Aim: Regular gear progression for high level chars above level 80 in the current game.
My experience: It is very very hard/timeconsuming to obtain gear improvements once you reach a higher character level and are trying to progress your build to an end-game ideal capable of running lvl100 maps successfully & pushing high Arenas. Subjectively, in days worth of playtime, I am lucky to find/craft/gamble a single item of gear that improves on what I already have. Important Note: I do NOT already have ideal gear in most slots (average T13, best T18 purple) and still using āsubstituteā uniques etc. to keep the build viable but they are not BiS. I have also been unable to find very rare affixes that arguably are needed for the build.
This is my process:
Run monolith maps over and over collecting coin, shards & if I am lucky a nice purple or rare with decent base affixes and low instability.
Once I have decent amount of coin, gamble for gear with the 1 or 2 appropriate affixes and hope for high tier rolls.
When I run out of coin, I take gambles and drops and attempt to craft the remaining affixes and improve rolls. Round robin affix upgrading done (i.e. I dont push for T5, I upgrade each affix in turn using appropriate glyphs). If the gear is an improvement on what I already have, I tend to stop at instability of 40 or 65% success chance. If its not better but could be, then I go for broke.
Subjectively, this process results in no improved gear after 10-15h of playtime.
Question: Current problems with various parts of the game ASIDE. Is there an optimal 0.7.9f process to maximise gear progression.
I havenāt been playing this game for a while, so things may have changed since.
I have no idea what is a purple. Items used to have up to 4 affixes, 1-2 blue, 3-4 yellow.
My strategy was to rummage through all blue/yellow drops (especially blue!), looking for appropriate bases and affixes, of at least T8, and use them as a starting point. If an item has an affix you donāt want, you may try to remove it using a remove-random-affix rune, might get lucky. I push for T5s on affixes i need the most, usually 2-3 affixes, then add less needed stuff until item is fractured or Iām too afraid to brick it.
To manage instability: I use glyphs of stability first, trying to push my luck, then switch to glyphs of guarding.
I was able to gather T18 items for most slots where I donāt need particular base (usually all armor slots). Jewelry and weapons are usually harder to craft, because you want a particular base for your build, so you get less T8+ bases to work with.
Itās a drop with a higher T6 or T7 level affix and the tier cannot be crafted. You can craft the item more (i.e. other prefixes/suffixes can be crafted).
Other than pushing for T5 on an affix your process seems much the same. I obviously have not been able to get T18 for most slots so you were either particularly lucky or I am just unlucky.
I am looking for rare or very rare affixes on almost all my gear so the deck is stacked against me from the start, thats why I am trying to see if someone has a better way of getting gear.
Just collect a lot of items you want to craft, gold, affix shards and do it at once.
The chance should be the same but if you do a bunch of them at once, you will see ābetterā result. Crafting one by one will end up disappoint you mostly so stay away from that. Itās extra hard for rare affixes, so it may take longer.
Honestly, idk how long is appropriate to acquire a higher tier item? The dev plan to make some kind of a season/ league like in D3 or PoE so at least everything will be calculate for normal people to get a full set of high tier gear in that time frame?
Take my case for example, I want to craft a sentinal chest with poison/ necrotic dmg taken as physical, together with some useful mod preferably attunement or str/ armor. I play this game for about 1 month now, around 4 hours a day. I only have around 6 shards of those affixes each. Pretty sure not enough to have a crafting session. My gear will get better over time thus better clear speed --> more loot, and taken the season/league is normally 3 months, I might end up with around 30 shards? It might be enough to get end game chest at the end of each season?
Maybe those who play longer than me can have a better ideal of how long would it normally take for them to get 1 T20 item. And over the life span of this game, how many T20 items/set have they finish crafting.
That would be logical, but subjectively itās not what I am experiencing in lvl 100 maps so far. I see very little difference in the drop quality from running the other MoF levels with similar boosts.
As this gear progression issue seems to start around character level 80, there are also quite a few levels (iād say around 5-10 char levels or so) before unlocking MoF lvl100 maps that - and I stress again, subjectively - these 80-100 levels donāt seem to give much in the way of useful drops either.
This is all subjective purely based on my grind so far. I plan on putting in a few more hours getting my char up to lvl 100, but at the rate its going, I doubt I am going to have anywhere near T18+ average gear by the time i max level.
EDIT: I do not expect to reach ideal gear before lvl 100. T20 gear grinding should take a very long time and perhaps even be impossible for all but the incredibly dedicated player. What I am referring to here is going from mid tiers T13/T14/T15 and incrementally going up perhaps a tier at a time etc.
Again, this is a single example and depends heavily on how long progression (level, gear and otherwise) the Devs have designed in the game and as mentioned before, it all depends on their long term ātime linesā i.e. what XX% of players do they want to reach lvl100 in a season of X months. what average gear level do they expect people to achieve in a day/week/month of play etcā¦
Its all linkedā¦
My experience is that itās proving to be a little too long to get ANY upgrade / progression gear wise. Char levels etc seem fineā¦ for me its the gear grind that is frustrating.
