My feedback

General
21

Everything you write makes sense. I’m just not entirely sure that adding affix slots will solve the “dullness” the exact way you described.

In a game where you don’t have deterministic crafting, having more affix slots serves the purpose that you are more likely to find a valuable item. You are happy if you find an item with 4 good stats and just accept that 2 trash stats on the item. Because you can’t do nothing about it.

Would you accept these trash stats in LE, too? Or would the goal be to have 6 fitting affixes?

I think it would be the latter. Just because you already have 2 good suffixes would not make a trash suffix ok. You would accept it for the leveling phase and along the road. But for endgame gear you would aim for 6 perfect fitting affixes.

The “filler” affixes don’t get valuable just because now you have more slots. These more slots will be filled with more of the valuable affixes. Imagine 2h weapons with 3x flat t5 melee damage.

Resistance will stay no.1 choice on suffix slots. You will cap res with less items or you go for 2x res and 1x endurance affix on every item possible.

In the end the choices might not be more diverse. It just adds player power, that has to be balanced.

And longevity also may end in tedious gearing. It would take a lot longer for people to get t30 gear, as you said. For some it is longevity. For others it’s just the carrot on the stick that is always visible but not in reach. This can end in complaints that t30 gear is hard/impossible to get. Everybody will want to have 6 perfect affixes, but only the lucky ones and the hardcore layers will be able to get it.

This is my fear when changing the system. I’m not against more diverse gearing options. But I think it not just adding slots.

22

I know u have a lot more expwrience for sure than me playing LE, but i do not think best items should be obtainable by everyone, and i do not think all people should be able to craft this easy endgame gear and it ahouldnt be possibe for everyone to craft it. The brilianc of this crafting system conpared to some games koff Poe is that is so symple it is actually easy to use by anyone even compleate noob that never has played Arpg before and anyone can start crafting without tutorials but it doesnt mean anyone should create in such
short amount of time engame gear and as i mentioned not all of players should be able to do it, but in same time they could potentialy do it i hope i said it right, if there would be 6 affix items it would certainly need to rebalance mob power and maybe value of affixes and how difficult is to get certain affixes together. But i underatand your point that u wouldnt feel satisfied with 4 good and 2 filler affixes, but personaly to me that is the trill of this kind of games

23

For me t20 gear with 4 well fitting affixes is hard enough to create to be a rewarding task, but not too hard to make me frustrated.

Maybe players with more hours per day than me feel that it is too easy.

Yeah I get this and I don’t disagree.

Also like I wrote, I’m not against more diversity. I see the benefits of having more slots. I just have some concerns that this would not work out the exact way everybody expects.

Did EHG ever state if they consider this kind of change?

24

I really dont know if they have mentioned it before on dev streams although i watched every single one it just didn stayed in my memorie, i would also like to know if someone has some info. And as u said i as well hope they do this in a right way this item should not be even nearly as mirror tier rare to obtain it… Sorry for poe referencei do not have any other maybe i can even give LE refernece lol not nearly rare as double t7 affix on single item

25

Oh yes, you would still have the ‘goal’ of getting perfect affixes, it’s just much less likely now that a drop will fit your criteria. BUT if you get two of those 3 as perfect, and 1 is pretty good, that might carry you a long ways. Right now, we can get our perfect suffixes handled very early if we want to. But accepting less than ideal affixes for a longer period of time is really only a secondary benefit. The main benefit is we can actually gear for more than one defense type. With two affixes, if your preferred affix is HP, then you’ll fill your affixes with resistances and HP. With 3 affixes, you’ll have a lot more room for a ‘secondary’ defense, which isn’t the case right now at all. So even if that goal state you have in mind is reached, I say we’re still far better off than right now.

Well, since you can’t possibly get 3x flat t5 melee since all affixes are exclusive, we don’t run into this problem even now. We do, however, have 2 HP affixes, and 2 affixes of most defense types. A third affix means you can still pick up both of your best affixes, and think about what a good secondary defense would be to add to your build. With 2 affixes, there’s really only one optimal choice, which means additional defense types are ignored.

