Exalted Forged: Raising the Gear Ceiling and Adding to Arena

[Scrubstar]

Exalted Forge: Found deep in the Arena, the Exalted Forge is a limited-use station that allows a player special crafting opportunities. Instead of using your own shards, glyphs and runes, the Exalted Forge is stocked with a small number of special items that are randomly selected.

Special, powerful, but limited and hidden behind the grind of the Arena, these would be valuable crafting opportunities to motivate players into the Arena beyond Experience Grinding and Ladder Competition.

Crafts could include:

Upgrade a Mod to Exalted / Upgrade Existing Exalted Mod

Rerolling a base Item

Rerolling values on an Idol

Rune that has a small chance of rolling Unique (Limited to Gamble-able?)

Perhaps Arena-Only Affix Shards, or selection of rare/class-only Shards.

Whatever you leave on the Exalted Forge is gone when you leave. Perhaps you are not only limited by the choices, but the forge runs out of power after a certain number of uses.

The Exalted Forge could be similar to a Quest Echo in Monoliths, where you need a minimum number of Arena floors to see your first, but then your odds are just improving for the next one as you keep going higher. Maybe guaranteed every 80-100 floors, adding additional use to that Golden Key.

Still leaves Monolith as the main way to farm Bases and get initial items, but now Arena has a unique niche it can offer that supplements that loot instead of directly competing.

[McFluffin]

I like the concept of this idea, but not for arena. For me, I want arena to have an exclusive place in the game: competition. I think it should be for those who want to test their build and see how far it can go, and then compare it to other players, and I don’t think it should offer any exclusive rewards or be more efficient at any kind of farming than the rest of the endgame. Right now that probably seems unfair, since there are only two endgame systems, so that leaves Monolith as the only source of rewards, but I’m also projecting the game to have 3 more endgame systems at 1.0 (as laid out in the development forecast), and I’m expecting the Mono system to become deeper over time.

With that being said, I think your idea would be really cool as an additional layer for the Mono system or another as of yet developed endgame system!

[Scrubstar]

That’s fair, but I can’t quite imagine those additional endgame systems yet. If this idea fits better with one of those addition endgame modes down the line, I won’t be crying because it wasn’t specifically Arena.