gravitated to items regardless of their build. Like the Judicator rings… Clairvoyant set is good for AAR sorcerers…but would a warder use?
When I mentions RNG to as a function to control diversity of gear I wasn’t referring to the stats on items, I was referring to which items dropped. How long did it take you to complete the dawnbreaker set? Do you have many others finished? I don’t think I’m that unlucky, but maybe I am… Either way, I have not gotting more then 2-3 pieces to drop for any set that contains 4+ pieces in 600 hours of game play… And a LOT of bloods turned it when should help get some armor drops for sets…still no luck…
Did actually have two set pieces (trozan’s helm BP, new agrivix off hand) drop last night so hopefully my luck is changing…
Absolutely agree, I’m not dreaming of a world where no one can agree on a BiS item. I just think sets multiply the issue because they make more than one item combined together BiS from the set bonuses. They quickly make BiS ideas fill up more than one slot.
It’s mostly about mitigating and trying to delay convergence and make it harder for players to converge to the same choices. Convergence is inevitable to me – there are just some design choices that I think could slow it down.
On the flip side to get out of nitpicking and explain my whole attraction for this game, I love procs! OMG! Procs to me are one of the most interesting and fresh ideas I’ve encountered. Whoever introduced that is a total design genius in my eyes.
With procs you can mix and match, assign this proc to that skill, or another, even weird ideas like attaching a damaging proc to a CC AoE skill works! I can even assign a proc to a new skill I didn’t even encounter before from an item I discover and the two combine in such interesting ways. I’m in heaven!
They also make it really difficult, when combined with cooldowns and percentages of triggering, to calculate things like total damage throughput dealt on paper which to me is a good thing. The harder it is to work these things out, the more difficult it is for players to discover some perfect idea of “optimal”.
So it’s like that – I love mixing and matching and a game that really lets you think and rethink and rethink your choices. Powerful sets, in my opinion, simplify the choices too much and make me choose in bulk instead of trying to decide what is best for me more on an individual basis. But I digress.
sets are still extreme hard to naturally complete without TON of playing time…So even if they are the best…you might not even get them (without trading)… Still, no set is more than 5 pieces, so that is still <1/2 your gear choice…
(Haven’t read the whole thread so I don’t know if this was brought up):
The trouble here is that it assumes we’re talking about items in a vacuous space of only one particular item type, whereas in our Grim-Dawn reality, we have multiple item types and slots to fill with various items. So a very good particular item, say, a sword, may break some sets which include weapons - e.g., Warborn - but would have no impact on sets that don’t - e.g., Bloodrager. So for your above request to work, you would need ‘setbreakers’ in every slot…and at least a couple slots worth of set breakers for various conceivable builds so as to allow for partial sets and complete sets and no sets to coexist on approximately equivalent terms for different characters (granted, character A may favor a set over all else and character B may favor nonset items over all else, but that distinction is what I believe you’re going for).
Ultimately we approach a scenario in which there are a ton of very good set items/sets and a ton of very good nonset items. When we’ve reached that scenario, we should ask ourselves why anything that doesn’t fall into either of these categories even exists, or at the very least - for our conversation - may be considered ‘Legendary’. I don’t have an answer to that, and such is my belief that all ‘Legendary’ items, if they are to hold up to that name, must offer some edge that cannot be found elsewhere if they are to compete with each other.
I’m not sure either. I always felt like sets exacerbate the issue by quickly tempting players to make a uniform choice that fills up more than one slot, but I don’t know how to get a healthy dose of competition on an individual item basis for a particular slot.
There are already exceptions where people are breaking their sets for a single slot quite often that I see, and I’m glad, but sets still often dominate a lot of the other slots.
To me competition is easiest to achieve from a balancing standpoint (without making the game boring and uniform) when you go for properties that are even hard to compare against each other in terms of numbers on paper. For example, items that grant a whole new skill are harder to compare against each other. We can’t just boil them down to bonuses to resists, DA, OA, damage, things like that – to lose it would deprive you of a valuable skill. Yet another item that fills the same slot might also have an interesting skill just as valuable for other scenarios, and that’s when I think the competition is starting to get healthy for a slot – when we’re having a really hard time settling for an item and constantly find new stuff for that slot that tempts us to rethink our choices – when the idea of BiS sparks a huge debate that involves people mentioning a number of items.
Individual items that grant very notable skills and procs would probably be one of the easiest types to compel people to change their minds about a particular slot, and maybe stop wearing sets so often.
1400 hours played. Still have not completed any 3+ piece legendary set without trading. With trading completed 1. Though have tons of other legendaries. Legendary set items might need some drop rate raise even a small one.
I see – and yeah, dawnbreaker’s is only the second legendary 3+ piece set that I’ve completed. I wanted to find the most popular ones like Ultos but I haven’t found a single piece yet after seemingly endless grinding and farming.
I’ve been talking like we all have endless collection of gear in our stash and can wear anything we want. From a late endgame build design perspective I generally don’t constrain my ideas to just the items I own but all the available items in the game. It’s just sets stick out as things to quickly fill up more than one slot, simplifying my choices – and simplifying to me is actually kind of making me gravitate towards choices that many other players (and even the developers who introduced the precise set combination) already made on a wholesale basis.