Resistances don’t push HP (or whatever your favorite defense is) even now. Especially with resistance blessings getting buffed this patch and more implicits having strong resistance choices, you can easily gear for resistance capping and HP. What you can’t do is gear for another defense. This is where the system becomes boring. In your scenario, now we’re adding endurance to our gear, which is already way more interesting, since we go from gearing ‘resistances and HP’ to ‘resistances and HP and endurance’. But endurance could also be replaced by dodge, or armour, or whatever defense best fits the build and we’re looking way better than we are now.

It would 100% be more diverse. By the system’s own restrictions right now, we only have at most 2 affixes for any particular defense (i.e. added health and increased health) that could go on a single piece of gear. In a 3 suffix system, as soon as the two HP suffixes are on your gear you need to select a different defense to fill the third slot. You’re going to choose one of the other options, which already makes gearing more interesting, since you have more to gear for than just HP and resistances.

No matter what the solution is, this is a problem that needs to be resolved in a way that ends with your concern being realized, at least to some extent. Leagues/Cycles have to give players who want to spend a ton of hours building a character and pushing content reasons to do so. So even if affixes aren’t increased, there needs to be other long term chase mechanics that solve the current problem LE has, which is that our reasons to play a character long term are very limited.

I do want to mention that I am open to alternative ways of solving these problems. I’m pro more affixes because personally I haven’t seen a better solution offered yet. That being said, EHG has surprised me in the past with solutions for problems that I hadn’t considered, and that worked very well. If they find a solution like that, I’ll be happy. I don’t need 6 affixes, what I need is for the problems to be solved, one way or another.

2 Likes
26

This is possible right now. You can get flat melee physical and flat melee void on an item (for example) If theres no such restriction (as right now there isnt), you can run into this problem.

Maybe restrictions as you mention can solve that. But then opening up affix slots for more diversity, but then restricting them to certain types again, is working against each other.

I’m really curious if the devs have some sort o enchantments on their “maybe sometime” list.

27

But you can’t get x3, which is what McFluffin said in the part of his magnum post-us that you quoted.

28

I would never understand ARPG players on a certain point, I adore this type of game, I like the race with the equipment, but its has limits, and especially for me it is not its who makes the content of a game. Listened to some, we give you a game without history without anything, just equipment with 45 affixes each, or give you random maps in a system like the monolyte and that’s it for you it’s a good game … I mean I like having to search for ideal equipment and not have it right away in a very easy way. But this research is not for me a reason to play a game. What you are doing is artificially creating content. For me as long as my only goal in the game is to improve equipment for … Nothing just to search, well I quit. So no good games don’t just boil down to equipment with 1,000,000 affixes and stupidly hard to get stuff, it doesn’t make me want to play let alone stay.

29

Of course :slight_smile:

30

I am a player who likes a little bit of RNG but good dose, possibility of having a change yes, but I like the probability more, or a game where the RNG is mastered. I don’t like games where it’s all about luck or almost, spending 100 hours of play hoping for a moment of luck is a bad game for me. On the contrary a game where you know that after 100 hours of play you will have what you came for, but if you were lucky you will have had it before, its a good game, which masters its RNG.

This little introduction goes a little bit back to the topic of discussions, having 4 or 6 affixes on an object doesn’t bother me, while everything is not RNG, after the dev to find a solution so that it is not just anything. . Whether it is by limiting the number of affixes part place, or simply pushing the limit for crafting, that the items break less quickly, that the difficulty remains the same as today, which I find is quite balanced at this point . If you are a lucky damn you can drop an item with the 4 affixes you want full T5. But if you have no luck you can craft it against a little time to gather all the ingredients (for several try)

So that we keep this balance with 6 affixes that suits me. But it must not be like today with 6 affixes otherwise it will become anything, it is just the one who will have the most luck.

31

The 3x is an example of what could happen with 3 prefix slots. Because I assumed that they would be equally distributed over pre-- and suffix slots.

