Advanced players can find a new legendary gem recipe which can be crafted at the Jeweler for a high cost. These gems can be given to your artisans and Kadala for unique crafting related bonuses. Once crafted, these new legendary gems can be ranked up like any other gem and also provide additional effects once they reach rank 25.
How to acquire the new legendary artisan gems?
You must first acquire a legendary recipe which has a chance to drop from Rift Guardians in Greater Rifts of tier 45 or higher.
Crafting cost: Jeweler must be Rank 12 in order to learn the recipe. Crafting cost for one artisan gem: 1000 blood shards, 1 Flawless Royal gem of each color, 100 Forgotten Souls.
After crafting, you have a new option when talking directly to your artisans and hand them a legendary artisan gem. Be careful, once provided with a gem, the artisans won’t be able to give them back.
When completing greater Rifts, artisan legendary gems in use (and any spare one in stash/inventory if it exists) can be selected from Urshi and upgraded like any other legendary gem.
Artisan legendary gems can be crafted multiple times, but you can only carry one with you/have in stash at a time (like old unique items).
Artisan Gem Effects
Jeweler: Additional chance to create ancient jewelry 10+0,4% per rank. @Rank25: When upgrading rubies, diamonds, amethysts, topazes or emerals there is a 30% chance to craft an additional gem. Max rank: 100.
Kadala: Grant chance to receive an ancient item: 10+0,4% per rank. @Rank25: Increase bloodshard cap by 1000. Max rank: 100.
Blacksmith: Additional chance to craft a legendary item. 10+0,4% per rank. @Rank25: Salvaging ancient items yields 2 Forgotten Souls. Max rank: 100.
Mystique: Eliminate the lowest (10+0,4 per rank)% values of all offered rolls. @Rank25: Offers +1 reroll options. Example: if you have rank 100 artisan gem in your Mystique and a value can be 10-20%, you will only see 15-20% and you will have 4 instead of 3 values to choose from.
Kadala
Cost of all armor items increased to 150.
Cost of shields, mojos, quivers and sources increased to 200.
Cost of 1h weapons increased to 300.
Cost of 2h weapons increased to 500.
Cost of Rings and Amulets increased to 300.
The base chance of 8%(?) to receive an ancient item from Kadala has been removed. Ancient item chance is now granted by augmenting the new legendary artisan gem to Kadala.
Kadala now has a 100% chance to provide you with legendary or set items. It is no longer possible receive yellow or blue items from her.
It is no longer possible to find off-class items from Kadala, e.g. a Barbarian will no longer receive Monk specifc helmets and any items purchased can not roll with intelligence or dexterity.
You can no longer buy items for slots which your class can not use, e.g. the option to buy quivers is not availble to classes other than Demon Hunters.
General
If any item rolls ancient (no matter if drop/kadala/crafted/bounty cache), it can not roll off-class.
It is no longer possible to find off-class items in Horadric bounty caches.
Paragon primary stat bonus reduced to 3 for level 1001 and beyond.
New jeweler crafting recipe (drops from bounty caches): legendary gem rank 0-24 + 7 GR keystones = legendary rank 25. The level gained is not additive, just set to 25. The amount of GR keystones is also always the same.
Highest group Greater Rift record also increases bloodshard cap (only best record of 2s, 3s and 4man is used).
Gold dropped from goblins no longer counts towards the gold streak indicator of the Avarice/Avaritia conquests.
Seasonal GR Leaderboards now show the paragon level of the heros at the time when the record was achieved.
New Dynamic Difficulty Level: Infernal Torment
Overall difficulty of Infernal Torment adjusted based on current power level of the patch/season. Last season's Infernal Torment would be round about GR 60; this season/patch 2.4 roughly adequate to ~gr70. This applies to everything excluding experience gain, which is slightly lower than their corresponding GR level counterpart. Whenever a new patch arrives which changes the power level of the game, the difficulty level of Infernal Torment is also adjusted, similar to the solo GR benchmark from the season journey. This eliminates the need for Torment 11, 12, 13 etc.
Double drop amount for crafting materials from mobs, goblins and elite packs compared to Torment X.
Death's breath drops from elite packs is 3,25 (3 guaranteed with a 25% chance to drop a 4th).
Bounty cache act specific materials and bounty cache blood shard rewards are exactly double that of Torment X.
Act specific legendary items from bounty caches have a 25% chance to be ancient.
Rift Guardians in IT nephalem rifts drop 3,5 GR keystones and 3 Forgotten Souls.
Key Wardens drop 1,1 infernal machines.
Uber bosses drop 5,5 organs.
Joining a public IT game requires you to be paragon 400.
Crafting Materials (Arcane Dust, Veiled Crystal and Reusable Parts)
Arcane Dust, Reusable Parts and Veiled Crystal are consolidated into one crafting material.
All current crafting material costs are changed to the sum of their current cost divided by 10, rounded up, e.g. Sword: 10 dust, 10 parts, 11 crystal is now (10+10+11)/3 = 10,33 => 11 new material cost
The amount/chance of all dropped Arcane Dust, Veiled Crystal and Reusable Parts is reduced by 85%.
The amount of materials gained from salvaging items at the blacksmith is reduced by 80%.
Kanais Cube
Anger of Iben Fahd: Cube recipe to convert normal crafting materials has been removed.
New Cube recipe: Duriel’s Bargain. Convert 10 Forgotten Souls + 1 Flawless Royal gem into horadric cache crafting material. Each color corresponds to another act, e.g. 10x Forgotten Souls + 1x Flawless Royal Ruby = 1x Corrupted Angel Flesh.
Darkness of Radament: when transmuting gems and multiple iterations are possible, a confirmation dialog pops up and asks you to confirm if you want to use all available materials. If yes: convert as many gems and essences (multiples of 9) as possible, no: transmute only 9 gems.
Followers
Reduce damage taken of followers by 75% across the board (make other follower specific items viable, “follower cannot die” mostly for Unity builds.)
Reduce amount of resources provided by Templar’s Inspire ability by 50%.
