Honest Question on the Tempering Debate

PC General Discussion
52

The problem with Tempering is super simple, they keep this idea of making everything a finite/predetermined collection (instead of a loot drop)

Here’s an example:

Tempering manual (World resilience, or whatever the name was)

  • Armor %
  • HP
  • Dodge %

And that’s it, every single “finesse” will have these 3

Here’s an example of having Temper manuals being a loot piece:

Resilience package (1)

  • Life per hit
  • Barrier generation
  • Armor %
  • Damage reduction while injured X%
    ** Rolls: 3

Resilience pack (2)

  • Fortify % [10-15]%
  • Life per second [130-175]
  • Equipped aspect of Assimilation gains [25-50]% additional Fortify generation
    **Rolls: 2

Resilience pack (3)

  • Fortify % [20-30]
  • Life per second [75-125]
  • Bonus fortify generated by Bash [15-25]%
    **Rolls: 7

Resilience pack (3)

  • Armor % [5-12]
  • Max HP [800-1200]
  • Dodge % [6-8]
    **Rolls: 1

e.t.c.

Like, it would’ve been way more playful, and when a “Godlike” one occurs like for example:

Destruction package (1):

  • Basic skills damage increase [33-70]%
  • Mastery skills damage increase x[25-40]%
  • Critical hit chance [7-12]%
  • Conceited Aspect gains [75-125]% damage increase
    Rolls: 8

Perhaps people would consider a Trade with some of these (for example the last one => 4 out of 5 are borderline godlike and number of rolls is pretty high)… And can really end up playing with the numbers (both rolls of affix pool, their range, as well as attempt rolls in the manual), point being ?

The possibilities are ENDLESS, and so is the excitement/fun along with it :slight_smile:

This way as is ? (always same, always predetermined, everyone having the same possibilities, meh)

The game needs much more individualized impact of performance (but with a much better baseline balance between skills), rather than providing equal opportunities to everyone (while still being baseline near-broken)

That’s been a problem/theme for quite a while now tbh

53

Kind of a loaded question because you are going to get a lot of different answers, as everyone plays the game for different reasons, and they all play differently with different amount of knowledge.

D4 is at its base a very very simple game, its hard to mess up any build and gearing is very very easy compared to most ARPG’s I play, requires almost no thought. I enjoy it, and think its a fun change of pace from playing path of exile myself, but it will not keep me playing for long.

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54

I know this sounds really cool, but you end up with the same stash problem as you had with aspects. You find these manuals, but they have limited rolls and so you don’t want to use them
until you have that GG item to use them on.

Just adding stash tabs doesn’t really solve it because that massive stash becomes unwieldy and annoying to search through. My character in LE had this issue and I only had 2 tabs worth of stuff.

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55

That’s the whole point, now we have almost empty stashes (unless keeping GA items for rolls for Alts)

The problem with Aspects was much worse than this, mainly cause it was a Chore/Routine (check if duplicate, check if higher roll or lower, check if already equipped, check if item you want to equip aspect on has already been imprinted)

This is much more of a nuance/niche issue (especially considering Temper manuals could and probably should drop less often than Legendaries on Helltide for ex.) - would also break the “routine” of gameplay if they’re intended for something else (say completing a higher Pit level guarantees a couple of these, NMDs on completion could have a 33% chance to drop one, and random Helltide events that aren’t Ritual have a 5% chance to drop some)

And by those I mean Legendary Tempering manuals (regulars and rares can drop almost say as 1/10 as often as an item would)

Well it’s a trade-off to have. Either have a routine-first (like predetermined by “pattern” gameplay, or have a more nuanced/enriched one but having to take a few more stops in town to double-check if something may have been amiss)

I think the latter is much better, (ofcourse there are nuances to this as well) but pretty sure you’d agree that the game is already too much Blood Maiden co-op rounds tbh (perhaps can dial down a bit on that)

56

they problably dont know its a near impossible odd

getting a 3GA, for your build, with all 3 affixes right so it dont become a 2GA after enchanting is already a huge amount of RNG

casually playing wont get you enough of these to call your char “finished” for the season

some will say, “you arent supposed to finish one char in one season”
yeah, not even one char, less than one spec in 3 months

57

It wouldn’t be so bad if there weren’t so many duplicate rolls. Doesn’t help that many of these dupe rolls aren’t even a skill you use! If I had it my way, I’d fire my blacksmith immediately! :rofl:

I always, always stop on the first roll with an affix I’m looking for. I don’t press for perfection, that’s when more dupes (of irrelevant affixes) occur. :roll_eyes:

58

I think there are ways to get the depth without the tedium. It’s definitely a tradeoff, but that doesn’t mean it’s fine to just introduce a thousand individual items you have to pick up and hang onto.

