Legendary potential on guaranteed uniques, and why LP chance is arbitrary and not level req based

Fair enough, that’s very reasonable. Thanks again, both for the response as well as a game I quite enjoy - I’ve been pretty impressed with the patches so far and we’re not even out of beta yet!

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LP does have a specific issue which is unusual among loot rolls with incomprehensible probabilities. I think most people manage to intuitively understand and tolerate that eg. getting 7 ideal affixes each with 1 in 100 chance is not an attainable goal. On the other hand when you’re looking at a single “d4” roll where the best result is at 1 in 10^14 odds or w/e it’s kind of hard to grasp or embrace even if it’s sort of the same thing.

I think it would be interesting to separate LP into the affix slots and a Quality % value, where the Quality would be applied as a modifier to numeric values of the Legendary affixes (basically the same as reducing the tier, but presented in a more palatable way).
That gives you some leeway to distribute the unattainability of a god-item into 2 parameters instead of 1, which should at least halve the apparent harshness of the droprates.

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Agreed. Zero LP should not be in the game, except for select cases. Also, it would be nice to have a tooltip on each unique item regarding how much the max LP could be.

Of course but then you have dataminers who will decide against that. you cant hide anything anymore from players. someone will go dig in and release your figures if they can

I would even be surprised if you personally messaged Dammit asking them to please not release all the information they know and only gives us bites

Personally I feel tools such as Path of Building / LE tools and others basically ruin the game. it turns the game into an artificial spreadsheet where nobody even tries anything anymore because ‘the numbers dont look good’

When I read this post yesterday I had a half a mind to stop playing LE for a while and just play Kenshi until next PoE patch because theres no point farming for Legendaries with LP as I wont ever find them according to LE planner

I had plans of relentlessly farming for Last Steps but now I dont even want to attempt to do it once -

it would be something like -

50% to get the boot (actually far less because you want at least 13% roll of Ward. If you went for max rolls this will be 5x longer)

25% chance to get ANY LP at all (prob less)

Then 1/4 chance to get ONE affix of my choice assuming it didnt fail and my boots rolled with 1 LP

So on average I would have about 3% chance to hit a Last Step with any rolls with a single affix of my choice per Monolith run, not including needing to do Dungeon run and also needing the right Exalted boots…

All that to maybe get some MS/Int/Crit Avoidance. This is potentially the same RNG as double corrupting an item in the Temple in PoE where you can corrupt an item 25+ times and never get it

This is exactly what my biggest worry was with the more or less arbitrary system of changing rarity by hand. People were going to spend a long time farming something that was effectively impossible to obtain while having no reason to think this was the case and becoming very frustrated in the process, and OP is exhibit A.

I understand the worry about comprehension, but players also can’t easily comprehend why one unique is much less likely to have legendary potential to another when it isn’t directly tied to any other number in the game. As OP pointed out, Prism Wraps have an effective level of 90 even though they’re only a level 5 unique. Some items can never have LP. Not providing players with any official information on the rarity is not going to make it more comprehensible to them than providing such information, given the already very incomprehensible state that it’s currently in. The rarity system of legendaries just isn’t at the level of transparency and comprehensibility that I’ve grown accustomed to from EHG, and for that reason I think it would be good to reevaluate it.

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I understand that everyone wants to know the specifics of it but I’m a little confused. Have we given out the formula or chances for any other aspect of item stat rolling? Like exalted affixes or even just the relative rarity of each affix on an item. As far as I know, we’ve never given out that sort of information. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this one though.

I think that there are two separate issues here, the quest speciffic items being able to roll legendary potential or not and the relative rarity of legendary potential in the rest of the uniques.

The quest uniques being able to drop LP is something that should have been more clearly communicated. That one falls squarely on me. I’m sorry it wasn’t in the legendary reveal dev blog and isn’t clearly communicated in game. It’s something that we are still discussing if we want to have an alternative acquisition method which can have LP or something like that. The 200 is just instead of having an extra variable that says “can’t have LP”.

It’s a little unfortunate that the exact numbers for relative rarity came out without us having some UI ready to show it in game. I think that a good solution would be to add alt text that says, something like very low, low, average, high, very high relative chance or something like that.

While we haven’t said the exact chance to hit LP, I think we have said why some items have higher LP level than their unique level.

To expand on that a bit, the LP level is generally based on item level. Some have had their chance shifted to account for particularly powerful and well scaling attributes. Items like prism wraps are already end game viable so they have a low chance to get LP. It’s the same reason that high level uniques have low chance to get LP. Most uniques don’t have a problem with this but some effects are just really good at scaling into late game. This was done to avoid having clear runaway 4LP uniques being just obvious BiS items for most builds. The alternative we looked at was just bumping up the level of the unique itself but we thought this would have been even less favorably looked on.

As always we are happy to talk about why we decided on something, other alternatives we discussed, other suggestions you have and things we are considering changing. We are also prepared to make adjustments from feedback. This is a very big system and up until patch day, less than 100 people even knew about it. We very often get great feedback that changes our systems.

I hope that helped shed a little light on it and I’m happy to answer any more questions…other than, “what’s the exact LP formula?” Partially because I don’t have it with me on my phone haha.

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Is there a list of uniques that can absolutely not get any Legendary potential besides the quest rewards? That would help me to not farm certain areas or uniques.

No, the only ones that can’t get LP are the quest rewards.

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Ok thank you. I appreciate that info.

But if “0LP wasn’t in the game” then people would just say that 1 LP sucked and it shouldn’t be in the game. People generally don’t like the lowest rolls/options/etc, but that doesn’t mean that they should be removed.