All followers now have an additional inventory slot: chest armor.
I took courses in game design while at university, but all numbers here are just rough estimes from the top of my head. I have given them quite a bit of thought, but for actual use they most certainly need adjustment. Let me know what you think below.
If we're going to have + bonus items like Diablo 2 charms, they shouldn't be taking up stash space. Something like the charm-wheel (forgot the name) that Blizzard had previewed before launch would be far better, as it would limit how many can be used.
I'm not a fan of all the increases to drops, class specific drops and ancient drops. It's already far too easy to gear up, and the 15% chance for actual random non class specific loot is a good compromise between what we had at launch and only gear for your class.
Kadala;
Same thoughts as above; finding gear is already a cakewalk. We've already got the recipe to convert rares into legendaries, this would be even more overkill. If anything, Kadala should only have armor / weapon / jewelry choices, but that's my own opinion.
General;
Also same reason as my first comment on your non class specific drop changes. It's okay that 15% of drops are actually random, this is a loot game after all and it's fun for a lot of people to suddenly find an ancient wand on their Barbarian, maybe they'll start up a Wizard.
I do like the main stat change to paragon, but I'd vote for the change to start at Paragon 800.
Highest group greater rift increasing your cap would just leave out every player who doesn't have three other equally geared out friends, and it would leave out all the players who chose not to play the meta classes. Leaving it as solo highest GR is fine.
Showing Plevel on leaderboards at the time of the clear would be nice.
I like the idea of Infernal Torment, and I've wanted something like this for awhile.
Crafting Materials;
There's no reason to change these now. We used to have 9 + different mats depending on difficulty and level, and the consolidation that crafting went through worked. What we have now feels good.
Kanais Cube;
Having a recipe to convert crafting mats into bounty mats would have to have an extremely high cost, otherwise bounties become useless again. Having these mats separated by activity type is a great way to change up gameplay depending on what you want to achieve.
Followers;
Would be nice to be able to use other follower items besides the invincible one, so I'm for this. Not sure why we'd want a chest slot added though.
I'm always happy people love this game enough to write up posts like this trying to make it better, so don't take my negativity as me being a jerk, I just don't see the necessity behind a lot of the proposed changes, that's all.
Thanks for taking the time to put some ideas together. Some of those I really like, but bleu42 brings up some valid concerns. I think it would be nice to have a slider for the TX Difficulty to scale up, let's say it goes as high as your highest gr solo completed. This way you can farm mats and get more Xp. Melting t10 is fun, but that progress bar hardly moves at higher paragon. Overall voted for some of your ideas.
If we're going to have + bonus items like Diablo 2 charms, they shouldn't be taking up stash space. Something like the charm-wheel (forgot the name) that Blizzard had previewed before launch would be far better, as it would limit how many can be used.
I'm not a fan of all the increases to drops, class specific drops and ancient drops. It's already far too easy to gear up, and the 15% chance for actual random non class specific loot is a good compromise between what we had at launch and only gear for your class.
Kadala;
Same thoughts as above; finding gear is already a cakewalk. We've already got the recipe to convert rares into legendaries, this would be even more overkill. If anything, Kadala should only have armor / weapon / jewelry choices, but that's my own opinion.
General;
Also same reason as my first comment on your non class specific drop changes. It's okay that 15% of drops are actually random, this is a loot game after all and it's fun for a lot of people to suddenly find an ancient wand on their Barbarian, maybe they'll start up a Wizard.
I do like the main stat change to paragon, but I'd vote for the change to start at Paragon 800.
Highest group greater rift increasing your cap would just leave out every player who doesn't have three other equally geared out friends, and it would leave out all the players who chose not to play the meta classes. Leaving it as solo highest GR is fine.
Showing Plevel on leaderboards at the time of the clear would be nice.
I like the idea of Infernal Torment, and I've wanted something like this for awhile.
Crafting Materials;
There's no reason to change these now. We used to have 9 + different mats depending on difficulty and level, and the consolidation that crafting went through worked. What we have now feels good.
Kanais Cube;
Having a recipe to convert crafting mats into bounty mats would have to have an extremely high cost, otherwise bounties become useless again. Having these mats separated by activity type is a great way to change up gameplay depending on what you want to achieve.
Followers;
Would be nice to be able to use other follower items besides the invincible one, so I'm for this. Not sure why we'd want a chest slot added though.
I'm always happy people love this game enough to write up posts like this trying to make it better, so don't take my negativity as me being a jerk, I just don't see the necessity behind a lot of the proposed changes, that's all.
Thanks for taking the time to put some ideas together. Some of those I really like, but bleu42 brings up some valid concerns. I think it would be nice to have a slider for the TX Difficulty to scale up, let's say it goes as high as your highest gr solo completed. This way you can farm mats and get more Xp. Melting t10 is fun, but that progress bar hardly moves at higher paragon. Overall voted for some of your ideas.
I think you didn't fully get where I was going with this. Most of my changes are not inteded to do what you say and many of them are solving problems or aknowledging things you said!
Gearing up: Yes, it is faster to gear up now and that is fine. However, my suggestions are only relevant for people who have already gotten far into the season and can only improve themselves through perfectly rolled ancient items. My changes also include a pretty hard Kadala nerf for when you first start a new season so that is actually something that you should like. For example, I suggested removing the ancient base chance from Kadala and in the beginning your blood shard cap wont even be high enough to purchase all slots!
Artisan gems wont require any inventory space. It is a single slot item which you craft once and then carry to your artisan of choice. For crafting happy players, you will repeat this process 1-2 more times for other artisans to get the most out of your time in the very very long run.
Crafting mats: Having different crafting materials (and needing thousands of them) only cramps up your stash space. They are also interchangeable using the Cube. Just reduce the total amounts and make it only one. Seems only the next logical step.
