Rarity of primals were meant to make us excited when they drop but it turned out most of them are useless. Ethereals were actually so much better designed and each of them was useful.
Primal stat table should get replaced with ethereal stats and limit them to 1 equipped at a time, maybe make them weapon only. Some cool but not used legendaries could be reworked to drop as primals to make them more unique instead of same item with different border. Existing primals in non season can just be changed to ancients keeping their max rolls.
I made a thread a week or so ago about using some of the elements of Ethereals to update Primals (mostly the reduced loot pool, not the huge power boost). I really do think that the way Ethereals drop (which has been well-received by a large section of the player base) is a huge lesson for how to update Primals.
Primals weren’t meant to be a guaranteed upgrade. Getting the ones with the right stats is the chase outside of paragon. They are a chase item and without chase items it will get even more boring because the chase is just the paragon.
They should just make Primal 30% stronger than Ancient with a perfect roll ala Primal 1.0 + Primal 2.0 = Primal 3.0, a truly ultimate gear to hunt for.
I’m really tired of finding primals that have no affix at all! Blizz really needs to review the loot table for primals. So far, my DH has had 4 primal Fletcher Pride Quivers drop this season.
There is a kind of balance in this game. Not a perfect balance in it yet by any means, but there is a balance where each weapon performs a certain way.
Ethereals were great no argument. If they brought them back once or twice a year with different transmogs each time in seasons most people would find that acceptable.
I get why people want them but it was a celebration of D2 which is a different type of diablo. It is like the upcoming shards, they’re a seasonal feature. not a permanent one.
To bring in either permanently, they’d have to rescale all of the weapons and class sets down to accommodate the massive damage boosts. somehow, I cannot see that happening. There are enough speed issues getting untouched green sets up to par in the character classes without adding more delays in my opinion.
Primals are only seen as a failure because getting the correct affixes vastly outweighs getting perfectly rolled affixes, particularly because most affix ranges aren’t high enough to ever offset this fact.
Ethereals are a cascading failure of RNG. They’re only tolerated because even a poorly rolled ethereal is insanely powerful compared to a corresponding ancient.
When I read threads like this it’s hard for me to read anything but players wanting a much more powerful item. They make for a novel seasonal theme, but from a pure itemization standpoint they’re a rather messy design.
Simple answer no. Primals were NEVER ment to be upgrades (statwise or otherwise). Originally they were designed to be more powerful then ancients but the majority of the community shot that down so they became perfectly rolled ancients instead.
Like seriously, as soon as you get it out of your brain that your not primal hunting, the better you will be as 90%+ rolled ancients will serve you far better and the difference between a 90% rolled ancient and a perfectly rolled primal is EXTREMELY small and its NOT hard to get to 90% rolls on an ancient.
Having full primals is not an iwin button.
But Diablo 3 is really lacking that cool effect of dropping that very rare and good unique item. I also really like the idea of item type that only 1 can be equipped. Primals were supposed to be that, very rare drop to make us hyped when we see it. If most of them are useless then it’s not working as it should. if you’re telling me to give up on primals then why even have them in game lol.
Ethereals was that until you got a decent one, after that it’s the same as always, they are just mats. This season I have made mats of hundreds (probably thousands in fact given that I have over 20k forgotten souls in inventory atm), most of them without even checking the stats.
Why not? They have a higher chance of being perfect compared to an ancient given that you only need it to roll the right stats, not the right values, removing one part of the RNG.
I wrote out a concept for the creation of several item tiers above ancient, covering all items types: Weapons, Armor, Jewelry.
The tiers are Primal, Ethereal, Epic and Mythic.
We need several loot tiers to vary the builds and make the item hunt more interesting. Finding item(s) in a certain loot tier can possibly enable build traits otherwise impossible to glean with ancients: CDR for fulltime buffs, new AS breakpoints, or passive heavy builds that are potent or hold an edge from extra utility.
The aim is to prolong the loot hunt and specialize without completely undoing the baseline of what the current ancient item tier offers.
Primals are Nice to haves, not MUST haves. Hunting for “just” primals is setting yourself up to burn out and fustration when you can far more easily get high rolled ancients and pretty much have the same power as if you had full primals.
Last thing we need is MORE power creep. But tiers above ancient that are more powerful was shot down by a Majority of the community and wont come back full time.
Give rares more RNG - what I mean is that they should have more options for affixes that can roll on them. Why not give more weapons, for example, the ability to get move speed?
Primals are the exactly same items as ancients… Which are the exact same items as normal Legendaries. Copy paste.
Ethereals are at least something new. Even if most of the building blocks are reused.
Which is not even a problem in general, rearranging your building blocks to create “new” content is a foundation of A-RPG design.