While it suppose to be true, I find little different in farming a lvl 100 MoF area or a lvl 80 one.
I store items in different general tab for different character, I find the amount of useful real end game is the same for my sentinal which I can farm lvl100 and my lvl 68 spellblade farming ending the storm. The amount of exalted affixes in a highest ilvl item is also the same (which is close to 0 :P)
My take on this: max ilvl is ~70 anyway so lvl 80 or 100 area can both drop max ilvl, the same for max affixes lvl. So farming area lvl where u comfortably kill stuff fast.
I have been doing some informal (scrap of paper type) recording of drops comparing farming lvl 80 monolith vs lvl 100 and also looking at drop quality.
So far, after about 200 rare & purple drops from each MoF level, I am fairly confident that I (personally) am seeing:
Very little drop difference between lvl80 & lvl100. quantity or rarity.
Rarity % Boosts make MUCH more of a difference than area level.
Tend to find more uniques in lvl100 but no difference in purple/rare drops
Averaging 2 rare T14 per run at 40-50% rarity boost, occassionally a T15/T16 on boosts higher that 100% rarity
No difference in finding appropriate char related gear affixes or affix shards on either lvl80 or lvl100
I am damn unlucky and the RNGods hate me.
EDIT: Murphys Law in play - since posting this about 2h ago, I have found 4 shards of Mana on Vengence - all from gambling chest armour. Thats 100h+ playing sentinel and the first time getting this affix on anything. Granted you cannot get it before area level 56 so lets say less 30h or so, but still thats the epitamy of a grind in my opinion.
Glad to see someone of that level is having similar experiencesā¦ There is no way in hell I could run MoF with those modifiers up to 900% rarity boostā¦ Thats a flex left to demi-god players.
Logically Iād say that the formulae involved are working as designed/implemented - but grief, the results are tough if getting 900% boost still only drops what he is showingā¦
Iām fully convince the % chance show in any case is false.
Letās talk some of my personal example
90% craft chance end up failing more than it should
10-20% of quest line appear faster than it should. In 100% of any MoF play-through, the 1st and 2nd quest will appear 1-2 echoes after it meet the minimum requirement to appear which is under 20%.
So there is something wrong with the % showing vs the actual % the engine calculated.
Pareidolia is a thing, our brains have evolved over millions of years to patterns (like whether thereās a thing with sharp spikey teeth hiding in the bushes over there) even when there arenāt any. That skill has lead us to develop complex theories that give us insight into deeper layers of reality (quantum mechanics, relativity, etc), but it also leads us to see shapes in clouds & to the ferverent belief that the Earth is flat & the sun and moon are small and close.
If you are seeing patterns that look non-random, youāre probably too deep in the detail & not looking at a large enough sample (akin to looking at a small patch of the planet & deciding that the Earth is flat, zoom out to see more of it & itās an oblate spheroid).
Lets not morph this into another crafting threadā¦ I am talking gear progression here
My gut feeling is that I am in agreement with this ā¦ however, I am not sure if the way its working perfectly is the ideal solution and maybe there are some changes that would make it work ādifferentlyā and let us humans think / feel that it was betterā¦
uhmm. Interesting.
So according to the dev, playing this game just for a few weeks will not result in seeing thing normally?
A few hundred of MoF questline and seeing thing anomaly is normal?
We should play until a million of something to see it normal out?
Well, do you thing itās too large of a sample for a normal human being to play to see? Maybe they should change the formula so itās still normal in a normal player playtime? 1million of something is quite too big and too hard to swallow
No, your perception of it is that itās not normal because you remember the failures a lot more than the successes. Youāre not going to remember each time you succeded at a 90% craft, but you certainly will remember each time you failed at a 90% craft.
Then itās not the case in my experience with MoF questline.
100% the quest will appear in 1-2 echoes after it can appear which is ~under 20% for a quest to appear. This is not collective.
Well, the monolith quests arenāt crafting, which was what I was talking about.
In my experience it only ever appears that quickly if youāre doing the lower level monoliths, since not only do they have lower thresholds for when they can start appearing but they ramp up their % much faster than the higher level monoliths. Youāre right, Iāve had a quest echo for Fall of the Outcasts, Stolen Lance & Black Sun often appear in a few monoliths, but rarely has Dragonās Reign or Ruin of the Empire appeared similarly quickly.
It feels like 2 monoliths in Fall of the Outcasts gets you ~10-30% chance for it to appear, while in Dragonās Reign itāll be ~4-8%.
Iām sure @EHG_Mike could have a poke at the data & tell us roughly how much % chance we get per timeline in Dragonās Reign compared to Fall of the Outcasts.