Getting Bounty Mats from kanais Cube: yes it is a nice change of gampelay, but it also requires you to have an alt which moves fast. The recipe should be there to fill blanks or recycle your old resources at a really bad ratio, similar to how legendary rerolling works. That isn't efficient either, but if you are a hardcore player and have lots of mats, why not save you the trouble give you something to do with it. The recipe must be very expensive and then all is fine.
Getting off-class items: there is nothing more frustrating to get off-class rolls. Yes, it's cool to sometimes find an ancient off-class item and be like: hey maybe I should level an alt. But in all honesty: most of the time you are just frustrated about another wasted item from Kadala. If you farm a specific bounty cache item for days to only have it drop as an ancient off-class with perfect rolls, you will think differently about this.
As you rightfully said, diablo 3 should be about doing things you like and progressing your charackter. Doing bounties and crafting hundreds of hellfire amulets is not very fun (in the long run). Having an increased ancient chance on your artisans saves time for high end players only, it doesn't break the game.
Paragon main stat on 1000 rather than 800 is just number tweaking. The reason why I went with 1000 in my original proposal is that reaching 800 is sort of a milestone and it is bad game design to instantly punish the player for achieving that.
Same goes for things like increased blood shard cap from group play. Your charackter doesn't automatically break the game just because you did some GRs for fun with your friend. It only increases your cap. Why not reward players who play the full spectrum of the game? I for one don't enjoy doing speedruns, someone else doesn't enjoy group meta play. So why not give all of them somthing to progress and have fun their way.
I'd really fancy they cleared all of our follower's gear, mailed it to us, and made them share! So you don't have to take off your best weapons/gems for followers, or reequip them for every character. Ability choices could still be remembered per-char. basis, though.
One other idea I had would be to cause strength, dexterity, and intelligence to all equally benefit followers, by converting it at a 1:1 ratio to another stat, follower-exclusive, which behaves in the same manner.
I'd really fancy they cleared all of our follower's gear, mailed it to us, and made them share! So you don't have to take off your best weapons/gems for followers, or reequip them for every character. Ability choices could still be remembered per-char. basis, though.
One other idea I had would be to cause strength, dexterity, and intelligence to all equally benefit followers, by converting it at a 1:1 ratio to another stat, follower-exclusive, which behaves in the same manner.
Would certainly make it a lot easier to gear followers since they all use essentially the same non-weapon items.
It is no longer possible to find off-class items from Kadala, e.g. a Barbarian will no longer receive Monk specifc helmets and any items
purchased can not roll with intelligence or dexterity.
i have never seen this happen and if it is i can only imagine it is a bug. I would like to see the option to buy for off class at kadala so when speed rifting i dont need to switch classes every 4 rifts to spend my shards when trying to gear alts.
As for the shard cap Bliz has always had the stance of not punishing a player for playing solo vs group. No it wont break the game to give players the shard cap of their highest gr of any group but at the same time the difference between solo vs group is about 10 ranks which isnt a whole lot of extra cap space. By making it your solo rift it means that your shard cap is based on your own performance and skill/gear and not that of the people carrying you
You can no longer buy items for slots which your class can not use, e.g. the option to buy quivers is not availble to classes other than Demon Hunters.
I dont see the point in removing the options you cant equip. Its dev time that would be better spent elsewhere
As for the rest of your Kadala and the gem ideas i dont like any of it.
Kadala is already self scaling in that players with better gear and running faster/ higher rifts get more shards meaning more items so more chances at ancients.
while the gems are just an effort to avoid bounties to craft more ancients and generally avoid adventure mode where you get gems and crafting mats.
The only thing i like is an additional roll on the enchantment but i think that should be tied to the re roll X number of times achievement rather than a gem or item.
If any item rolls ancient (no matter if drop/kadala/crafted/bounty cache), it can not roll off-class
I dont think you understand how items are rolled now. An item is dropped and then determined if it is legendary and then if it is ancient so your just asking for any off class item to roll non ancient with no trade off.
This punishes players who want to play multiple classes (primarily at the start of season) where these items can provide a boost.
Changing paragon now that we have the new cube recipe would be overkill. The players near the top of the leaderboads are running over 5k in bonus stat but have about half of that in paragon stat.
New jeweler crafting recipe (drops from bounty caches): legendary gem rank 0-24 + 7 GR keystones = legendary rank 25. The level gained is not additive, just set to 25. The amount of GR keystones is also always the same
Your maths here is bad 7x3 is 21 so your getting 4 free ranks by doing this, why would anyone every want to level them normally. But this just seems like an extension of the "the new recipe is really hard to enchant every set for every class so please make it easier" argument. I have a fc barb i use to clear gr 50s in 3-4 mins meaning it takes about 25-30 mins to level a gem from 0 to 25 in empowered rifts. If you choose to only play one class or one build that isnt fast thats your choice but it means you wont be getting the benefits of those other classes/builds.... This encourages diversity and gets players to try other classes.
Arcane Dust, Reusable Parts and Veiled Crystal are consolidated into one crafting material.
Are you so lazy that you cant/ wont pick up blues and whites when you need them?
Your reply said its a space issue so perhaps it would make more sense to have a crafting mats tab or space on the crafting/ cube UI that can hold an infinite amount of each mat. The same could be done with gems clearing about 1/2 of a stash tab
As for followers i do think they need an overhaul suggesting that just the Templar ability needs to be buffed without comparing it to the other followers makes me think you just want more resources and dont actually think its because the Templar is unbalanced (despite being the most widely used follower).
i have never seen this happen and if it is i can only imagine it is a bug. I would like to see the option to buy for off class at kadala so when speed rifting i dont need to switch classes every 4 rifts to spend my shards when trying to gear alts.
Well, lucky you.
As for the rest of your Kadala and the gem ideas i dont like any of it.
Kadala is already self scaling in that players with better gear and running faster/ higher rifts get more shards meaning more items so more chances at ancients.
