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.
2 Likes
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
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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…
1 Like
Dunno. I would assume drop chance would have a similar rarity as the item does in the game, so Orions would still be extremely rare. On top of that, RoA doesn’t target beyond item slot, so you are probably going to get a junk unique.
I don’t know about the items gated behind corruption. I assume the RoA lets players get uniques from zone levels higher than that player might be at. Corruption is just another way of extending the “zone level” without actually being zone level.
Sorry, I consider the petals a quest drop.
1 Like
So let me clarify where the problem is, for me at least. It’s not a problem of knowing the exact numbers (although that would solve the problem to a large extent if they were presented in game). The problem is how legendary drops don’t follow the predefined path of how rarity currently works in the game. Everything else follows this path. A white item is common, a blue slightly less common, yellow even less common. An exalted is less common than a rare, while a two fix exalted is more rare, and a tier 6 is less rare than a tier 7. We don’t need to know the exact drop rate of each of these in order to intuit the general rarity of each. Because of this, it would be irrational for a player to be frustrated that the game won’t give them a tier 28 with their preferred affixes because the game has made it clear to them that this is an extremely unlikely item to find.
Now you could say “well uniques don’t necessarily follow the rarity system so closely. Some uniques are more rare than others, and the game doesn’t tell you exactly which ones are the most rare”. This is true, but it’s also something that has been built up in these kinds of games as an expected reality of items that fall under this rarity. Some uniques being more common than others is something that most players go into an ARPG with an understanding of. This is also when players start using third party tools to figure out the rarity of the items they want so that they don’t become frustrated with a grind that is much longer than they anticipated.
Now with the legendary system, the logic is flipped on its head. A player trying to intuit the legendary system will likely come to one of three conclusions:
- All uniques are just as likely to gain LP
- More rare uniques will be less likely to gain LP
- Higher level uniques will be less likely to gain LP
Now I think the third will be the one that fewest players intuit to, because it also follows the current uniques the least closely. Not all high level uniques are rare, and therefore why would they be less likely to get LP? All uniques having the same LP makes sense because rare uniques are already defacto harder to get as legendaries. Rare uniques being less likely to get LP is a double rarity penalty, but at least it’s easy to logic out that it could be the case.
But none of those are how the system actually works. The third is the closest, but it’s not right either. Anyone believing that will believe they could target farm Petals, Gambler’s Fallacy, Avarice, Prism Wraps, Mourningfrost, Humming Bee, Reach of the Grave, Arboreal Circuit, etc. with relative ease, yet all of these are higher rarity items. (I know three of these are mechanical exceptions, but given that the whole post was about one of them, I would be remiss to omit them)
Where it really breaks down, to me, is when players begin to intuit correctly (which is likely already after they have been wrong about the system at least once), and determine that it must be based on relative power of the item. The reason this breaks down, is because in order for this to be an accurate way of predicting rarity, it requires the player to know what the devs think are powerful items, and vice versa. And the reality is, not every item a dev thinks is powerful is, and not every item a dev thinks is not powerful is not. For example, Grimoire of Necrotic Elixirs is, and has been for a long time, used in competitive arena pushing. It is a very powerful item with the lowest rarity tier. This is why I say the system is more or less arbitrary, and why expecting players to figure out a system that does not follow conventional or pre established rarity paths while also having behind the scenes number changes that can go against the perceptions of the player base is a new problem for transparency and comprehensibility that we’ve never had before.
I don’t believe at least the dev blog part of this falls on you at all. This information needs to be in the game, not in the dev blog. In 6 months it won’t matter if this was or wasn’t in the dev blog because people won’t read it. The uniques themselves need to clearly state that they cannot gain LP, so the second part here is the important part.
This would probably solve the problem right here. There are other issues IMO with hand choosing LP rarity, but a solution like this would at least make it clear to the player how likely they are to find a particular unique with LP potential, which would give them the information they need to choose whether or not to target that item.
3 Likes
I agree with all of this pretty much. I think the other factor that plays into this to some extent, is that if you don’t look at the official discord regularly, or read through forum posts, you have significantly less information on changes/new mechanics/additions to the game.
Case in point, the person who started this thread trying to farm lp on quest uniques 50 times. (This situation probably happening was also brought up in the feedback channel…)
And while it’s not at a really bad point yet, it does seem like this patch has kind of made it apparent that the information in the game, and the information we’re expected to know, are not the same. And alongside that, the information people would need to be able to make correct decisions about what they do for things like legendaries or crafting, isn’t in game, and doesnt seem to be intended to be known either.
For example, saying it’s unfortunate that the exact numbers came out without having ui ready. At least one person I know was planning to target farm wings until they got 3lp+, it has the same lp rarity as ravenous void. That’s extremely something the player needs to know, so they don’t end up wasting their time.
Obviously the game hasn’t got to a bad point in regards to information yet, but this patch has definitely highlighted that it could be close to falling down that rabbit hole (where you have to have a wiki etc… open to play the game)
3 Likes
This is sorta my issue with the system so far. When originally teased it was like “low level uniques are more likely to have LP!” Except for all the ones you care about enough to actually use, and we are not gonna tell you that!
It feels somewhat lame that there has to be exceptions built into LE at this point like that. For the quest items I can understand not wanting players to mass create and delete trying to get them. But why does humming bee and reach of the grave get crappy LP? meaningwhile the new sword which gives +1/+2 to TWO skills, is common, and gives tons of other bonuses get full potential for LP when imo its way stronger then humming bee.
So now people are gonna go grind for days get 5 humming bees, none of them are gonna have more then 1 LP if any at all and they are gonna be like “what gives”
3 Likes
Honestly, I don’t know that LP needs to be as rare as it currently is. I still haven’t made a Legendary because the 4 uniques I have found that have LP, I don’t have an Exalted item to go with them. If people are trying to target farm 1 or 2 specific affixes on a Legendary, they are going to have to find a lot of the unique with 1 or 2 LP, then have that many Exalteds of the item type crafted up with the affixes they are trying to target.
I really like how Legendaries are done in concept. I just don’t see it getting done as much more than throwing 2 random things together just to say you did it currently.
Yea, it’s my fault it’s not in game too 
I’m mocking some stuff up this morning and I’ll get some feedback from the team on it and go from there.
I appreciate the feedback on this from all of you. I think we can get the in-game information to a point where the relevant information is communicated well.
5 Likes
This is part of the value of just “running the dungeon”, you are supposed to be rewarded with items that will work in the cache. My understanding is there is currently a bug in that the unique doesn’t drop though. And of course you have no idea what combo will be presented and if it will be worth it, but you should at least be able to engage the system this way.