So i didn’t want to have such a valuable discussion in a teaser from Sarno, so i decided to move it here.
Me and @KissingAiur just started a very valueable discussion i think, especially with the recent announcement of new affixes
Just in case you want to fully catch up with the conversation history
Conversation History
While the new affixes are definitely exciting for me personally, KissingAiur raised some concerns which are very valid. And we might not know the full picture yet, but i think nontheless it’s worthy of a discussion.
I just want to quote some of the last statement and give my feedback about some of those very valid concerns:
I think less affixes are better. It’s hard to get the perfect middleground, but if all affixes are very balanced, having fewer affixes actually increases build variety i think. (Very similar to the limit we have on skill slots)
If we get to many affixes you can get almost all you want/need.
If all affixes, especially the defensive ones are well enough balanced and all of them are viable choices 4 affixes per item is perfect IMO.
If some options are too strong, it definitely hurts build variety with so few affix slots, but if all potential option are viable we can see ALOT of different combinations.
If we would have 6 affixes (3 prefixes and 3 suffixes), in the current build of LE, you could basically get almost all defensive affixes, which is not good. The game definitely would need a major overhaul if we get more affixes.
The new skill specific affixes are very likely only present on body armor and helmets, from what we saw in the teaser they seems to be prefixes, so they only mess with a minor pool of defensive affixes (most importantly HP Regen, % Dodge, % Armour, Attributes and some Minion Affixes)
This concern i 100% agree with. While the example they gave will be most likely not bad for alot of sorcer builds, since meteor is sorcerer exclusive and they is littel to none synergy to go melee with sorcerer. I can definitely see those double affixes feel underwhelming on certain build types.
I kinda like those double affixes, but they would need to be either more generic to fit multipel playstyle, especially on very transormative skills or maybe we could see something like “x% increased damage to skill x”, which would increase the dmg output of the whole skill, including everything from their tree.
This might be more focused and would not benefit the rest of the active abilities as much, but it would always benefit the skill that get the extra skill points.
For skills that have conversions within their tree, maybe the devs could come up with a “adaptive affix”? Like %increased X damage, depending on the damage type of the linked skill.
For example “+2 To Detonating Arrow; x% increased poison/cold/lightning/fire damage” depending on how you converted the skill.
So what are your guys’ thoughts? Do you think 4 affix slots per item are enough? Do you would like to see more affix slots and/or affixes in the future?
I think 4 affix slots per item are enough. If there are some balance issues in HC then this should be fixed elsewhere.
The >4 affixes should be unique/set/legendary exclusive.
The new +X to Skill Y changes up everything because you want it on each item possible. Depending on this there should be a “Skill” affix slot to keep at least a bit of the diversity we have right now.
On the other side I need to see how this works out in the end.
Imagine the auction house plus… saying 1.000.000 players peak one fine day.
-> Now every of those players can provide max 5 items on same time on this auction house. (So max 5.000.000 trades on the same time.)
(Just to don’t forget them: Yes, we have some “affix-ranges” on idols, uniques, sets, but most of them are basically the same.)
And we have nearly 300 base items (white ones - many of them are near worthless on endgame) which we can forge with affixes we want (to become blue [1-2 forges] and yellow [3-4 forges]) on max 5 tiers each.
PLUS nearly 300 affixes soon.
I think if someone will do the probability calculation we will see a much bigger item variation if we uses “6 affix items” then 4 , and this means on the end: Iess perfect item inflation on auction house because it is to easy to push them on 4.
-> On such an aucton house (with 4) you can easy buy all you need.
(This basically sounds like the later Diablo 3 auction house or poe.trade. No? Right?)
But maybe we will be surprised by what genius stuff EHG has planned for this subject area.
I have faith on them
We don’t know the details of trading yet, so might be a bit to early ot talk about it.
But i think trading or not. This is a more fundamental system that needs proper balancing and should not neccessarily take economy and trading into account.
While more affix slots theoretically have more combinations, that’s not very realistic.
We already had a similar discussion when talking about active skill slots and possible combinations.
It really depends on the total number of availble affixes + their value/demand.
At the current stage, having more affix slots would lead to less varied items. (At least the ones that are desired and have synergistic affixes)
I don’t want to dig to far into this just based on the teaser as we don’t(or at least I don’t) know what the final product will be, but I will add this…
The fact the “HYBRID” affixes are becoming MORE and MORE common should be an obvious sign 4 affixes on items is not enough…
As much as I’d like to see more affix slots on items, it would be a pretty big offensive & defensive power creep if they did, so they’d need to buff the mobs quite a bit as well.
pretty sure this happened to grim dawn where legendary/sets had way too many stats compared to rare, as a result there was a period of time the green rares were useless and completely ditched.
They only fixed this by making it the other way round - rare items can roll more affixes at lower probability, so you always would farm for that GG rare even if you have sets/uniques. This actually expanded the player’s game time because they always had something to look for.
But +X to any skill is soooooo powerful and the difference between “+2 to meteor” or “+3 to meteor” is MASSIVE.
So giving it some other more generric stats on top of the skill point, makes them a little more exciting without making them brokenly OP.