No, Kadala scales like shit. No matter how high your Grift is, your bloodshards will always be like 350ish. Every 4 runs you need to go to Kadala, spam your inventory with blues and disenchant all of it. This is not progression, this is an additional step, like repairing, which gains you nothing but frustration.The arcane dust gained from that is also completely useless, as it is your least nedded material. The chances to get an ancient item which you can actually use from Kadala are astronomically low. Even if you would get 1000 bloodshards from kadala per GRift, you are still more reliant on luck than on anything else. Kadala is like a state lottery, like repairing your gear, equipping your alt and farming materials. It has nothing to do with gearing once you've reached a semi-decent gear state. Kadala has become almost obsolete at this point.
while the gems are just an effort to avoid bounties to craft more ancients and generally avoid adventure mode where you get gems and crafting mats.
The only thing i like is an additional roll on the enchantment but i think that should be tied to the re roll X number of times achievement rather than a gem or item.
Have you ever farmed a specific bounty cache ancient? I mean for real? I suggest you play a LON build and try to get a decently rolled Hellfire Amulet. The amount of luck involved has become too great. If I play 100 hours more than someone else I expect my gear to be better in one slot, maybe even two. At the moment the only difference is that I am drowning is pointless crafting materials, am totally sick of doing uber runs (fuck you magda shield) and have some more paragon levels than the other guy. If I could invest in say increased ancient item chance for my Jeweler, I would gradually have a quite ridiculous chance to get ancient hellfire amulets. This would require a lot of time, but at least I would see additional progress over time. Have you actually checked the math on how it is currently and on what I am suggesting? Adventure mode will still be a core part of the experience. I guess it is time to google a bot which does T10s for me...
I dont think you understand how items are rolled now. An item is dropped and then determined if it is legendary and then if it is ancient so your just asking for any off class item to roll non ancient with no trade off.
This punishes players who want to play multiple classes (primarily at the start of season) where these items can provide a boost.
I understand that very well. They will need to adjust how creating items work or compensate for that. I am purely interested in good game design, not math or algorithms.
Your maths here is bad 7x3 is 21 so your getting 4 free ranks by doing this, why would anyone every want to level them normally. But this just seems like an extension of the "the new recipe is really hard to enchant every set for every class so please make it easier" argument. I have a fc barb i use to clear gr 50s in 3-4 mins meaning it takes about 25-30 mins to level a gem from 0 to 25 in empowered rifts. If you choose to only play one class or one build that isnt fast thats your choice but it means you wont be getting the benefits of those other classes/builds.... This encourages diversity and gets players to try other classes.
Your math is off. The recipe is even more expensive. 25 / 4 = 6,25 so you are wasting:
- 0,75 Keystones
- Loot from 6-8 GRs
- Bloodshards from 6-8 GRs
But you are gaining over an hour of playtime.
Also you and some other people are always pointing at diversity and making alts and wtf. How about some people don't want to do alts. I want one strong char which climbs the leaderboard. Stupid enough I have to make a solo, a group and a DB char. Now you want me to make two different speed running chars as well? You can't even save builds/skills/items for swapping them quickly. It is a pain in the a*s.
Are you so lazy that you cant/ wont pick up blues and whites when you need them?
Your reply said its a space issue so perhaps it would make more sense to have a crafting mats tab or space on the crafting/ cube UI that can hold an infinite amount of each mat. The same could be done with gems clearing about 1/2 of a stash tab
This has nothing to do with lazyness, more than it being the same logical next step. Materials are mutually interchangeable through the cube any person who can think logically can come to the conclusion that you just need one.
So basically this wishlist is "Remove items that are non-ancient non-legendary and non-smart from the game"
No, the wishlist is to slow down early game equipment, provide more progression methods for long term players and increase the fun for everybody, no matter what they like to do best.
The chances to get an ancient item which you can actually use from Kadala are astronomically low.......it has nothing to do with gearing once you've reached a semi-decent gear state. Kadala has become almost obsolete at this point.
Wow its almost like bloodshards arnt ment to be your primary source of items and more a way of focusing your loot drops in 1 area if you are only searching for the last few pieces for your build. In a game that is all about the search for loot having 1 spot where you just click for loot is bad game design people will get near perfect gear reach the limits of their class and stop playing.
Have you ever farmed a specific bounty cache ancient? I mean for real? I suggest you play a LON build and try to get a decently rolled Hellfire Amulet....If I could invest in say increased ancient item chance for my Jeweler, I would gradually have a quite ridiculous chance to get ancient hellfire amulets
Yes and seeing how each bounty has 4-7 possible items (almost every item wanted comes from act 1 and 2 so 1:4/1:5) and tx has a 100% drop chance with a 10% chance of ancient you have a 1 in 40/50 chance of getting the item you want in ancient.
Also hell fire has nothing to do with bounties and can be farmed way more efficiently than any bounty item can be. Running ubers in a 4 man with each person opening a set of portals gives you 8-12 organs so roughly 10 craft. Yes it can take a long time to get a well rolled ancient HF with the stats you wont or it could be your 1st 2nd 3rd etc its a random drop and gearing with your perfect gear shouldnt be a 10 min task.
And as far as investing time. This season players were at gr100 in just a few days and your napkin math would put your lvl 100 gem at a 50% chance to craft an ancient. So really your just further rewarding the lucky and higher end players with better gear who are clearing higher rifts. And again as players are clearing roughly 10-15 lvls higher in MP than solo your further rewarding and making players feel forced to play in 4man to get these upgrades. Just as you dont want to play other classes i dont want to feel forced to play MP just to lvl my gems and get enough paragons to feel competitive.
The issue i have is that you can then make the gem your suggesting and boost it to lvl 60 or so before crafting your first HF and have 3x the chance at getting an ancient. Its a design that favors rewarding players for waiting to craft something rather than giving them an increasing chance. It would be better to improve the craftsman so they gain some xp as they craft legendary items while at max lvl and the xp improves the crafting ability of the craftsman in some way. ie lower mats costs or improved ancient chance. Thereby rewarding players for playing the game and provides some feeling of progression while trying to achieve your goal.
