Feeding the cube

PC General Discussion
1

Well i cant say the expansion and/or season have not been worth the $ and time spent.
But the last 50 or so hours, not so much, and thats of concern to me as i find i have no desire to play S14. Not because of the changes, nerfs or whatever, but simply because they plan to increase the amnount of time you spend at the cube.

My Immoirtal barb gear is about as good as it can get(most of it done through the cube), without getting the gem incease hit on the cube. So ive spent a good amount of time feeding the cube ancestral 2h swords and polearms.
Keeping an eye on materials at start and end of me doing this multiple times over the last 15 days or so, this is what i got:

750 Transfiguration of 2h ancestrals, all with 4 affixes at the time.
14 enhanced gem results.
31 modifiable results
0 enhanced gem with modifiable results.

OK, you know, i was just messing around hoping against hope really. The goblin bags from the event helped alot, tons of obols, buy from obol vendor, hit cube, repeat til 0 obols.

But something else also came to light.
The 31 times i had a weapon still modifiable after transfigure, some 60% of the time it turned the weapon damage or stength stat to a GA. Great if you dont already have, not so great if you have great gear and just trying to get that final step up.
Only 3 of the 31 had indestructable, interesting.
Of those other 10 times it wasnt one of the above stats stats, there were ZERO instances where it gave me something i thought i could then run with and work the other stats through the cube, like crit chance, good item quality increase etc.

Like i said, my issue is now they plan to do same with uniques, and who knows what with mythic.

The loot that drops is mainly loot to go in the cube, this seems to be their direction.

I cant play like that myself. Thats not what i envision from this game series.

9 Likes
2

Agreed, I have decided to go the “other” route and only cube 3+GA’s with the right or atleast 75% right affixs once fully modded…tons less materials needed or time. Im batting about .15…2 very nice upgrades and lil time on the slot machine

3

That cube recipe was meant to be the END of the journey for an item, not the start! I blame the devs for introducing the scenario where an item can end - no wait - one more try!

4

Cube is fine, what needs fix is tempering, uniques, and paragon board

In that exact same order

I’m talking about actual fixes that work, not there “here’s a high RNG season for you players to figure out, we’ll keep track on what you want and come up 6 months later with a semi-solution”

5

That’s the dilemma with trying to gear to perfection. If mats weren’t a bottleneck, most would farm up or trade GAs and hit until there’s a good result.

However, because the cube results impact things far more than the GAs do, and mats farming isn’t going to get you the volume you need, you get to a point where the cube results matter more. Now we’re stuffing into the cube more than farming and its definitely not a good feeling.

6

that route must be painful seeing as blizzard seem hell bent on punishing you for having GA’s and when it rolls that GA to improve, nothing happens.

1 Like
7

The glaring Problem s13 showed was the amount of mats we needed from salvage was still far too high.
If you have a System that uses item filtering, you usually want to reach a point where you get enough mats from other means, and you do not need to salvage at all unless its for new aspects or transmogs.

8

Between stash management, obol gambling, and cube crafting etc, I was spending way too much time in town.

Every 10-15 minutes I’d grab a few items and spend 10-15 minutes crafting, just to go salvage everything.

When everything is just a token for a slot machine, drops don’t feel exciting. Combine that with 3/4ga uniques that roll the worst possible affixes and the result is 0 desire to play.

2 Likes
9

I want to pick up an item and know it’s an upgrade. Then be able to equip that upgrade without spending 30 minutes in town modifying the item.

1 Like
10

If you cannot stand transfigure, just don’t do it. Nobody forcing you…

1 Like
11

I myself didn’t really spend anytime using the cube and still rofl stopped T12. If anything the cube allows one to take garbage and band-aid your way to better gear and skip several torment levels.

Then dont.

In the past I spent 1000x more time in front of the blacksmith rerolling mwing or the enchanter rerolling ammies for passives.

12

I have better things to do than grinding for gem strength transfigure with the cube.

My barb’s 5GA 2h mace (weapon damage, str, all damage, crit damage, crit chance) got indestructible but it works just fine.

I’m glad they’re gonna “fix” the gem strength transfigure on 2h weapons next patch.

13

Whats totally putting me off using the cube is that i have to fully upgrade (temper, masterwork) all the items before i can try my luck with the cube.

Long time before i stopped playing S13 i did not care about good drops anymore. 4GA mythic and stash tabs full of cube worthy gear… i did not even use it.

I dont like to upgrade thousands of weapons and try to get gem strength. Let it drop as a bonus stat from monsters.

I want to play the game and feast on monster drops. :see_no_evil_monkey:

Cube totally sucks (for me).

2 Likes
14

which is a bit misleading statement. I know u mean you need to do everything else before transfigure, but that is kinda the point? is it not?
Before you try to get the desired offensive stats on the item with the cube, which is the annoying part in my opinion cause of all the bugs with it, like some reroll not working if the only offensive stat is main stat, or some stats refuse to reroll or you need to press different rerolls, cause some stats for whatever reason are refusing to work with different raritys. On Legendarys less rerolls work then on rares, which is very weird.

Last epoch had shown how to do crafting, at first glance seems complicated, but after you learn it, its quite fun, cause you do not do it for everything, just for some really good stuff. It improves the gameplay loop and experience. In d4 in my opinion the cube does the opposite, it devalues playertime, and you have to do boring ui slotmachine clicking.
You do far too much crafting, even for garbage, cause the drops u get got completely devalued, and it is excpected to craft on every item.

They kinda destroyed the item chase with the cube, and turned that into crafting/slotmachine simulator, that takes far too much of your time. Also the clunky ui around it doesnt make it better either, its completely annoying to even craft small adjustments, cause of the amount of clickage you do to change certain things.

Gem strength was another failure design, which was obviously overpowered, and could have been adressed beforehand, if this game would have any quality control, but frankly the only quality control the game has is us complaining and reporting on said bugs or misconcepts, which is the main critic i have about d4.

1 Like
15

I used the cube for seals and charms but even at later levels when I did get cube mats, I failed to get it to do anything exciting such as getting 2x multipliers and outside of changing a few unwanted stats, I never saw the light of why people thinks its so great.

16

that is kinda the crux of it, items became so boring, and will become even more boring in s14, cause every affix will be streamlined. Uniques have no cool affix that changes how you play, there is literally no chase anymore, everything is predictable. Tempering became so streamlined, that one thinks why is it even there if there is only 4-5 viable options across all items. MW is kinda there but is not exciting, cause there are no affixes that are interesting anymore, and this weird rng at the end of mw, is only annoying.

1 Like
17

If you don’t want a raise/promotion…just don’t do the work

This is what ur saying…they make us do it for progress…

18

what i dont get for example is these tons of lh dmg proccs from tempering or on charms, when they are mathematicly complete trash. What is the purpose of these, where are the builds that have scaling with Lucky hit, so we can build something else beside the stock standart dmg types. What is the purpose of affixes like lucky hit, if their value is like non existant, and it literally doesnt matter if you have them or not.

19

“Item journey" is just a nonsense phrase Blizzard injected into the narrative to try and make us fine with things like legacying gear, ilevel downgrades, and bricking promising or otherwise functionally complete items.

It’s fine if you’re okay with it but as a gospel to preach, it’s a directionless team’s coping mechanism as they throw feces at the wall over and over again.

20

Bingo, maybe that’s how they get their player count stats. I have to turn off Network Connect because often you have players standing around Cube, Blacksmith and Stash and get those a-holes w/ sideways mounts blocking them.