59

Perhaps, took me a while to think about this but the more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion:

  • It is IMPOSSIBLE to make the gameplay live and vivid and all the systems in it work as intended while HOLDING ON to a state of maximum conveniences

Really have to dial down on the “convenience” bits to make the game finally work (it is better to be engaged/annoyed at one thing at a time rather than delay that until the game finally gets in a state of total exhaustion)

60

I like the risk in tempering, but personally I don’t even care what the devs decide to do with it. It’s not that big of a deal for me. There are so many other things I want to see fixed or added to the game.

61

Prevserve the system and prevent bricking. You can still loot hunt for the roll you prefer but you can no longer make completely useless items.

62

Players only raise the opinions to the Devs, but whether they change or not is up to them. But I still keep my opinion that tempering system without a return point is bad.

That completely kills your luck when you picked or bought an item with 3 GA before and then became trash in the hands of the Blacksmith…

63

I think this is the main difference between the two camps.

One camp think people should work for rewards in a game, and many of them would argue that if you didn’t work for something, it wouldn’t feel as rewarding.

The other think games should be entertaining and rewarding, and it shouldn’t be “work”. You should have fun in the process and naturally get rewarded.

The reason the debates get heated and inevitably people start throwing insults around, is because the two attitudes towards gaming is simply incompatible.

People who play 40 hours a week and has already masterworked their gear in the first week feel “this game is too easy”, and think any attempt to eliminating bricking items via tempering and “soft-bricking” via enchanting to be lazy people “wanting things handed to them on a plate.”

People who play 3-5 hours a week and get maybe 1 or 2 usable items they take into tempering and bricking feel like the game has wasted their valuable weekened night.

The two groups of players are incompatible and we’ve known it ever since online gaming became a thing.

In MMOs, the solution taken has generally been to reserve the most difficult endgame content to the heavily invested players, while “handing things out on a plate” to the more casual players.

But with the tempering and enchanting system, both groups of players are subject to the same experience, and that experience is too harsh for one, while at the same time being too generous to the other.

There will never be a happy resolution until the devs realize the obvious truth of the world: it’s not possible to please everybody.

The only solution to this problem would be to have two sets of rules for two realms.

People playing on the casual realm gets pitty systems, lower enchanting cost caps, infinite tempering attempts, and more plentiful material drops.

People playing on the pro realm gets harsher RNG, heavier enchanting cost ramp-ups, even lower tempering attempts, and even less material and gold drops.

It’s an obvious solution that has, in other forms, been proven to work for other games. The Diablo team is just known for not learning from past mistakes and always designing things in a vacuum thinking that players will gulp up whatever they produce and be happy about it.

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64

RPG builds are about min maxing. Freedom of build only exist in low tier. Theres no such as thing as difficult content in D2, hence it has biggest freedom in the Diablo franchaise although D2 is actually a pigeon holed game. Non of Diablo games are really free to build. If you push 130 - 140+ or farm 110-120+ , selection of items and affixes are very pigeon holed and specific. You can not build around what you have found. D4 affixes doesnt support mix and match like other RPG games.

RNG in RPG is CRUCIAL. We do not want to be fed with pit 200 calibre gears 10 mins staring into a season, but that doesnt mean a system w.o safety net features on ultra rare loot, that requires expensive materials to reset, such as x amount of resplendant sparks, stygian stones. Not even gold, unless in billions is expensive enough for these resets. We dont want bricked resets for EVERY item, we want to find (not buy) from drops hence the reset should be used very cautiously.

Atm i have 60 respledant sparks and over 150 stygian stones. I am happy to use 100 sparks + 200 stygian stones for such resets on one of my bricked amulet which brings 10 tiers of pit increase, from 125 - 136+

65

It isn’t this simple. I play a couple hours a week at most, plus maybe 8-10 the first week of a season, and I think tempering is great as it is, though it could be improved by smoothing out the manuals to be less all-or-nothing.