I understand that very well. They will need to adjust how creating items work or compensate for that
So your argument is please redesign the entire loot system for the game to make it so that the (very small number of) off class items dont drop as ancient. Even tho every item is rolled separately and therefor you getting an ancient monk item on your barb will have 0 impact on the other items dropped in that game. You can have every item dropped in a rift be ancient or you could go 30+ items without seeing an ancient rng is rng removing some ancients wont improve your rng on other items
Your math is off. The recipe is even more expensive. 25 / 4 = 6,25 so you are wasting:
Ok fair point assuming you were taking the cost of empowering all those rifts into your upgrade cost for your gem.
Also you and some other people are always pointing at diversity and making alts and wtf. How about some people don't want to do alts
Yes in my 4 posts here im always talking about diversity.......
As i said you dont have to play alts but dont complain if your playing a class who cant do something as fast or as well as another class.
You said you did a design course so i would imagine you know that as developers they have made each class different and would like players to try all the classes. Yes you may only want to play 1 but you may like another but just never play it because you only play ranged classes or what ever arbitrary reason you like your class more than the other 5.
This has nothing to do with lazyness, more than it being the same logical next step. Materials are mutually interchangeable through the
cube any person who can think logically can come to the conclusion that you just need one.
just because they are interchangeable doesnt mean they are the same... Gems can be interchanged why dont we just have 1 gem type drop and you just pick what it does when you socket it...
The idea of the cube recipe was to balance your materials if you have a surplus of one type and none of another - mostly because people were to lazy to click armor racks for white items which almost never drop anywhere else once your in tx and grifts.
You guys take this to literal, you just say it is crap but offer few suggestions.
I personally like the path several of these changes would take us, basically more about the grind and less about RNG. An ARPG should have some form of RNG, but D3 is far to deep into it, to the point it created a level of disdain, and followed up by a retarded increase to drop rates, meaning most players can be fully geared with all specs of said season within 15-20 hours of gameplay. This may cater to the casual audience, but it ruins the game. The focus of casual players should be on Non-Season if they want to compete, where time is not a direct enemy. Season to me should be reserved to those who know they need to put in the time, aka the restart, gr push, leaderboard climb, and the farm.
That being said, in regards to Artisan Gems:
- I love the idea.
- I do however think these should almost be an experience bar sort of like how you train the artisan instead of an actual gem.
Regarding Kadala Changes:
- I like them, but they do need to be tuned. I would simply multiply each recipe by 7, so weapons would cost 525. With this I would raise the base BS level to 525 to allow someone to farm this number for a legendary weapon without raising their cap.
- Kadala would need to be turned into an artisan if the theory of leveling her up, thus increasing Ancient roll % were to happen.
- If a change like this were to occur THEN DROP RATES ABSOLUTELY NEED TO BE LOWERED IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD, which I am okay with
Regarding Infernal Torment:
- I love it!!!
- Obviously would need to be tuned to represent the current power creep, ala cannot be raw numbers, but a scaling formula based on the creep.
In regards to everything else, again, I like a lot of the proposed ideas. Just make sure drop rates in the world are lowered, thus making the game more about the grind again. By making several of these changes, RNG is better tuned for what an ARPG should be.
Thanks for the post, a lot of good raw ideas, would need some work, but many of which make sense.
The really dedicated players reach full sets and gear withing the first days after season start. After that its just Exp-Farming for paragon levels. Progression for like...30(?) hours and repeat it for the other 1000+ hours.
Your artisan idea will be finished by them within that first days. Torment Infernal might replace speedfarming if its statistically better. The cube idea will replace bounties if its statistically better. Your ideas especially the artisan will be nice and something meaningful to do for those who just play the season for ~ *guess* 50-100 hours and then wait for the next season. Players with their 1000+ hours per season ( and that includes some streaming stars ), who post things like "diablo 3 has no endgame" won't stop posting that because your ideas won't change anything for them. At a long term, only the mathematically best way to play will be done for hundreds of hours.
As I say in my post, if changes like this were to occur, drop rates need to drastically be nerfed. Instead of getting lets say 10-15 legendary items in a full TX clear, maybe we get 3-4 of them.
I also feel that a lowering of drop rates would be in high support to a removal of blue and white crafting mats, instead, we have a united crafting mat, deaths breath, and forgotten souls. Each have their own niche, which is nice and clean.
Thanks for taking the time to put some ideas together. Some of those I really like, but bleu42 brings up some valid concerns. I think it would be nice to have a slider for the TX Difficulty to scale up, let's say it goes as high as your highest gr solo completed. This way you can farm mats and get more Xp. Melting t10 is fun, but that progress bar hardly moves at higher paragon. Overall voted for some of your ideas.
This is absolutely how I would execute Infernal Torment. Much like the Power Creep slider we had in vanilla, but more tuned to the modern style of D3.
Also, for D3 Xpac 2, which I feel we will get summer of 2017:
-Removal of Paragon system
-More gated progression, or static runs. ( I want a few items in the game that are equal, to see who truly is the best, not just the luckiest)
-Increase in follower gear slots. ( I love followers for solo play, but feel they are a little drab. Allow them to equip up to 13 items like we can)
-Addition of another follower type (I was thinking that instead of a new class of Necro or Amazon, two old classes in Diablo, they are followers)
-Addition of a new class (I like the idea of a Blood Mage, something that fuels their power off Blood Shards as a resource, and is more of a melee caster)
I have several others, but those are a few I really like.
I'd like to have a way to farm or craft ramaladnis gift. Maybe like hellfire or something similar.
I like the idea of being able to craft it, perhaps put a cooldown on it like you have in WoW with some of the more powerful materials. Maybe a craft timer of once a week or something.
I would also love to see a similar item for jewelry.
I like the suggestion about the artisan upgrades not being a legendary gem, but more like a experience bar or something. Maybe an additional bar which fills up by crafting legendary and set items. It would be a slightly confusing additional stat/display, but I think it could work. If you are really crafting your a*s off with Hellfire Amulets, you at least pushed the quality of the next few a bit.
