I’d like to describe a situation I’ve found myself in that feels bad and seems like the opposite of the experience you’d want us to have with drops and crafting.
I have a build I’ve been (slowly) trying to gather gear for. A potentially great but actually disappointing item has dropped for me. It is the base I want with a nearly perfect implicit roll. It has the most important affix for my build on it as a T7, and two other affixes that are also very good. Initially, seeing this item was really exciting, until the reality of trying to craft on it set in.
The problem with this item is that the 4th affix is not just totally dead for the build this item is for, but it’s in the place of another very important stat, and without at least some of it on there, this item would probably be a downgrade. The dead stat is T4. I have several options but all of them suck:
Roll the dice on a Rune of Removal. 25% chance of success, 25% of completely bricking it, 50% chance of making it unusably worse than the current item. Additional chance of using up too much FP to do the remaining necessary crafting. This seems like the only reasonable option but it’s still really bad.
Roll the dice on a Rune of Despair and have a ??? chance of bricking the item. I have only one chance for this to work. Additional chance of using up too much FP to do the remaining necessary crafting.
Roll the dice on a Rune of Chaos and have an enormous chance of bricking the item with another dead stat. I have only one chance for this to work. Additional chance of using up too much FP to do the remaining necessary crafting.
So, instead of being really excited about this drop, that’s so close to being something I’ve been looking for for a long time, I’m super disappointed with it because it’s more likely I’m going to just shard it than be able to craft it into what I need it to be.
I’m not sure if there is anything that can or even should be done about this kind of situation, because ultimately we are talking about random loot here. But I wanted to at least write out about how it feels lame and I wish I had another crafting tool that gave me a better chance of turning this potentially amazing item into something I would be very happy with.
Yeah I have been in this situation and ended up bricking the item, I feel ya. As much as situations like this suck, if there was an absolute deterministic way to remove a dead stat on a 2pre 2suf item, I personally feel it would compromise the system far too much. You can obviously also use glyphs of hope and pray for FP not being consumed, but the underlying issue doesnt change.
Maybe offer the option of deterministic removal as the reward of getting thru a very high end dungeon, or create a rune with the drop odds of a HH in PoE? I dont have an answer, but I do know, if there ever was a good way to do this, it cant be something that is readily there to use.
I agree. That’s why I’m not sure if anything can or should be done about it, because that’s the only way I can think of to make this kind of situation not feel bad (other than when trade gets here eventually and I can save up gold to buy the damn thing instead). But maybe the devs can come up with something.
I took the route of rolling the dice and ended up with the second most important stat being removed, I was able to shatter the important affix but using a Removal was an uncomfortable feeling, even slightly anxiety inducing.
I would personally use a Chaos if I had to do it again, and be happy with a solid 3 stat item with the potential of getting lucky as hell and hitting what I want, or something that still is of some use. At least you have some agency when doing this, opposed to losing one the stats that made the item what it was.
I suffer from this a lot of times . The base I look for, with good rolls but one out of the 4 affixes is completely useless. That’s something comletely normal to me so try a removal and hope for the best and throw it away when it’s borked.
Drops in LE aren’t that exciting for me anymore. I look at items because of my lootfilter. If it is realy good or not will be seen after crafting. I’m rarely lucky with crafting so I’m rarely excited . Then again what would a hack and slay be without mindless grind and options to ruin your gear?
Hope you get the feels good once again when we get 1.0 and seasons. Compared to most here I play LE very little, and I find myself heading in your direction. There is a fine line between finding something cool for your character/potential new build, and having too many stash tabs filled with solid items.
It is a problem I also have with Grim Dawn and its mods, every couple months I have to refind where all the save folders are and delete them, it isnt very exciting make a new toon when you already have BiS for all slots waiting in your stash.
Is a glyph that lowers the tier of shard by 1 too strong? You would not be able to fully remove the affix. This would give someone the opportunity to reduce the affix then despair it away? It’ll cost FP just the same so I wonder if that may be a good solution?
I’d say that’s a 90% chance because out of all my removal rune attempts it has almost always removed the T6-T7 affix. I don’t if they are weighted or it’s just RNG but I stopped using them because it’s almost a guaranteed brick.
Also, Glyph Of Despair works once in a blue moon. Their chance needs to be increased. I’ve only farmed about 20 of them in 150 hours and the 6-7 that I used always failed. I’ve stopped ignoring them too because they just never work.
Overall I have to say that there’s a point with each build when gear drops actually become disappointing instead of being exciting. Nothing is usable and what is almost usable 100% of the time has some completely irrelevant affix that you can’t even get rid of.
I spent way too much time thinking about this, and maybe it does, but I don’t feel like it takes away enough to say there’s not a need to at least consider improving situations like this.
Yeah, the result I got was great, and yeah I had that short spike of “holy shit” when I hit the Removal, but in the end the overall experience was a really shitty rollercoaster that I just don’t care for. The likelihood of getting any good result was so small that I could not be excited about the drop or about trying to craft on it, which is the opposite of what I understand the goal to be here.
Hitting that Remove didn’t get rid of or compensate for the disappointment and “ah god damnit” that came before it, and as I think about it, I would rather have those feelings on the back end than on the front end. Like, I would feel better about getting an OK item, trying to craft it to something great, and failing, than I did about getting a possibly amazing item and being disappointed before I’ve ever touched the thing at how unlikely it is to turn out how I want it. And even though I got an incredible result this time, there was nothing I could have done differently or better, because it was pure, extreme luck that will never happen again, and I’m just going to repeat that “ah god damnit” with more items again in the future.
So I still think this is an area that could be improved in some way.
25% doesn’t seem that extreme. The real thing that momentarily got your hopes up at the beginning was because it had a T7 affix and a good implicit roll.
If it wasn’t on an exalted item, I don’t think you would have had the same exasperation.
If the best gear in the game wasn’t very hard to get, it would be boring when you got it.
Welcome to the game.
I craft with removals/chaos/despairs on a daily basis.
Use all the tools you can
Best place for despairs is lightless arbor (bring some gold).
It’s not and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s a pure rng based on affix slots. What you’re experiencing is a combination of sucky rng (easily possible with a small sample) and perception bias (you remember the failures because they have more of an emotional impact).
It just feels worse because the exalted drop, on the base you are looking for, with good rolls, and the T6/7 affix being one you really want is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo fscking rare.
It’s not, but I didn’t just mean the chance of hitting the right stat with Removal. It also needed to cost very little FP (this thing dropped with only 37) or proc Glyph of Hope, and then after that keep getting lucky with FP costs as I crafted more. I hit 3 Glyph of Hope and 3 Critical Success procs working on this thing, and the luck involved with that is ridiculous. If I hadn’t, I would never even have landed that Mana at T5 let alone been able to bring the Health up.
I wouldn’t have even picked this up if it hadn’t had the T7 Attunement on it, so, technically yeah.
I mean, just getting this drop as-is, so close to what I needed, was already really unlikely. I can count on one hand the number of T7 drops I’ve seen so far.
. The base I look for, with good rolls but one out of the 4 affixes is completely useless. That’s something comletely normal to me so try a removal and hope for the best and throw it away when it’s borked.