I have mentioned this a few times again but since we are closing to the release of the next season i wanted to discuss this once more and see how everyone feels after the release of VOH which introduced more uniques and mythics.
My first point will be exactly about this one as well.
Uniques and mythics are currently taking over 80-90% of item slots in most builds. They are just that good. This would be fine on its own if uniques were farmable across most activities. But they are not.
They are locked behind bosses. And anyone that has done boss farming knows that this is one of the biggest pain points of this game. The bosses are absolutely boring. Its just a snoozefest farm for hours.
So when you have your mythics and uniques most of your upgrades are sitting behind duriel farms instead of pits, hordes and dungeons.
Effectively 90% of the legendary loot drops you get are automatically considered trash for your build, again for most builds.
My second point goes to gear affixes. I dont know why we made such a switcheroo from release. Affixes like damage to poisoned, damage to frozen, damage to slowed, fire damage, lightning damage etc were fine. Just keep them seperated from the core ones so there is more variety in gear. Let them not compete with crit, vuln and overpower. Let them be in another 4th, 5th etc affix position. But gear feels so stripped out of any complexity that when you get 1 ancestral with the 3 affixes you want you are pretty much set and are in the min max area in an instant.
Now combine these 2 and what you get is on a 10 slots build:
7/8 items are uniques/mythics locked behind bosses
2/3 items are legendary which when you get a 1 star ancestral the chances to find an upgrade are abysmal and the upgrade is not even that much of an upgrade.
Build crafting via legendary aspects is dead. You only get to buildcraft with said 2-3 slots.
Same mythics are used across every character every season. They are just that strong. And since they do not alter the gameplay, they are generic multipliers or defences, they are utterly boring. Cool color though.
Basically when you start boss farming, which unless you are a 1 hour/week and anti-social person(sorry buds no hate but it is what it is) you reach pretty fast, turns the loot in an ARPG almost worthless and there is no excitement to be found in the loot hunting. Helltides and any world event become a slog. The only thing that is left chasing is materials for masterworks. But not the gear. Not the loot. Which should have been THE chase.
And to clarify for the weak souls, no i am not asking for loot nerfs or super high complexity introduced that you would need a phd to play the game. But currently gearing and gear drops feels so sterile which make me feel that something really needs to change here.
Its all fun and all but you hit that spot so fast where min maxing feels more like torture than a natural progression. The usual answer will be âthats when you stopâ but this answer is basically why everyone stops playing in a week when they know how to play the game and its not the correct answer for a live service seasonal game, imo.
A proper solution would basically be more gear slots, belt, bracers etc as well as the addition of a few secondary affixes. Spice things up so both the loot chase and the build crafting feel fun again.
My Spiritborn went from lv59 1.2k atk power to lv60 then climbed to 4-6k atk power in one sitting decked out in 750âs without even touching any other paragon boards but the 1st one. My resists and armor are capped out going into t1. Heck itâll survive the t2 cuts as well.
Gearing is fine. What makes that fine is Tempering. If I get just the right item, I go from 2/3 legendary to 5/5 amazing item. Even if itâs 1/2 rare, that turns into 4/4 good item.
Uniques being behind the bosses is fine. Itâs pretty easy to get the unique youâre looking for but more difficult getting a near max roll one. The huge time sink is farming the boss summoning items so that you can do enough of them in a row to get that one good one.
Mythics being behind bosses is not fine in my opinion. Itâs because of multiple things that compound the issue. One, itâs more efficient to be in a group so that youâre quadrupling on your amount of summoning materials. Two, the time sink in farming stacks of 50 for each boss. Three, the Mythic drop rate itself already being very very low.
To resolve the last two things, I think that boss summoning material requirement be removed so that we can just go up to the bosses and kill them. Maybe put them on a respawn timer to make it similar to the time it takes to farm for the materials. This way we can just watch the timer instead of having to do farming activities that we didnât want to do when our main goal is rather the bosses.
It would kill group farming but in exchange, itâs a huge boon for the individual player. Due to it being more efficient and streamlined, people can earn the items themselves, as the limiter (summoning items) is no longer a thing.
One of my favorite trophy items was a perfect ancestral rare chest from back in S2 that was max life/armor/dr/dr while fortified for my druid. It dropped the day before AoZ was available. Still in my inventory. I remember that more than just about all the gear Iâve gotten including mythics. The reason they made the switcheroo was because the target audience canât be bothered to evaluate gear, some of that on Blizz for so much gear dropping, but back on the target audience who complain about getting âdrip fedâ and âdopamineâ.