Other topic: how can you possibly say that a 1 in 50 is a good chance for getting bounty items. The actual chance to get ancient on-class Boots for example is 1:72 or something. Add to that that even ancient items can roll pretty shitty we are easily talking 1:100+. Let's be optimistic and say that half the ancient items are actually usable = 1:144. As per basic statistics we are looking at 173 runs until you have a fitting pair of boots. Have you done 173 bounty runs this season? I have done so many, I drop the items on the floor and leave the game in frustration without disenchanting them and I am not even close to 173 runs.
My wishlist for Diablo III Patch 2.5
Artisan Legendary Gems
Advanced players can find a new legendary gem recipe which can be crafted at the Jeweler for a high cost. These gems can be given to your artisans and Kadala for unique crafting related bonuses. Once crafted, these new legendary gems can be ranked up like any other gem and also provide additional effects once they reach rank 25.
How to acquire the new legendary artisan gems?
Artisan Gem Effects
Kadala
General
New Dynamic Difficulty Level: Infernal Torment
Crafting Materials (Arcane Dust, Veiled Crystal and Reusable Parts)
Kanais Cube
Followers
I took courses in game design while at university, but all numbers here are just rough estimes from the top of my head. I have given them quite a bit of thought, but for actual use they most certainly need adjustment. Let me know what you think below.
Artisan gems;
If we're going to have + bonus items like Diablo 2 charms, they shouldn't be taking up stash space. Something like the charm-wheel (forgot the name) that Blizzard had previewed before launch would be far better, as it would limit how many can be used.
I'm not a fan of all the increases to drops, class specific drops and ancient drops. It's already far too easy to gear up, and the 15% chance for actual random non class specific loot is a good compromise between what we had at launch and only gear for your class.
Kadala;
Same thoughts as above; finding gear is already a cakewalk. We've already got the recipe to convert rares into legendaries, this would be even more overkill. If anything, Kadala should only have armor / weapon / jewelry choices, but that's my own opinion.
General;
Also same reason as my first comment on your non class specific drop changes. It's okay that 15% of drops are actually random, this is a loot game after all and it's fun for a lot of people to suddenly find an ancient wand on their Barbarian, maybe they'll start up a Wizard.
I do like the main stat change to paragon, but I'd vote for the change to start at Paragon 800.
Highest group greater rift increasing your cap would just leave out every player who doesn't have three other equally geared out friends, and it would leave out all the players who chose not to play the meta classes. Leaving it as solo highest GR is fine.
Showing Plevel on leaderboards at the time of the clear would be nice.
I like the idea of Infernal Torment, and I've wanted something like this for awhile.
Crafting Materials;
There's no reason to change these now. We used to have 9 + different mats depending on difficulty and level, and the consolidation that crafting went through worked. What we have now feels good.
Kanais Cube;
Having a recipe to convert crafting mats into bounty mats would have to have an extremely high cost, otherwise bounties become useless again. Having these mats separated by activity type is a great way to change up gameplay depending on what you want to achieve.
Followers;
Would be nice to be able to use other follower items besides the invincible one, so I'm for this. Not sure why we'd want a chest slot added though.
I'm always happy people love this game enough to write up posts like this trying to make it better, so don't take my negativity as me being a jerk, I just don't see the necessity behind a lot of the proposed changes, that's all.
Thanks for taking the time to put some ideas together. Some of those I really like, but bleu42 brings up some valid concerns. I think it would be nice to have a slider for the TX Difficulty to scale up, let's say it goes as high as your highest gr solo completed. This way you can farm mats and get more Xp. Melting t10 is fun, but that progress bar hardly moves at higher paragon. Overall voted for some of your ideas.
I think you didn't fully get where I was going with this. Most of my changes are not inteded to do what you say and many of them are solving problems or aknowledging things you said!
Gearing up: Yes, it is faster to gear up now and that is fine. However, my suggestions are only relevant for people who have already gotten far into the season and can only improve themselves through perfectly rolled ancient items. My changes also include a pretty hard Kadala nerf for when you first start a new season so that is actually something that you should like. For example, I suggested removing the ancient base chance from Kadala and in the beginning your blood shard cap wont even be high enough to purchase all slots!
Artisan gems wont require any inventory space. It is a single slot item which you craft once and then carry to your artisan of choice. For crafting happy players, you will repeat this process 1-2 more times for other artisans to get the most out of your time in the very very long run.
Crafting mats: Having different crafting materials (and needing thousands of them) only cramps up your stash space. They are also interchangeable using the Cube. Just reduce the total amounts and make it only one. Seems only the next logical step.
Getting Bounty Mats from kanais Cube: yes it is a nice change of gampelay, but it also requires you to have an alt which moves fast. The recipe should be there to fill blanks or recycle your old resources at a really bad ratio, similar to how legendary rerolling works. That isn't efficient either, but if you are a hardcore player and have lots of mats, why not save you the trouble give you something to do with it. The recipe must be very expensive and then all is fine.
Getting off-class items: there is nothing more frustrating to get off-class rolls. Yes, it's cool to sometimes find an ancient off-class item and be like: hey maybe I should level an alt. But in all honesty: most of the time you are just frustrated about another wasted item from Kadala. If you farm a specific bounty cache item for days to only have it drop as an ancient off-class with perfect rolls, you will think differently about this.
As you rightfully said, diablo 3 should be about doing things you like and progressing your charackter. Doing bounties and crafting hundreds of hellfire amulets is not very fun (in the long run). Having an increased ancient chance on your artisans saves time for high end players only, it doesn't break the game.
Paragon main stat on 1000 rather than 800 is just number tweaking. The reason why I went with 1000 in my original proposal is that reaching 800 is sort of a milestone and it is bad game design to instantly punish the player for achieving that.
Same goes for things like increased blood shard cap from group play. Your charackter doesn't automatically break the game just because you did some GRs for fun with your friend. It only increases your cap. Why not reward players who play the full spectrum of the game? I for one don't enjoy doing speedruns, someone else doesn't enjoy group meta play. So why not give all of them somthing to progress and have fun their way.
