Masterworking is not fun!

[valentino46-2148]

@Veracity-11673

First, in a season, you have a standard 90 days. S8 came out 4/29 and today is 5/19 (time not adjusted for place on planet) so it has been 19 full days. Even at the low estimate of 2 hours a day you’ve spent 38 hours in the game. Presuming from a truly fresh start with campaign you’re almost done with that, and if you skipped the campaign you’re already in the paragon levels, have probably beaten Pit 10 and are now in Torment 1.

To make matters “worse” for the time case all resources are account bound and the path to them is very clear. You want some obducite for your Druid but your awkward Druid sucks at clear and you just so happen to have a very effective Necromancer? Use that. Get the obducite. You wish your awkward Druid who is now in paragon could reach a node but he needs 7 more paragon levels? Use that Necromancer and have at it to boost them. In this game cache experience is tied to the difficulty the cache was earned on so if you want to kick start your new, awkward Druid dreams from the go, you can take your lovely Necromancer and complete a single Tree of Whisper’s job on whatever difficulty you can handle then just put the cache into your stash. Druid opens it? 1M+ experience on T4 or ~350k for a T1. Instant level 15+ either way.

Time is not a concern even if you play alts.

First of all, thank you for your clear and detailed answer.

However, I disagree with a few points.

1. Resources
   Obducite is indeed not a problem, but rather legendary material resources. for 3/3 on affix

• amulet or ring with 4 affixes requires an average of 64 attempts (63 resets)
• amulet or ring with 5 affixes requires an average of 125 attempts (124 resets)
• cost in abstruse sigils
  → level 1: 22
  → level 2: 51
  → level 3: 78

I’m not a mathematician, but I estimate the average cost per attempt at 40.

The total cost will therefore be 125 x 40 = 6000.

salvage
unique jewel 800 → 30
unique jewel 750 → 3
legendary jewel 800 → 10
legendary jewel 750 → 1

in my experience, about 40 resources for 10 jewels → 4 resources per jewel. (Average)

6000 / 4 = 1500 jewels needed for 1 jewel with 5 affixes

For a character with 1 jewel with 4 affixes and 2 jewels with 5 affixes = ± 3700 jewels, not including the jewels needed for other tasks
let’s say 4000 jewels

If you play 40 days of effective looting, 3 hours per day = 33 jewels per hour for a single character, which is a lot for a normal player.

It is therefore impossible to create 2 characters

@Veracity-11673

And the final simplest point is that this doesn’t mathematically matter. Observe:

First GA is 10 + 20 + 30 + 40 = 100 obducite.

Second GA is 60 + 120 + 240 + 360 = 780 obducite.

Final GA for normal item is 450 + 900 + 1350 + 2250 = 4,950 obducite.

The key takeaway is that 4,950 / (100+780) = 6.35 so we round down to 6 real tries for every one triple attempt. You can get a 2 GA stacked item relatively easily because you can effectively get 880 obducite very quickly and the other materials also are very light. It’s this cost structure which makes it so that the triple GA is so difficult, so if you only “rolled back” once to the double GA you would basically be looking at just a cost savings of ~15%. In the long run, even though that sounds like a lot, most of your obducite is going towards the final GA. The process is a slog no matter what you do and that’s more of a mental health thing than a mechanical needs thing.

In top heavy systems it just doesn’t matter. The vast majority of your time is spent getting from 2 to 3 so that means that a person who is fine with a double GA build (which will handle all realistic content) for all slots will be done almost 128x times faster than the person who insists on the triple GA because 1. the probability of a double is higher than a triple and 2. the resource costs are exponentially lower for a double than a triple.

I rest my case. In the words of the Undercity:

“Time is no longer a concern.”

Resetting stats (not from base item but from masterworking) can be a real downgrade.
You never know the final result in relation to your available resources. 63 and 124 resets are only average values. I made 433 attempts on a 4-affix ring before obtaining 3 GA. The final result may therefore be lower than the initial result for a more or less long period of time, or even permanently…
A return to an earlier version would indeed significantly reduce the effective costs, but I think it’s better to increase these costs for the second GA and the third GA but allow a return to an earlier starting version, which would maintain the logic of constant improvement of the item underlying the enjoyment of the game. Our dopamine neurons don’t appreciate bad experiences, and I hope to be able to play the Diablo 5 franchise with my great-grandchildren ^^