If we look at it from the standpoint of actually collecting all the gear for our dream builds then that takes quite a long time of playing. That said though, when seasoned veterans who have discovered those sets start all wearing them, then all of us who haven’t found those sets end up getting the goal of farming for them. That’s also kind of boring to me since the set is dominating our end goals – instead of individual armor pieces, weapons, shields, off-hands, belts, all discovered and potentially being even better than those sets could help us discover very interesting alternatives.
So I wasn’t focusing so much from a collection/discovery standpoint, but I still feel like sets hurt that part a little bit too since just having one piece of a set is usually not very useful until you collect more, but you might then get it stuck in your head to try to complete the set as an end goal. Sets consolidate and simplify our goals in our build designs – and I actually like complexity more than simplicity there to help introduce some chaos instead of order.
From a pure collector’s standpoint, while there is a joy to collecting the very last piece of say a 5-piece set, there is also extreme frustration when you have collected that helmet from the set 7 times already but just can’t get the damned chest piece to drop. It tends to highlight duplicate drops and can make us really get tunnel vision on the goal of just trying to get one very specific item to drop. This then also puts a spotlight on the limited stash. That wasn’t what I was focused on but I feel like set hunting is a little bit unhealthy too and makes farming more tedious than a joyful discovery. It’s like collecting fragmented items instead of whole items – puzzle piece hunting. Without sets, every single individual equipment item that drops is potentially very interesting. With sets, it’s like you just picked up a small fragment that needs more to be really useful.
I love powerful sets, as people have already said, they are the point of reaching end-game with a character. I have a collector’s mentality and I like trading for powerful pieces, even when it takes a while and the price is steep. What I don’t enjoy is when my hard-earned items are made all but useless, like the judicator signets. Also, I only play in single-player mode so I don’t see how my OP items may affect play balance. This is how I feel and I’m voicing my opinion.
Also, I don’t exactly feel like combing through loads of trash green items to find one (or more - I have collected 6 judicator rings) that has the right combination of prefix - item - suffix. Nor do I feel like poring over lengthy update notes to find an item that might be a suitable substitute. I’ll leave that to people who have more time. I’d much rather play the game.
Sorry to hear about the judicator set! That was one on my dream list but not so much anymore – the on crit proc was so interesting to me.
I think for sets if we change perspective, the developers are designing the gear combination to wear for you. That’s another part that’s kind of boring to me. “This set was tailor-made for an AAR caster” – it’s so obvious and it’s obvious the developers crafted this precisely for that reason, it even boosts exactly the right skills. You can’t be a pioneer player trying new equipment ideas in the game if you are wearing a set – you are wearing an entire combination which was a developer idea and tested precisely together.
Set pieces scream to me, “Wear me wear me! I’m perfect for your build! Wait, don’t just wear me, wear the hat too… and the shield – don’t forget the shield! And the leggings! I’ll give you bonuses if you wear all four of us. Don’t choose your own hat, wear the hat here – you’ll lose the bonus if you get all creative and choose a different hat!” It’s not like we are being forced – we can choose not to wear the whole set or even just wear one piece of a set. But often the bonuses are too compelling to break the whole set down on a per-slot level and just wear a totally different piece for each slot – we’re being nudged to make the same gear combination choices the developers crafted precisely together.
It’s like sets introduce a dress code to the video game and if you choose not to dress in the precise outfit combination designed for you and get creative and mix and match different pieces for different slots, you’re going to lose the bonuses. That’s so boring to me – I know I’m not being very original whenever I’m wearing all or most of a set, but the set bonuses are too compelling to abandon – my whole outfit is being coordinated for me by the developers. Creative freedom to explore different combinations gets drowned out by set bonuses.
Without sets it’s like you aren’t being encouraged to take up a particular combination of gear for multiple slots. Each slot is your independent choice, no one is compelling you with synergy bonuses. You have to find your own synergies. And that’s also again more interesting to me. I think we find more diversity between player choices that way, and collecting individual pieces of equipment becomes a lot more exciting than just finding you have a fragment of some amazing set that is perfect for you if you just collect all the other pieces and fill up all your slots with those.
The problem is that, in my opinion, the selection of legendary rings is quite limited and only certain classes can take advantage of them. With the Judicator signets you gained a universally good effect that allowed you to free up some devotion points and expand your character. Now that is gone. Blue rings can only do so much and the only choice we have is to sift through hundreds of green drops until we find something “adequate”.
Well, I reckon it’s our only choice now. The problem is I have a demanding job and a hobby I prefer to video gaming (board games) and I’m not sure I can spare the time.
Personally I hate it when sets aren’t worth using. It’s wholly disappointing to see “yeah this set, even with its set bonuses, isn’t as good as <clownsuit BiS items>” because I feel like you should want to have sets. Like maybe the set items aren’t each BiS on their own but once you have them the bonuses push the whole set over the top. Because if the sets aren’t worth using when compared to a pile of pick-n-mix, why go through the effort of getting the sets in the first place?
