I love the idea of transfer the legendary power from one item to another and make your own build. It gives the player a lot of freedom to craft their own build. However, there are some quality of life change that can be made to improve the system and make it more easy to use.
Today, the system mainly works around the Occultist NPC, the codex of power and the legendary items you found. Here is how it works in general:
- When you complete a dungeon the first time, you will unlock an aspect in the codex.
- Aspects unlocked in the codex doesn’t take any space and store in the codex.
- When you find a legendary item, you can extract the legendary aspect from it at the Occultist.
- Aspects extracted from legendary items are items that store in either your bag or in your stash.
- Aspects unlocked in the codex can be used unlimited times.
- Aspect extracted from legendary item can only be used once. Once you imprint it on an item, you can not re-extract it again.
- Aspects in the codex always have the worst value.
- Aspects extracted from legendary item keep its roll at the value when extracted. (Which means if you extract an aspect and imprint it on a new item, the new item will have the exact same roll.)
- You can imprint aspect from the codex or from the item in your bag on a rare or legendary item at the Occultist. (PS: You can overwrite legendary power on a legendary item.)
- The extracted aspect has level requirement that is the same as the source legendary item and it will carry over to the new item if it is higher than that item’s level requirement. (Which mean using aspect farmed by your main character on your alt character’s item will likely brick it.)
- Aspects have different types. Each item slot can only use certain type of aspects. For example, you can extra a defensive aspect from a helmet and imprint it on a chest. But you cannot put the defensive aspect on gloves.
Starting from World Tier 4, you will find plenty legendary items over time and likely accumulate a lot of good or perfect rolled legendary aspects. However, there are only two rows of space for aspects on the character and the rest have to be stored in the stash. With such a limited stash space in the game (4 page shared by all characters), the aspects already taking more the half of my stash spaces and I only played one class so far.
But if we really think about the whole system, the only time player actually interacts with aspects is at the Occultist NPC. Without the NPC, the aspects do nothing besides taking space. You can’t use them like elixirs, you can’t equip them like weapons or armors, you can’t socket them like gems. So why should player puts them in the bag or stash and take all the precious space.
When player find a new legendary item with a decent aspect roll and want to see if it worth keeping for the aspect, they have to either memorize what rolls they already have or manually go through all of the aspects and see if they have it in the bag or stash. What makes it worse is that aspects of the same type all have the same icon and there’s no search function available in the game.
The solution I propose is to store the extracted aspects directly in the codex along side the dungeon based aspects. Here’s how it will work:
- View: When a player wants to look at legendary aspects they have, they always go to the codex. Where it will show for each discovered legendary aspect, the dungeon version if available (either locked or unlocked) and all extracted versions. This will allow player to quickly find what aspect they have or not have and see if the new legendary aspect they found worth keeping or not. This will also work as a reference to help player learn the game over time. Today, only about half of the aspects are available in the codex. With this change, new drop-only aspects found by players will also show up in the codex.
- Extract: When a player extracts a new legendary aspect at the Occultist, the extracted aspect goes to the codex directly. There’s no need for a tab in the bag or store it in the stash. We can put a limit there that player can only store up to X extracted versions per aspect per realm. If the player already have maximum number of extracted version stored for that aspect, ask the player to delete one before allow the extract. (If you want the system to be slightly smart, you can check if the new aspect is better than the worst roll of all stored versions and if so replace it. This will not work if there are more than one independent number rolls in the aspect. Or if you want to also consider level requirement.)
- The extracted aspect’s level requirement can be still the same as today. (This is a separate issue to solve and not covered by the post.)
- Imprint: When a player wants to imprint an aspect, they can first select which aspect they want to imprint, then select which version of that aspect they want to imprint. When selecting aspect, only discovered aspect will show up. If the dungeon version is not unlocked or not available and there’s no extracted version for a discovered aspect, then gray out the aspect to let the player know they don’t have it. When selecting version, if player select an extracted version aspect they previously extracted, let player know that the aspect will be consumed after the imprint.
- Dungeon version aspects are discovered based on if player has discovered the dungeon entrance on the map. (Should be similar to today.) Drop-only aspects are discovered when player extracts that aspect the first time. (Similar to how player unlocks the transmog.) Undiscovered aspect will be hidden from the codex. The discover progress should carry over seasons.
- The extracted aspects stored in the codex will be shared by accounts in the same realm just like how stash is shared.
The new system should function mostly the same as the old system but with improved quality of life. This change turns the aspects to work similar to materials which also has its own inventory. The difference is that every extracted aspect is a different copy (unlike materials which are all the same).
If you’ve read through the end, thanks for your patient! I hope this game gets better over time cause I love it!