So basically this wishlist is "Remove items that are non-ancient non-legendary and non-smart from the game"
I'd really fancy they cleared all of our follower's gear, mailed it to us, and made them share! So you don't have to take off your best weapons/gems for followers, or reequip them for every character. Ability choices could still be remembered per-char. basis, though.
One other idea I had would be to cause strength, dexterity, and intelligence to all equally benefit followers, by converting it at a 1:1 ratio to another stat, follower-exclusive, which behaves in the same manner.
i have never seen this happen and if it is i can only imagine it is a bug. I would like to see the option to buy for off class at kadala so when speed rifting i dont need to switch classes every 4 rifts to spend my shards when trying to gear alts.
As for the shard cap Bliz has always had the stance of not punishing a player for playing solo vs group. No it wont break the game to give players the shard cap of their highest gr of any group but at the same time the difference between solo vs group is about 10 ranks which isnt a whole lot of extra cap space. By making it your solo rift it means that your shard cap is based on your own performance and skill/gear and not that of the people carrying you
I dont see the point in removing the options you cant equip. Its dev time that would be better spent elsewhere
As for the rest of your Kadala and the gem ideas i dont like any of it.
Kadala is already self scaling in that players with better gear and running faster/ higher rifts get more shards meaning more items so more chances at ancients.
while the gems are just an effort to avoid bounties to craft more ancients and generally avoid adventure mode where you get gems and crafting mats.
The only thing i like is an additional roll on the enchantment but i think that should be tied to the re roll X number of times achievement rather than a gem or item.
I dont think you understand how items are rolled now. An item is dropped and then determined if it is legendary and then if it is ancient so your just asking for any off class item to roll non ancient with no trade off.
This punishes players who want to play multiple classes (primarily at the start of season) where these items can provide a boost.
Changing paragon now that we have the new cube recipe would be overkill. The players near the top of the leaderboads are running over 5k in bonus stat but have about half of that in paragon stat.
Your maths here is bad 7x3 is 21 so your getting 4 free ranks by doing this, why would anyone every want to level them normally. But this just seems like an extension of the "the new recipe is really hard to enchant every set for every class so please make it easier" argument. I have a fc barb i use to clear gr 50s in 3-4 mins meaning it takes about 25-30 mins to level a gem from 0 to 25 in empowered rifts. If you choose to only play one class or one build that isnt fast thats your choice but it means you wont be getting the benefits of those other classes/builds.... This encourages diversity and gets players to try other classes.
Are you so lazy that you cant/ wont pick up blues and whites when you need them?
Your reply said its a space issue so perhaps it would make more sense to have a crafting mats tab or space on the crafting/ cube UI that can hold an infinite amount of each mat. The same could be done with gems clearing about 1/2 of a stash tab
As for followers i do think they need an overhaul suggesting that just the Templar ability needs to be buffed without comparing it to the other followers makes me think you just want more resources and dont actually think its because the Templar is unbalanced (despite being the most widely used follower).
Well, lucky you.
No, Kadala scales like shit. No matter how high your Grift is, your bloodshards will always be like 350ish. Every 4 runs you need to go to Kadala, spam your inventory with blues and disenchant all of it. This is not progression, this is an additional step, like repairing, which gains you nothing but frustration.The arcane dust gained from that is also completely useless, as it is your least nedded material. The chances to get an ancient item which you can actually use from Kadala are astronomically low. Even if you would get 1000 bloodshards from kadala per GRift, you are still more reliant on luck than on anything else. Kadala is like a state lottery, like repairing your gear, equipping your alt and farming materials. It has nothing to do with gearing once you've reached a semi-decent gear state. Kadala has become almost obsolete at this point.
Have you ever farmed a specific bounty cache ancient? I mean for real? I suggest you play a LON build and try to get a decently rolled Hellfire Amulet. The amount of luck involved has become too great. If I play 100 hours more than someone else I expect my gear to be better in one slot, maybe even two. At the moment the only difference is that I am drowning is pointless crafting materials, am totally sick of doing uber runs (fuck you magda shield) and have some more paragon levels than the other guy. If I could invest in say increased ancient item chance for my Jeweler, I would gradually have a quite ridiculous chance to get ancient hellfire amulets. This would require a lot of time, but at least I would see additional progress over time. Have you actually checked the math on how it is currently and on what I am suggesting? Adventure mode will still be a core part of the experience. I guess it is time to google a bot which does T10s for me...
I understand that very well. They will need to adjust how creating items work or compensate for that. I am purely interested in good game design, not math or algorithms.
Your math is off. The recipe is even more expensive. 25 / 4 = 6,25 so you are wasting:
- 0,75 Keystones
- Loot from 6-8 GRs
- Bloodshards from 6-8 GRs
But you are gaining over an hour of playtime.
Also you and some other people are always pointing at diversity and making alts and wtf. How about some people don't want to do alts. I want one strong char which climbs the leaderboard. Stupid enough I have to make a solo, a group and a DB char. Now you want me to make two different speed running chars as well? You can't even save builds/skills/items for swapping them quickly. It is a pain in the a*s.
This has nothing to do with lazyness, more than it being the same logical next step. Materials are mutually interchangeable through the cube any person who can think logically can come to the conclusion that you just need one.
So the effective removal of non-orange and off-class drops from the game is coincidental then.
Wow its almost like bloodshards arnt ment to be your primary source of items and more a way of focusing your loot drops in 1 area if you are only searching for the last few pieces for your build. In a game that is all about the search for loot having 1 spot where you just click for loot is bad game design people will get near perfect gear reach the limits of their class and stop playing.
Yes and seeing how each bounty has 4-7 possible items (almost every item wanted comes from act 1 and 2 so 1:4/1:5) and tx has a 100% drop chance with a 10% chance of ancient you have a 1 in 40/50 chance of getting the item you want in ancient.