I think a loot filter would have been better than super simplifying gear, but then again maybe Blizz determines a loot filter isnât casual.
Part of this isnât the issue of the affixes themselves, itâs that getting a better base item still has to pass also getting equal or better temper rolls to actually be an upgrade, as the base stats being better generally isnât much on its own.
Add to that that even if Iâm not grinding out specific MW crits, if I got a good one on one piece and I donât get equal or matching on another, it also probably isnât an upgrade.
End of the story is, getting a usable 800 is pretty much the first and last stop in endgame gearing. The system as a whole needs to change, or tempering and masterworking need more determinism, to have itemization progress past that.
I agree with what youâre saying here regarding tempering and masterworking but I still want more affix variety in my loot drops. Itâs a topic weâre not going to see exactly eye to eye because we want a bit of a different experience.
I have played every season except S2 which I played a couple of hours and then quit.
I would remove Ancestrals at all. Chasing for same items with higher stats is not fun, especially if we donât have a reason to min/max for. High drop rate where legendaries drop from the sky and ease of obtaining meta items make it even worse.
End of the story is, getting a usable 800 is pretty much the first and last stop in endgame gearing
This pretty much summarizes my thoughts about legendaries right now. Thank you for this!
Gearing is fine. What makes that fine is Tempering. If I get just the right item, I go from 2/3 legendary to 5/5 amazing item. Even if itâs 1/2 rare, that turns into 4/4 good item.
This is what i just described as an issue. When you are only using 2-3 legendaries, the moment you get one you are done. There is nothing much better to expect from that point.
Uniques being behind the bosses is fine. Itâs pretty easy to get the unique youâre looking for but more difficult getting a near max roll one. The huge time sink is farming the boss summoning items so that you can do enough of them in a row to get that one good one.
Again, its fine that you can target farm them but combined with mythics and the 7/10 slots taken by these 2 most of your gear is now locked behind bosses when the game offers so much more content. Instead you are stuck doing 2 second boss runs and inventory cleanups that drain the life out of you after the 100th time.
Three, the Mythic drop rate itself already being very very low.
Sincerely i do not understand where people are coming from whenever they bring this one up. I played for less than a month this season and i have over 20 mythics and only using mats with 1 friend, not 4 man groups. Between mythic tributes and boss farming i have 10 times more mythics than i got usable 2 GA ancestral items. I also dismantled and crafter 3 2GA mythics. Same with my friend so its not a me thing.
If anything mythics are not mythics. There is nothing mythic about them anymore.
And just a me opinion here, if they could literary remove them from the game i 100% believe the game would be so much better. They have become a balance reference for anything and they are taking up 2-3 slots while offering no gameplay alternation at all. They are just big bad purple sticks that excite people with their color.
I believe we could have more super rare things.Ubers manuals,Special glyphos,Ubers runes.There is just something left to be found and said, how cool this is super rare.They have trivialized ubers and the end game is just that.
Loot exhaustion was a real thing. Even when you learned to âearly outâ and discard items if they had more than 1 âdudâ stat for example, you still had to at least quickly assess almost every item that dropped, because that one rare item could be the best item for your current needsâŚ
And⌠thatâs great, except, with the volume of loot that was dropping, the burden of checking it all was a very real problem that we were all feeling, and needed to be addressed.
Unfortunately, there was the additional problem that many players simply did not understand that a rare item was simply a legendary item without an aspect already imprinted. And thatâs why the system had to fundamentally change, rather than just tweaking drop numbers or something.
It feels bad because it is bad. When mythics are easier to get than a usable ancestral it is all too obvious.
I get GA to thorns on my sorc quite often or when I do get a 4GA unique it has a minimum roll on aspect. This wasnât well thought out or tested. It is more like throw it out there then react rather than have vision and clear direction for the game. Affixes being weighted makes it that much worse.
And donât give me this âitâs not weightedâ BS. Go to the occultist and 90% of the time one of the rolls is life or life per 5 seconds from a list of 15 possible affixes. 100âs of items across multiple characters and classes. All the same. It simply is not bad luck or RNGesus not blessing me.
That month is probably more hours than half the playerbase has since launch, and odds are very great that people playing twice as long as you arenât doing it as efficiently. I would very confidently say that most players do not have 20 mythics in all 6 seasons combined.
Thereâs no counter balance in itemization anymore. The game was designed to restrict the amount of offensive items to a few slots, but with the proliferation of offensive aspects to defensive slots and the decreased need for actual defensive stats itâs upset this balance. Thereâs just no longer a drawback to putting the best offensive item in something like a chest or helm slot and thatâs often times the case a mythic.
