How much of an outrage about the infamous final boss the blacksmith is there for the probable possibility of not getting the tempers you want and need for your build? Sure we have a scroll of restoration but it can only be used once per item. My experience is I get many of the same rolls of a stat I don’t need.
Right now my amulet is the only item that isn’t ancestral cuz it rolled with all the stats I wanted and got lucky with my tempers. It’s already hard enough finding a good ancestral amulet replacement and I just conveniently got one earlier but now I’m scared to do the tempers and fudge it up.
I wish there was another way to keep resetting your tempers so that you’re guaranteed to get what you want. Maybe just a gold cost or some mats thet progressively gets more expensive each additional time you reset just like how enchanting works. Imagine if you only got a max 12 enchants per item to reroll and if at the end you didn’t get your stat you were out of luck and had to get a new item.
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If you cant fail/brick then why should it be there in the first place? Might as well make it an enchant where you go to an NPC and just slap it on for some mats.
Find another item and try again. The game has to have some semblance of pushback on the player or we might aswell have an item editor at the char selection screen where you select all yopur items and all your desired stats (which we are close to having in-game anyway).
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This is a silly point of view. You have a material cost and with it being not only RNG on the Temper you get but also the value and you have two Tempers, Durability could not exist and it still take quite some time to get the Tempers you want with a max or high roll value.
People tend to only look at Tempering also as it relates to Best In Slot (BiS) items and not how the system functions over your entire journey. While it makes BiS more deterministic and lowers the RNG significantly, you have to realize that finding the BASE ITEM to begin with is a huge stroke of luck with absolutely zero way to guarantee the outcome.
You have a ton of Affixes that can roll at any value and with Greater Affixes. Tempering was designed entirely around having that BiS item. It is awful and makes progression and upgrading very disjointed and quite frankly - bad.
MasterWorking can be done indefinitely. It functions similar to Tempering without durability. That is a tremendous grind in its own right to get 12/12 3/3. For most players, they probably will never even hit 1 perfect MW item let alone every slot? Now do that each time you find an upgrade…
It would be a very easy test to just straight up get rid of durability entirely for a Season or allow Scrolls to be used as many times as you want on an item. See how the game changes. If you are right, they can add some more RNG in. If you are wrong, problem is solved.
Regardless of the outcome, the system is just atrociously terrible.
If Ancestrals were raining from the sky, the tempering system is fine. With Ancestral drop rates being low, the RNG for temper rolls needs to be way more “fair” or “forgiving”. Or they need to make retemper scrolls unlimited uses, but make them fairly rare drops.
Blizzard thinks these systems will “retain players by extending the end game goals” but all they’re really doing is pushing players away by taking any fun out of even the most tedious of tasks, making them nothing more than a chore, and punishing you for investing the time.
6 Likes
Here now… THIS is exactly what is needed with the current tempering system. Even raining from the sky my bet is on 99.5% of it will be trash still giving massive rng to get the ancestral with the aspect needed for your build.
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I suspect many of the defenders of the unpopular system(s) are “traders” who want their single items to “trade” for 10 billion gold or higher. And due to that amount of gold not being reasonable to farm in a <3 month period times the multiple slots required, it inevitably results in RMT gold purchases.
So these people are highly motivated to defend that system, and since they probably have bots farming for them, they have plenty of time to troll the forum defending that system and often attacking people who want to be able to farm these items (“oh, you want everything handed to you” and the most ridiculous hyperbole of all, “players want to be able to kill the monsters even before they appear on the screen”).
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Fine by me.
You’re telling me one of two very different possibilities: either you don’t play enough to really engage with the system at all, or you’re an absolute no lifer and finding a replacement ancestral is no big deal for you.
Either way, this conversation isn’t really for you.
2 Likes
Maybe some more tweaks, but if they were going to change temperings fundamental nature they would have likely done it already.
It will probably take awhile for them to change it.
S4 was heralded as this major success so they won’t want to mess with it.
That said, I hope it’s soon. Because the current system sucks as it discourages you from upgrading items. Either from not wanting to temper/master work a meh item. Or from not wanting to temper/masterwork a new item after you already have a decent one with okay tempers/master working.
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the pushback is its not free and requires mats. The fix to make everyone happy would be to make the reset scroll more than a single use
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the only thing that needs to be changed is remove the cap on the single use of the re-temper scroll. Otherwise lets make it more exciting and bring back masterwork failures 
Totally accurate point of view.
The issue is that the items you want for you build are so easy to get that the tempering system feels out of place. And you get to enjoy bricking hundreds of items per season, instead of just hoping to get a truly exciting drop that’s rare, and if something goes slightly wrong with it’s final crafting steps you won’t feel bad at all using it.