In fact, I’d be surprised if the difference had much correlation at all with play time. I’ve seen people on here who already claim to have 200 hours played and yet want tempering rerolls to be unlimited.

It is purely a mindset one. There’s a camp of people who think that randomness is bad and want games to have pity timers and smart loot and infinite rerolls and no death penalty and hand-crafted dungeons that never cause you to backtrack for anything and nothing in them that can ever one-shot you or be unkillable for your character. They claim this is because they don’t have enough time so they don’t want the game to waste it, but that’s clearly absurd because there is nothing forcing them to play or to achieve some specific level or to upgrade their items every day. The reality is that they only measure fun by the increases in power they are given and the achievements they’ve checked off, not by the chances they’ve had or the challenges they’ve overcome.

Then there’s a camp of people who think randomness is the point of playing a single player game. They don’t mind losing effort because they too a wrong turn or got a bad roll. They want more surprise and more ways to fail, because they understand that if you can’t fail then you also can’t succeed. This group plays to make the best of what they get, instead of starting with a checklist of what they are going to do and then getting angry if the game slows them on that path.

The first group tends to be louder and easier to please on any single issue. On many issues they also have natural allies in the streamer community because anyone who plays the game all day wants to streamline the things they’ve done over and over and over. But when this group gets its way it also tends to join the people complaining the game is boring and doesn’t have enough to do. Because without failure you can’t really succeed.

That’s an interesting claim. I’m not sure I agree, but I’ll have to think about it some.

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66

I truly do not mind RNG and Tempering… But for the Rolls have to be Honest and without Weights. Currently it definitely feels weighted including masterworking.

67

No they don’t. It would be nice if the weights were public like they are with dropped affixes, though.

68

I feel that there has been enough discourse on the topic that it will probably be discussed or addressed at some point.
Though I feel that people have been seriously hyperbolic regarding tempering. Specially when you take into consideration the previous system with it’s bloat of affixes.
I have found far more useful gear under this system and while I have “bricked” my fair share. It is nothing to the slog of meaningless loot of the old system.
If there was one change I would ask for, it would be some form of bad luck protection against rolling the same affix over multiple times in a row. If you rolled the same affix two times in a row, the next roll should have that affix removed from the list of possibilities.
That being said, I would not care if they made no change at all either.
To me this current system of loot is far more rewarding and less punishing than the old.
The affixes are far more useful now and the trade off is that they introduced another element of RNG in tempering. There should be risk involved. It’s not as if you can’t go and do a HT that is basically a loot pinata and find more gear… or even better than what you just “bricked”.
In the end, this is just my opinion only. Just because I don’t agree with people wanting XYZ does not mean that their opinions are without worth.

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69

The increasing cost is still there. there is just a cap of 3.5 million per roll once you get to it.

70

When items brick, people need replacements to try again. Well rolled replacement base items are rare hence many will trade for them. This creates demand. More trade equals more RMT as it is always a percentage of the total trade. More opportunities for RMT creates a niche for players to work the game as a job and/or bot - like the so called chinese gold slaves. Again, it does not take a genius to notice this but since you use D3 player as an insult, I am willing to consider that is might be a difficult thing to figure out by yourself. That or you are a troll…which is fine by me.

71

GA’s are 1.5x perfect rolls, there’s nothing “slightly higher” to farm. To me the tempering ranges really aren’t so massive I find myself inclined to go after higher rolls than I already have assuming I get the desired tempers.

Then again I adjust my stats to maintain caps as needed, and while GA’s are neat to get and hit correct tempers on, for me it’s really only been when I get them on GA + to skills that I get any sense of excitement, and even then I go in knowing the item isn’t complete. I may have to settle for less desirable tempers or keep what I have.

Mainstat/Health/AS/CC GA? Sure I will take them, but I am just fine if I brick them, I will find others. I’m just fine bricking in general. If it is really that good of a GA, I’ll live with missing a temper.

I don’t really care if they change it, I only “defend” it because gearing is very easy now, if they make the changes everybody is pushing for it’ll just be even easier, and it took me no time to find and temper 5/5 stuff.

I’d much prefer if any of the rng gets changed it’s letting me pick my 25% increases, but I know I’d really lose any interest more quickly then as it is the intended final gear “loop”.