Limiting how many times one can temper an item may lead to bricking the best gear in the game

Items and Crafting
1

Basically the title. But allow me to paint you a picture:

You’ve devoted hours and hours and hours to your build. The pit. The Boss ladder. High level nightmare dungeons. The content is engaging, but still challenging and you want nothing more than to have the monsters that plague sanctuary tremble when you log into your account. After some really phenomenal rolls of loot, you finally find it. It’s an IP 925 chest piece with all of the right affixes, but it has not one, not two but three Greater affix rolls. Sure, the aspect is wrong, but thanks to the new Codex of Power fixes, you can put that crit of just the right aspect onto it with no problem. Your item is perfect in every way. You can masterwork it over and over so that the flat damage reduction, at some point will have that sought-after orange text and nothing in all of Sanctuary will be able to kill you.

After pinching yourself to ensure that you’re not dreaming, you take your brilliantly masterworked (first time btw), Triple GA chest piece to be tempered. You’ve been playing through enough content that you have plenty of manuals and materials, all it needs is a little bit of luck.

Your first tempering is fine. A lower roll on the exact affix you were looking for. No big deal, you use another manual and… well it’s a high roll, but the wrong affix for your build altogether. You don’t even use that skill. So you roll one more time and it’s the wrong affix again. With 4 options from each manual, there’s still a shot that you ca- No. That’s just a worse roll on the same wrong affix.

But now you can only temper the item two more times. And you still have to hope for the right tempered aspect for your resource manual that you were going to put on your chest piece. You temper for resources once and get the wrong affix. Then again and it’s the lowest possible roll for the right affix.

Your Triple GA chest piece, with masterworking done just right now has a low roll of one tempered affix, and a completely unusable roll for the other. You stare at the big, orange ‘0’ that shows how many more times you can temper the item. After cosmically perfect luck, grinding through hundreds of dungeons, your chest piece is good… great even. But it will never be perfect. Sighing to yourself, you post that you’re looking for group, and silently hoping that you will, some day, find another chest piece as good as this one.

Just hope your tempering luck is better next time.

Ultimately, I think that this is a massive improvement for itemization, but allowing infinite masterworking an limited tempering is going to take some really awesome rolls of gear and sour them by putting the wrong affixes or just sub-par rolls on them. I’m stunned that the developers didn’t think of this because the first time someone has an incredible item that becomes unusable because of bad tempering luck is going to be such a gut-punch. Give us unlimited tempering. Make it absurdly expensive. Make it so we have to kill Tormented Lilith for each reroll. However it’s done, just make it doable.

2 Likes
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I don’t think they need to do unlimited tempering. If it becomes a major complaint I’m sure they will address it. What they could do is have a reset like they do with masterworking. Which strips off the aspects and allows you to start over. But honestly base hunting is nothing new and was a big part of D2R. It also opens up the trading market. You find a perfect base and it will command a hefty price on the trading market.

3

Resetting the tempering of the item is effectively unlimited, since tempering is essentially brand new every time. It’s like if you could only reroll an affix on current items X many times. Because masterworking is additive, the reset is a bit more “formalized” but every time you temper over one of your tempered aspects, it’s a complete restart.

Base hunting may work, but it seems as though perfect GA rolls might be harder to find that Uber Uniques, especially with there being like 3 ways of an Uber. And in the current system, it may take multiple perfect GA bases to get a really powerful item. Say you consider anything where the 2 tempered aspects being either wrong or below 75th percentile in possible roll “bricked”. That’s a high standard, but much less strict than a perfect item.

Assuming a perfect 50% roll is about as likely as a crit or a 0 roll (flat distribution rather than bell curve). I think there’s usually about 16 possible rolls? So you’re looking at two separate affixes each from a bank of 4 where you need something in the top 4 out of 16 possibilities. That’s a 1/4th chance to get the right affix times 1/4th of the time that you get a top 75th percentile roll. Do that twice in 6 total tries.

Used Binomial Probability Calculator on Google to arrive at just under 5% chance. If rolling X affix is 1/4th chance every time, you’re only going to get the right combination of 2 affixes from different manuals ~47% of the time. You want perfect rolls of the right affixes from 2 different manuals? About 1 in every 4,350 perfect 3x GA rolls.

The math on that isn’t great. Multiply by all of the gear that you can slot and all of the builds you want to try. While that’s not what many people will want, I do think they should make that feel at least achievable. I don’t know what the odds of GA rolls are, but I’m hoping they’re generous at ultra high levels of the Pit, otherwise we may never see a “perfect” item.

4

I agree with adding some sort of mechanism to either reset tempers or add temper charges. Perhaps adding a rare drop item in high level pits that adds a temper charge to an item. That way it’s accessible but time/effort gated.

1 Like
5

This is the way to go to be honest. In fact if people wanted it RNG have this item required for ALL tempering, you get no free attempts. The current system causes a player to actually lose progress, a fail should not cause you to go backwards.

6

This is the thing I dislike most about the new crafting. It really needs fixing. Just double the material cost for Tempering since we have plenty of them anyway and remove the reroll limit.
Imagine how good the game would be.
And while you’re at it: Make masterworking be deterministic so we can choose the affix that we want to improve at 4/8/12.
If that was the case I would still play the season but I quit early because of RNG.

1 Like
7

you prob should temper before doing anything else its the cheapest thing.

1 Like
8

This is my biggest complaint is the tempering. 1 only certain amount of rolls to get both right affixs. 2 even if you get the affix you want but rolls low you don’t have the option to keep the right low affix. You make a great piece of gear useless. You already made people want to grind just looking for that right 3 greater affix roll. Not to mention grinding for those greater ubers. I don’t care how expensive you make it. Just fix it

1 Like
9

It doesn’t help that their random number algorithm is wonky. Corner cases such as getting the same result five times in a row happen far too frequently. This sticks out like a sore thumb to anyone who has studied probability.