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But people will also often ascribe malice where none is present when they don’t get what they want or feel what they “deserve”.

The data is in the files, I suspect the formula is in the code. It is possible to determine the formula from the parameters & the output (quantum mechanics says hi), but it’ll take a better mathematician than you or I with a forkton more data. There are reasons why the rest of us normal people aren’t theoretical physicists.

And Orichian’s Petsls @EHG_Mike.

Ive thought about it today and if you are welcoming feedback, going forward I have an idea but it probably wont be well received at first but I think is healthier for the game long term -

Currently the new system lacks some player agency and risk vs reward and very high RNG and character performance does little to affect it

Theres little risk as we know we consume the exalt item and do not lose the legendary. My idea as follows:

  • ALL uniques. Yes ALL drop with guaranteed 1 LP - I dont see an issue with a Gamblers Fallacy with 1 extra affix if thats your end game amulet

  • 25% chance to drop with 2LP up to 40% in 100 zones

  • Items CANNOT drop with 3/4LP ever.

  • To get a 3/4 LP item you must enter the 4th tier dungeon, prior to the Chronomancer fight I would put a shrine to put in your 1-2LP item which is taken and only given back to you IF you beat the Chronomancer

  • For every LP on the item the Chronomancer gets some sort of buff

  • IF you beat the Chronomancer your item is upgraded to 2-3LP and returned to you, you can use the eternity cache if you want from here

  • You can then decide to leave and do the dungeon again this time putting in the same 3LP item and attempting to get to 4LP

  • If you die during the fight your item is gone forever

Pros:
Agency
Risk v Reward
Short term goals
Long term goals

Cons
Feel bad if you lose your item, especially from technical issues
Never being able to hit jackpot RNG

Last night before bed I watched LizardIRL die to that boss, then massively struggle on beating them on another try on a super juiced character which means to get 3/4 LP from this you would already need a super optimised character going for ultra end game goals - and the stepping stone to potentially be able to do that is 2LP incremental upgrades

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This type of discussion leads into my constant worry about new content.

Now, I have also been enjoying the introduction of legendaries into the game, not so much for any particular legendary item but more for the fact that it’s something new to do.

However, my worry has always been when games introduce something that a percentage of the player base will view as being a new “meta” to chase. In most games, some players will be geeks and look at all posts, calculate numbers etc etc (myself included) and some will simply go by what they perceive as being “the best” by what others are talking about. The problem with the new legendaries I think is that a portion of the playerbase has seen them as a potentially wonderful “cheese item” that will solve all ills. I suspect they’re therefore expecting ready access to this wonderful new source of cheese and haven’t read up on chances/stats or even looked at whether or not these bases will need to be a result of long grinding or not.

It’s a tough one, and I do not envy the devs at all on this type of thing. It’s kind of a “damned if we don’t/damned if we do”. I think, and I may be wrong, that the more veteran “geeky” players have already accepted the low odds of getting bases, and instead are more all about grinding some bases just for something different to do. However, I feel that a lot of the posts from newer players here & on reddit reflect that the newer players don’t have this same approach to the legendary introduction.

Maybe some more very public clarification is needed to push home the point that crafting legendaries is POSSIBLE, but it’s by no means a guarantee of anything, and it will be at the end of considerable hours of grinding if a chase for a certain base is involved. Also maybe stating clearly in black & white exactly which uniques CANNOT be found with any legendary potential on them. I don’t know, but maybe it might help stem some of the grumbling?

Anyway, from my personal perspective, I’m just glad to have something slightly different to do, with some new content. It makes me happy, the item is more of a slim possible cherry on top.

Problem with that is, outside of the quest reward uniques, the max LP are technically 4, its just that that is so extremely unlikely that it will never happen even once over the entire lifetime of the game

There is always a meta that some players will feel beholden to chase otherwise they feel bad because they’re “not doing it in the most efficient way possible”. It matters not one jot how balanced things are, there will always be a few builds that are fractionally more effective than the rest & that becomes the meta.

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Although I agree that “bottom is always bottom, regardless of where the bottom is,” an item with 1LP still has a redeeming quality for being useful with a half-decent use-for-craft-only exalted item.

I see the main problem in the combination of the following 1) too many uniques are just too week to earn their spot, and 2) the distribution of LP seems to decrease in the following order: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. Thus, zero appears more common and in most cases means “auto salvage.” Wait, in LE with can’t even salvage bad uniques.

Zero would be an acceptable lower limit IF the average LP were 2; then the tiers 1 and 3,were less common, and tiers 0 and 4 were further less common.

It would be nice if the few items that currently can’t have LP were changed. Just make the quest reward specifically only give 0LP versions. Same for the petals.

Next, make it so the Rune of Ascendance, when creating the unique item, has the same chance for the item to have LP as if it were dropped from a level 100 zone. Enable the Rune of Ascendance to hit any unique in the game.

Since the Rune of Ascendance is quite rare, I don’t think this would break anything.

It does already.

It can create any non-quest reward unique that can drop in the world (with the exception of Orchirian’s Petals, not sure about the boss-specific drops).

I didn’t know it could make uniques with LP. I just put it there just in case.

I know. That was the point I was making. It should be able to drop the quest reward uniques and the petals as well.

What about the uber-rare uniques (eg, Orian’s Eye, Ravenous Void, etc) or ones gated behind corruption? On one hand I wouldn’t want to “shortcut” those restrictions, but on the other hand, it’s not like the Runes of Ascendance are exactly common…

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