Also hell fire has nothing to do with bounties and can be farmed way more efficiently than any bounty item can be. Running ubers in a 4 man with each person opening a set of portals gives you 8-12 organs so roughly 10 craft. Yes it can take a long time to get a well rolled ancient HF with the stats you wont or it could be your 1st 2nd 3rd etc its a random drop and gearing with your perfect gear shouldnt be a 10 min task.
And as far as investing time. This season players were at gr100 in just a few days and your napkin math would put your lvl 100 gem at a 50% chance to craft an ancient. So really your just further rewarding the lucky and higher end players with better gear who are clearing higher rifts. And again as players are clearing roughly 10-15 lvls higher in MP than solo your further rewarding and making players feel forced to play in 4man to get these upgrades. Just as you dont want to play other classes i dont want to feel forced to play MP just to lvl my gems and get enough paragons to feel competitive.
The issue i have is that you can then make the gem your suggesting and boost it to lvl 60 or so before crafting your first HF and have 3x the chance at getting an ancient. Its a design that favors rewarding players for waiting to craft something rather than giving them an increasing chance. It would be better to improve the craftsman so they gain some xp as they craft legendary items while at max lvl and the xp improves the crafting ability of the craftsman in some way. ie lower mats costs or improved ancient chance. Thereby rewarding players for playing the game and provides some feeling of progression while trying to achieve your goal.
So your argument is please redesign the entire loot system for the game to make it so that the (very small number of) off class items dont drop as ancient. Even tho every item is rolled separately and therefor you getting an ancient monk item on your barb will have 0 impact on the other items dropped in that game. You can have every item dropped in a rift be ancient or you could go 30+ items without seeing an ancient rng is rng removing some ancients wont improve your rng on other items
Ok fair point assuming you were taking the cost of empowering all those rifts into your upgrade cost for your gem.
Yes in my 4 posts here im always talking about diversity.......
As i said you dont have to play alts but dont complain if your playing a class who cant do something as fast or as well as another class.
You said you did a design course so i would imagine you know that as developers they have made each class different and would like players to try all the classes. Yes you may only want to play 1 but you may like another but just never play it because you only play ranged classes or what ever arbitrary reason you like your class more than the other 5.
just because they are interchangeable doesnt mean they are the same... Gems can be interchanged why dont we just have 1 gem type drop and you just pick what it does when you socket it...
The idea of the cube recipe was to balance your materials if you have a surplus of one type and none of another - mostly because people were to lazy to click armor racks for white items which almost never drop anywhere else once your in tx and grifts.
I'd like to see the Asheara 4p bonus made passive rather than a 50% uptime buff.
You guys take this to literal, you just say it is crap but offer few suggestions.
I personally like the path several of these changes would take us, basically more about the grind and less about RNG. An ARPG should have some form of RNG, but D3 is far to deep into it, to the point it created a level of disdain, and followed up by a retarded increase to drop rates, meaning most players can be fully geared with all specs of said season within 15-20 hours of gameplay. This may cater to the casual audience, but it ruins the game. The focus of casual players should be on Non-Season if they want to compete, where time is not a direct enemy. Season to me should be reserved to those who know they need to put in the time, aka the restart, gr push, leaderboard climb, and the farm.
That being said, in regards to Artisan Gems:
- I love the idea.
- I do however think these should almost be an experience bar sort of like how you train the artisan instead of an actual gem.
Regarding Kadala Changes:
- I like them, but they do need to be tuned. I would simply multiply each recipe by 7, so weapons would cost 525. With this I would raise the base BS level to 525 to allow someone to farm this number for a legendary weapon without raising their cap.
- Kadala would need to be turned into an artisan if the theory of leveling her up, thus increasing Ancient roll % were to happen.
- If a change like this were to occur THEN DROP RATES ABSOLUTELY NEED TO BE LOWERED IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD, which I am okay with
Regarding Infernal Torment:
- I love it!!!
- Obviously would need to be tuned to represent the current power creep, ala cannot be raw numbers, but a scaling formula based on the creep.
In regards to everything else, again, I like a lot of the proposed ideas. Just make sure drop rates in the world are lowered, thus making the game more about the grind again. By making several of these changes, RNG is better tuned for what an ARPG should be.
Thanks for the post, a lot of good raw ideas, would need some work, but many of which make sense.
I also feel that a lowering of drop rates would be in high support to a removal of blue and white crafting mats, instead, we have a united crafting mat, deaths breath, and forgotten souls. Each have their own niche, which is nice and clean.
Also, for D3 Xpac 2, which I feel we will get summer of 2017:
-Removal of Paragon system
-More gated progression, or static runs. ( I want a few items in the game that are equal, to see who truly is the best, not just the luckiest)
-Increase in follower gear slots. ( I love followers for solo play, but feel they are a little drab. Allow them to equip up to 13 items like we can)
-Addition of another follower type (I was thinking that instead of a new class of Necro or Amazon, two old classes in Diablo, they are followers)
-Addition of a new class (I like the idea of a Blood Mage, something that fuels their power off Blood Shards as a resource, and is more of a melee caster)
I have several others, but those are a few I really like.
I like the idea of being able to craft it, perhaps put a cooldown on it like you have in WoW with some of the more powerful materials. Maybe a craft timer of once a week or something.
I would also love to see a similar item for jewelry.
Monstrous Armor Rack!
I like the suggestion about the artisan upgrades not being a legendary gem, but more like a experience bar or something. Maybe an additional bar which fills up by crafting legendary and set items. It would be a slightly confusing additional stat/display, but I think it could work. If you are really crafting your a*s off with Hellfire Amulets, you at least pushed the quality of the next few a bit.
Other topic: how can you possibly say that a 1 in 50 is a good chance for getting bounty items. The actual chance to get ancient on-class Boots for example is 1:72 or something. Add to that that even ancient items can roll pretty shitty we are easily talking 1:100+. Let's be optimistic and say that half the ancient items are actually usable = 1:144. As per basic statistics we are looking at 173 runs until you have a fitting pair of boots. Have you done 173 bounty runs this season? I have done so many, I drop the items on the floor and leave the game in frustration without disenchanting them and I am not even close to 173 runs.