Now: 2 prefix slots - 2x melee
Possible Future: 3 prefix slots - 3x melee

Edit:
@McFluffin said “Affixes are exclusive, this isn’t a problem even now”. So even now the same affix is exclusive on an item. Different damage types not.

It sounded a bit like “this isn’t possible right now, why would it be later?” Did I get something wrong?

The skills scaling doesn’t care about the damage type. If a skill scales with melee damage, it scales with all types.

32

something i saw @FoE suggest was a flex affix, it could be a prefix or a suffix. i see 2 ways of doing this:

  • stick with 4 affixes, 1 prefix, 1 suffix and 2 flex affixes. keeps the same number but open the possibility of more decision to make.

OR

  • go to 5 affixes with 1 flex affix and stay with 2 prefix/suffix.

Personally i really like the former but i do see a lot of power being added to weapons.

1 Like
33

I like this idea, but the thing is I think it would make all ranger chars to OP since u would always
go for a prefix choice, same goes for necro summoner (u would always go for buff to your minions) and for a melee chars it would be maybe more balanced. Maybe to make 2 flexes that are gonna be limited only on a certain number of affixes u can use for example the ones that u will rarely slam on your gear couse they are very weak compared to others but still if u have they could be useful? And maybe just maybe leave an option if u slam certain flexes u can still slam them under sufix and prefix?

34

so instead of un-restricting the all affix there would be a few flex affixes. I like that idea too, it just feel like a less “elegant” solution because you will run into questions why can x affix be both prefix/suffix but not y.

Just to be clear i dont think my idea is better or worse, it is( or feels) just less arbitrary.

I don’t think that is a forgone conclusion. I know there are plenty of people who would give up some prefixes for more defensive suffixes like hp+dodge+res.

35

Maybe couse its a new affix type, but i understand your point, but now situation is that a lot of affixes u will never gonna use since a lot of tham have a superior version of them self like for example i will rarely use flat helath, i will always go for hybrid health if algorithm lets me. Would be very nice in my opinion to solve somehow that problem, actually with current system for me is like poe tree it has on first look endless possibilities but u will always go 90 percent in same way depends of class u are building that is.
Maybe any ideas of better solution?

Yeah maybe i just like glass cannons to much lol

36

I slightly misunderstood your point on this and thought you meant added melee damage of the same damage type. Yeah, you would be able to get 3 added melee damage affixes on a weapon. This is also currently the only stat in the game where that’s the case. All others, to my knowledge, are limited to two. And even that being said, each added melee being a different damage type means they really aren’t all that similar. To that, you said:

That’s only partially true. It’s true in any case where you’re getting ‘increased melee damage’, but it’s not true in any case where you’re getting ‘increased x damage’ where x is the damage type that corresponds with the added melee damage. Many skills also have nodes that affect certain damage types, so scaling multiple damage types really limits a lot of builds. The only builds I can see 100% wanting to put 3x added melee damage in pretty much all cases would be the ones where all added damage is converted to the same damage type and the skill has relatively high damage effectiveness (i.e. Detonating Arrow).

So even in this very specific and highly unusual (compared to every other affix) scenario, I think 3 affixes is still opening up a lot more options.

37

Yeah… We’re getting into details here. And there may also be solutions to these kind of issues.

And just to be perfectly clear:
I’m not arguing against 6 affix slots. I’m just trying to think about everything that comes with it would it be implemented - as many people already pointed out the positive aspects, I just wanted to show that there might be some downsides that has to be dealt with. 6 affix slots in PoE work differently that it would in the LE environment. It’s not just copy and paste, imho.

It’s not just “add 2 affix slots and PROFIT”. It would need a lot of work to become decently balanced.

I’m really curious about the EHG stance on this topic. We should bring it to the next dev stream :grin: (if it wasn’t already… and I missed it)

2 Likes
38

It has been asked at least a couple of times thus far – maybe more, but I haven’t bothered to transcribe the latest dev streams. There’s just so many of them now. :sweat_smile:

4 Likes
39

Hey, thank you, Andrew! :ok_hand::+1:

1 Like
40

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