Seems to be an offical channel with Blizzard offering answers to questions RE itemization - here
Wonder if blizzard will ever do something similar on their offical forums…
If you had a question what would it be?
Posted yesterday.
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My questions would be:
-
what process is the team
Going through to balance Unique items relative to Tempered Legendary items? -
Rares must have a higher purpose in some future iteration of the game; can you share some insight into that?
-
what was the rational of having some Tempered Recipes having 2 affix options and others having 5?
-
what is the design rationale behind master working having a chance to fail each time?
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The only question I have, which I imagine will be answered in the video would be what changes have been made due to the feedback from the PTR. I just want the pdf file of patch notes.
Fairly certain I’ve used up all my questions for the year in the last campfire though.
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One would hope so, it’s certainly the most burning question for sure.
It’s always interesting to see which questions and areas of the game the developers avoid talking about.
Do you think there are topics they will avoid?
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Is there a system regarding of potential usage of Rares in endgame in progress or in plan ? 
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Not so much avoid, rather just not seem worth answering. Design philosophy questions are going to be hard to get out of them more so than what they’ve already expressed in the latest campfire. They may reiterate a point, but that’ll probably it.
The bigger issue is it’s harder to ask questions about the changes we don’t know about yet. For example did they change how tempering or masterworking work? Were uniques and Uber uniques changed? Can we still find several duplicates of the same tempering manual? Are Dust Devils actually transparent now?
All stuff I would hope they would go over, so it’s hard to predict what we should ask based on the new information they’ll be giving us.
About the only question I feel that could be asked with a definitive answer right now is all the questions pertaining to previous items for the Eternal Realm. We know about the Legacy part, but what about salvaging a Legacy Legendary to get the aspect? Or will all those Monster Parts actually be converted into Bundled Herbs, Rawhide, or Iron Chunks?
Important questions for people who play on Eternal, but not completely relevant to the new systems and possible changes they made since the PTR.
Will changes be retroactive? (will items we have now have a stat disappear?) And prior to tempering/masterworking, will items be crap and we’ll have to endure a painful grind to overcome that hurdle? (in other words, any point reviewing rares that drop now)
Why do rares need to have a higher purpose?
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Don’t have any, I’m content to see how the changes work post PTR.
No they will not change.
Yes you will want to farm the new items. You will want to keep specific legacy gear with stats that no longer appear.
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They don’t, it’s their game but keen to hear it from the horses mouth.
Yea never understood this either. It’s the natural progression of items in most games. Whether it’s from normal to magical to rare to legendary, or wood to copper to iron to bronze to platinum to unobtanium, or whatever, the lower tiered items are almost always deemed useless in most instances.
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Why are people so obsessed with rares having a purpose? I was relieved that we won’t have to consider rares once we get past them.
Before new itemization, no one was obsessed with normal and magic gear having a purpose.
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It’s a missed opportunity, that’s why
I get the point that people don’t want to “stop and pick up” and look at everything, I get that (that’s why I suggested only SOME of the rares to roll a 3rd affix and have a yellow beam on them, so the players immediately know - ok, that one could become a thing right away, especially if they have a separate affix pool to roll from for the 3rd affix, like the “bad” conditionals for example)
Be as it may, one can’t be right in stating that reducing Rares altogether to scraps is the right decision to have made
MOST, said it yourself (not all of them), the problem with current design is 100% all rares will become just scraps. Reasons being two-fold:
1 - They lack an affix (no matter what, one less affix than legendary)
2 - No rolls on GAs (still not sure why they decided to restrict GAs to just Lege and Uniques but whatever)
IF on the other hand there was some chance (not much but still not negligent, say 6-8%) for a rare to roll a 3rd affix - then “most” would be correct. Hence the suggestion I made
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I would ask:
-Clearly there are affixes that are rarer than others, since 70% of my rings had % health or main attribute and I only received one ring with a critical chance during the PTR. So far so good, no problems, but we will have the percentages of these rarities described?
Is this rarity the same as the occultist?
I agree, this is an area some more detail on would be nice. Why ‘legendary’ affixes different rarities seems odd to me personally.
So why rares, but not magic and normal? Why aren’t you also campaigning for those?
Why is it so important that this class of gear not become obsolete? “Missed opportunity” is made-up nonsense.
It’s not about principles, it’s about drawing the line (somewhere)
For example GAs could’ve been put on Magic items (guaranteed all roll GA when dropped), and then restrict the number of GAs on Rares & Leges to 1
That would’ve included Magic items in the being-useful cycle, but they wanted for people to “farm” for better instead of “combine” it from more sources, so that’s fine I guess
It’s not really a principle, it’s not a matter of politics lol, it’s a game. And as such it’s one of those things that are defined by the approach of “the more the merrier”
What is important is to keep more items useful (or conditionally useful, or potentially useful), not just become scraps. Where the line is drawn isn’t as important, as long as it’s towards that side of bargain instead of the opposite, i.e.:
No-one wants to play a game where 99.999% of items dropped are literally trash (look at S1 for reference), if wise enough perhaps people should’ve realized it
Liked what I saw in the PTR, only thing I would ask is what use are rare items in endgame? other than materials.
Will probably have more questions once I fully engaged with season 4.