Class specific affix bloat - "damage on tuesdays"

[Sol77]

I have mentioned this several times as a sidenote in other conversations, but I’d like to put a spotlight on this, albeit too late for 1.1:

I’ve spent the past month farming for an exalted helmet to slam onto a unique, which has been kinda infuriating. I suppose my hopes were unreasonable, but that’s mostly due to the bloat of possible prefixes.

There are 20 potential suffixes for helmets, which feels like a very good amount: a lot of variety, yet targeting certain affixes is quite possible.

Prefixes however (on class specific slots) are horrible, I get 52 for Rogue helmets in the LET planner. I suggest to trim those down to 20-30. Some could be removed, some replaced and many could be grouped:

remove (edit: As pointed out by Iogann, these are wrongly listed in LET):

• Strength (?), Intelligence, Attunement
• Minion dodge rating/health/health reg

Having these on items that are Rogue only makes no sense, not sure if anything uses strength.

In general I would like to have affixes not class-locked where possible (like fire pen with ignite or inc shred effect/duration). It’s a non-factor for using the exalted item as-is, but it matters for slamming uniques.

group/replace:

• Chance to bleed/ignite/shred/slow on Bow/Shuriken hit → lose the bolded part
• Added phys throwing damage while dual wielding → just enable the “Catapult’s” prefix from relics, it even has higher values
• Bow ele damage → again, just enable ele damage
• Inc Area with Acid Flask, Dive Bomb, Cinder Strike, Dancing Strikes, Detonating Arrow
• Inc crit chance with Flurry → this is meh for it’s only one skill, rather have generic crit chance with Rogue skills - there are a few more single-skill affixes, won’t list them all
• Inc crit per dagger → this is my favorite affix, could be extended to swords though for both are treated equally in the passive tree
• Inc damage while wiedling bow/dagger/sword → there is a somehow hidden functionality here that allows you to stack these when wielding one dagger and one sword, which is nice. But I’d rather group these and enable a few generic inc damage affixes instead (like lightning or melee)
• Level of skill X: Grouping them all into + Rogue skills would be overpowered, but you could create groups of mutually exclusive skills
• Mana efficiency with Decoy/Sync Strike
• Inc Throwing phys damage → too specific, the values aren’t really higher than generic inc damage affixes, I would remove the damage type condition
• Ward gained on Shift/Shadow/Smoke Bomb

[iogann]

There is a mistake in LET planner, intelligence/strength/attunement cannot roll on rogue helmets. But I want intelligence to be added, because it’s the best prefix to buff ballistas with aerial assault.

I agree, that mod bloat is a problem, and some mods doesn’t make any sense. For example percentage maximum mana can roll on rogue gear, when there are only two skills that can benefit from it. At the same time acolyte has a of of possibilities for mana stacking, but doesn’t have percentage mana on gear. The other thing is reflect on rogue gear, both flat and percentage. Why? Rogue has the lowest health of all classes and relies on dodge. And for some reason those mods on body armour have much higher weighting, than the rare mods. As if they were added intentionally to dilute the mod pool.

For the level of specific skill, choosing a skill from a pool can help with mod bloat, although is probably too OP. Maybe add a rare rune to reroll skill affix into another skill.

[Sol77]

Thanks, I have edited the first part. I have multiple Mage and Acolyte items with dex, so I trusted in LET there. Regarding + skill affixes, like I said, we could group mutually exclusive skills - like Detonating arrow and Falconry. That might cause some switching around regarding which skill goes where.