It’s just another level to balance them a little bit more finely IMO.
Agreed. Tere are more cases i can’t name here, were i would get basically almost every desired stat currently available on ALOT of slots with 3 pref- and sufixes
Agreed we need to see all of them and where all there able to be placed before making any final conclusions, but I mean…
+1/+2 or even higher to any skill is MORE likely to be better than a slapped on stat like +8 int.
The only problem I have with these new affixes being on GEAR instead of IDOLS or a different source is that its going to be considered way more effective or even “mandatory” over other stats. Its a big problem with gear right now is there’s 200+ types of affixes but everyone uses the same 10…
It will make gear hunting more exciting though. Cant wait to see some of those +1 +2 drops.
Can you imagine having +2 on a 4x1 idol & then getting 4 of them? That’d be +8 (I know because I’m an accountant & can do maths, though that did require almost all of my fingers)! It’d be nearly doubling your number of skill points.
I can IMAGINE yes. Or idols could be limited to +1 leaving a +4 the maximum reachable which would be the same as +2 on chest and +2 on helm, but all of this is IMAGINARY, cause we don’t know. Im just saying I don’t like all these competing affixes. its my own opinion.
This is one of my personaly main concerns, MOST builds are best suited with a small couple of affixes.
→ Some main attributes, a couple of “attack affixes” on amulett and many-many defence affixes.
I have a little suggestion on this: What about a third affix section on each item? We have prefixes and suffixes now and we could implement another type, let’s call 'em “support affixes” for now.
→ These support affixes mainly could be for stuff like “Health gained on block”, “Added Mana”, Stun avoidance", “Chance to chill attackers”, “Chance to find potions” and such.
It’s funny because the first thing that came to my mind after reading the affixes news from Sarno was: ‘‘shit, now i want one more prefix and suffix slot on each gear to get all the good stuff i want’’, but as Llama said the power creep would be insane and yes for rogue as an example it will become too easy to max res/dodge. Also Monolith in its current state would be a joke, so you have to overhaul the whole game again with the difficulty. I mean i come from PoE and Grim Dawn where your items are full of affixes and i basically fell in love with LE because of the different itemization approach…Also i want the game to be fully released soon, so every revamp would make the waiting time even longer.
If they do add 2 more slots I would assume they would reduce the power of the affixes and also buff the hp/damage of all the monsters to compensate. Both those things have happened before; so it’s reasonable to assume they wouldn’t mind doing it again.
Maybe it’s me, but i rather want a good (near perfect?) game than a fast release, so we bring some considerations and discuss.
Like said before, it’s true, no one of us has the whole picture EHG has…
…that’s why we try to do our best to overlook the informations we have and sovereign what to do best for the development progress.
Thats true, i’m with you trust me i dont want anything like the wolcen release again to happen It was more related to content like MP, all remaining classes, Trade, last chapter and the other missing points from the roadmap. I think this should take priority now in the beta. Itemization and difficulty balance can always be worked on, it’s not something which is currently broken in LE. And yes a discussing about this topic is always good.
When I first saw the update to the new interesting affix I was excited but it also made me feel uncomfortable because now I have another powerful affix to consider and have to drop other things I once had to get the power grab. For me it just goes back to this “illusion of choice”, for example, with limitations on slots being very tight, the developers might give you like 300 prefixes to choose from but realistically only a handful of them will work and then adding in the layer like the mode you are playing, the class and the build, it narrows down to 1 or 2 maybe 3.
I personally hate the idea as time goes on, if they do keep adding affixes and still decide to stay in this box of only 4 slots, it really doesn’t create as much choice as one would think realistically. I can’t help this feeling the more affixes we get the more it won’t matter because itemization is going to be so freakin’ tight. That makes me feel bad when getting new affixes because I will start looking at it like, oh cool 50 new suffixes but yeah I will maybe only use 1 or 2 possibility because I can’t drop resist/hp.
I personally think this type of system, 4 affix slots is interesting, different and easier to balance but over time it might be too confining.
PS - I might be bias here because I played PoE a lot where they have 6 affix slots, it is hard to say if that has a big influence in how I feel on this topic but worth mentioning. I will say though, I never once felt the “restriction” of choice in PoE when gearing or crafting as I do in LE. Maybe their version of “illusion of choice” is hidden enough where it’s harder to pick up on as an average player.
PSS - I don’t want to look at new affixes being added and have a bad feeling because the limited affixes that once were at the top of my list are now pushed down and became more irrelevant. And the affixes which replaces those affixes are basically dead stats. That is how I see going over time. That is a sucky feeling.
That’s the Problem of the most ARPG’s. A big ammount of stuff that seems nice but is utter useless. Then after some time there is the patch that streamlines everything while some people cry seas of salty tears about useless crap. I think it’s hard to find the right balance but in the end it’s EHG design choice.
It was more related to content like MP, all remaining classes, Trade, last chapter and the other missing points from the roadmap. I think this should take priority now in the beta. Itemization and difficulty balance can always be worked on, it’s not something which is currently broken in LE. And yes a discussing about this topic is always good.