This is a hybrid General/Feedback post, Im mostly curious on how people think they will change/rework/modify set items to make them more viable. Im planning on doing a “Last Bear” set werebear and will have to use exalteds until a set item rework comes around, but I am excited to see what they do with sets and how it will impact that build idea.
I believe it was confirmed that within the next 2 updates they will do a complete change to Set items. Let me know what you think they will do with them, and also let me know if they have already confirmed it (lol) and if so, what they are planning on doing.
yeah I believe it was said Set items will be within the next 2 updates, but I really hope it is the first update!! And yeah they also as far as im aware made no comments as to how sets were changing/improving.
Excited for the new Lich skill, do we know anything about it yet? Sorry im not good at keeping track off all the dev stuff lol.
I’m not sure. The boring answer is just making them more powerful so they’re actually worth using/building around. A slightly less boring one is to let them get legendary potential so they can interact with that system and be upgradeable parts of your build like everything else. If they were going to make them more powerful, they do have to tread a fine line between making you want to consider and build around them in some cases, but not so much that they are just always the right pick and take up multiple gear slots so you have less choices. At the very least there’s only so bad that can get because all the sets are only 2-3 items total.
Beyond that, I’m kind of just happy to wait and see what they do about it. For all the problems the game has, the devs have just been really good at coming up with interesting solutions to problems.
I think giving them LP “fixes” them, but not really, now they are just uniques not sets. lots of set pieces are actually good stand alone gear pieces, by giving them LP, we would see plenty of “Green” uniques. seems silly imo.
Alternatively they can try and make the sets smaller/more powerful. This is slippery and hard to control. but does a better job of keeping the themes of sets but has the chance to make “meteor build” always lightning cause the set is just that strong.
I think a good thing to maybe consider is keeping the sets 2-3, but allowing you to turn one of your gear slots into a “Set” piece. So for example, for the lightning meteor set, its 2 piece, a hat, and a staff. imagine if you could activate the set with the hat, and an exalted staff that you have turned into a “Set” item it otherwise is a normal exalted, but it goes through a special process to be tied to that set. it could cost an affix slot, or perhaps be a dungeon reward, or something along those lines. And you could only have one of these types of items equipped at once. so if you wanted to turn on another set, you would need to use that full set.
This allows more gearing choices, while still making the player have some confines on gear and rewarding building around the set and those slots.
Well they have ruled out stuff we have gotten in the past.
Basically their motto really is “never say never”
Which is good, but I agree with them on sets.
The point of sets is the gear constraint, that you need to give up some gear slots to get a powerful effect. The issue always comes down to the pieces themselves being weak.
Which is what my idea aims to solve. Chronicon has a similar mechanic where you can basically make another item count as a set piece for the set, so you dont have to use all the pieces.
I am really curious what out of the box changes are coming to sets. EHG always manages to create some interesting twists on common problems (even if sometimes they aren’t completely balanced or work fully as intended).
But I have to say that sets are notoriously hard to do. And that is because you have to balance them extremely well. Otherwise you get a D2/D3 situation:
-In D2 sets are too weak and mostly useless and ignored, barring some fringe cases. Even in those fringe cases, almost always there’s a similar build that is stronger without them. (On the other hand, they made runewords so strong that those became mandatory).
-In D3 sets are too strong and are mandatory. There isn’t a single build that doesn’t use them, until they introduced the gem that counts uniques instead (or something like that? Been a while since I last played it). Even then, you basically still had no versatility. You could use one of 4 sets or you could use the non-set build, which used the same uniques always.
So balancing sets in a way that they’re competitive with uniques without being just uniques themselves is very tricky. They have to maintain the flavour of being a set piece which creates some massive change when you use the full set, but you can’t make them so strong that you are forced to use them always.
I’ve suggested in the past that my preferred way to deal with this is to make sets become build enablers. That is, they create a new build that can’t be achieved without the set but in a way that makes them totally useless for any other build.
Something like, for example, changing fireball into “magic missile” that deals a new type of “magic” damage. This would make the set fun to use for a completely new build which didn’t exist before while making it absolutely useless for any other build.
Or, for example, a set that changes your form into an avatar/angel/demon/whatever. You get a new set of 5 skills, with their own skill tree. Since the set is geared towards these new skills, it’s useless for any other build.
This would also have the added bonus of being new-player friendly, since it would be less daunting to create a build around a set, since the theme is already limited, than it is otherwise.
In the end, though, I’m sure EHG has come up with something fun and I can’t wait to try it out.
Mike said on stream that Lich was getting some love and would get a new skill. He has since said that those Lich changes won’t make it in time for Season 2, so we’ll only get them in Season 3.
Rogue definitely needs them. They’re the ones further behind in this matter.
Shaman, Paladin and Lich are all missing one skill, but Rogues are missing 1 general skill, 1 general passive tree skill, 1 for Bladedancer and another for Marksman.
And then mage has 1 extra general skill, so it could also be argued that the other 4 classes are also missing one more.
So I hope Rogue is getting more than 1 new skill in Season 2 because they have a lot to catch up.
? I’m reading this as; they don’t want sockets because that’s too close to what crafting is already. Yes?
If that’s true I find it kind of funny, because LP is like sockets on PCP + Steroids. HAHA, socket a gem?! How about socket a whole other item!!! HAHA!!!
I just love game developer logic.
Edit: I admit I have no good ideas for set items, only PTSD from D3 set items, which I do not want any game dev to ever go back to. Which is a shame because D3, apart from the sets constraining build diversity became a pretty good game.