I would say this is the number one issue (crafting rng in general, not just tempering) for why I haven’t cared to go back to the game for the last few months.
If I felt like my efforts to get materials would result in upgrades without frustration, I would probably still play more often.
I agree there needs to be friction, but I also fully feel the outrage especially in S6 with ancestrals being so scarce. I have only got two 3GA legendries in the entire season, both of them were useless with garbage stats, but i can only imagine how i’d feel if one of them was actually good and I bricked it.
I did manage to brick the only GA devouring blaze i got all season, even with a reset scroll. All but one roll was overpower damage for my sorc. I did get 1 near min roll for vuln dmg early on but i need crit damage… so why keep that when you know you have 9 or 10 more chances to hit 1 option out of three right?
My personal opinion on the best way forward with tempering would be to make the scrolls NOT fully reset rolls but give you like 1-3 additional rolls, remove the 1 scroll per item cap, and make the scrolls slightly less common i.e. not a guaranteed drop from anywhere but maybe a higher chance in certain content.
I think this would remove entirely the possibility of making an item completely useless (esp a really good one that was so hard to find in the first place) while maintaining friction so you can’t just get an easy guaranteed max roll of the best stat every time, but also preserves the possibility of that super exciting/lucky moment of hitting good values for both tempers of the first try (which as actually happened to me! I hit max values for both tempers on PTR twice without even needing a scroll!!!).
Another idea i saw that i found interesting (but not sure fully if it would be good as i don’t see how you keep the rng factor on the stat and ensure no perma-bricking) is if the stat always tempered at min value and you could “level” the temper by applying a rare drop to the item
Yes either of these would lead to being able to eventually gain max potency for an item’s tempers, but i feel they can also both maintain enough friction to keep it from being Mony Hall.
They also both incorporate a lever of item rarity that can be pushed up or down to adjust needs for a given season based on where the item drop rate is. i.e. if the equipment drop rate needs to be low for whatever reason you can bump up the items to reset rolls or improve items, if equipment drops are more common you can push down the drop rate for reroll scrolls or upgrade items to make going for another item more appealing.
Scrolls should be unlimited uses, they can be somewhat rare to compensate.
Big problem I am seeing is switching builds. If I want to, say, go centipede from quill volley that’s quite a few temper changes and I already spent my rerolls ensuring I didn’t get useless garbage.
Continuing to play quill volley while I farm up an entire second set of gear just leads to "why bother. "
Armory is coming so they need to fix this.
They seem pretty hellbent on tempering not behaving like that.
I would argue that for most players getting a GAIII item or even an upgrade is actually incredibly uncommon making the bricking feel even worse. For the player who plays 10+ hours a day, you will experience this hardship more than others, but commonly, it sucks for everyone.
Where Tempering really sucks is that in between. The method to upgrade gear is do weird that even though you might find a better “Base Item” there is so much RNG and upgrades you have to redo to the item to even use it.
That is the really bad part.
2 Likes
One of the things that lead to “why bother” is that even starting with a better base item, making something that for sure is an upgrade to what you already have is buried under the rng of the temper rolls and mw crits and not knowing for example if it’s worth sacrifing 30% skill damage for 2% higher crit chance (just as an example.)
Why not:
Temper rolls have tighter ranges, work like enchanting (keep or replace,) no limit on scrolls, countered by scrolls being rarer.
Capstone MW levels (4, 8, 12) give 10% or 15% to all stats instead of a random crit, countered by salvage not returning any obducite (so it all has to be earned.)
Let the RNG be primarily in the item drop, make the enhancement a bit mote deterministic and without the nonsense of trying to hit a triple crit.
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You will never be guaranteed.
You could make it require more retemper scrolls for each subsequent attempt. Or have them provide fewer rolls. Currently they give another 6 (or 8) rolls… make it only give 5, then 3, then all subsequent scrolls only give one. You’ll be able to keep rerolling but after a certain point the hours spent farming Hoards just won’t be worth it. Or require more scrolls to unlock a full reroll… 1 for the first, then 4, then 9, then a dozen for all further retempers.
Basically there are ways to fix the system that aren’t rocket science. But nobody should fear taking a 3GA ancestral to the blacksmith. There shouldn’t be a significant chance (over 80% for some necessary build defining combinations) of bricking a great item. Because at it stands now the odds are good you’ll never see another item like it again. We’ll see if the “improved” drop rate actually shows thru clearly in play. I heard mixed response to it from PTR.