Reducing Loot Clutter - LESS is sometimes MORE

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I propose concentrating select rewards in the game to make them more significant and exciting for the player without necessarily reducing their availability overall. I have 2 suggestions:

Gold piles
I would like to see the sources of gold drops being drastically reduced and having that gold being concentrated into specific sources. In the case of gold, because it drops so frequently from low health mobs and destructible objects, it will commonly distract the player and interrupt the game flow. Experienced players know to ignore these drops, newer players don’t. Instead, what if gold piles only dropped from elite enemies, chests and equivalent challenges. You can bump up the gold amounts as compensation to the extent you think is necessary. In any case, please remove all drops from destructibles, it adds nothing to the game

Affix shards
Affix shard rewards can get absurd with the quantities that drop from certain sources. Currently, abundant affix drops are necessary for the player to have access to the shards they need to craft with. But, there is a way to drastically reduce the number of shard drops while simultaneously making them feel more rewarding/significant to the player without impacting the ability for players to engage with crafting

I propose a change from crafting requiring affix-specific shards to crafting requiring category-specific shards instead e.g. crafting a void resistance affix onto gear would require a ‘Resistance Shard’ rather than a ‘Void Resistance Shard’.
The affix categories are mostly already identified with the loot filter setup although you may want to rethink some of these.

This change would allow you to drastically lower the droprate of affix shards and help make them feel more significant and also make it much easier to identify when your needed shard has dropped from a mob/chest/shrine. It also would help shorten most of the shard item labels so that players can more quickly parse the items on screen. It would also help guide new players toward the loot filter since there is a clear link between the affix shards they see as rewards and the affixes they want on their items

Q: How should uncommon affixes be dealt with?
A: Uncommon affixes could have a higher affix shard cost to add to an item ie adding Elemental Resistance to an item could costs 3 Resistance shards rather than just 1. You could alternatively create a new rare material and add that material as a second cost that must be expended when adding an uncommon affix

Q: How should Class/Skill shards be treated?
A: Class/Skill shards could be divided into base + mastery categories ie Mage/Spellblade/Sorceror/Runemaster. The Base class affixes could drop at a lower level to help players in the campaign while introducing the mastery shards at a higher level once the player is a high enough level to unlock them

Q: What about Rune of Shattering?
A: I personally would remove this from the early game entirely and convert it to a late game reward. The Rune of Shattering should be a way to gamble on receiving a valuable shard from an unwanted item. The Rune of Removal should give no shard refunds at all and simply be a way to open a prefix/suffix for lategame crafting shenanigans

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

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2

yeah there is way too much garbage loot. One monster or pack cannot realistically drop 429 items. Where are they keeping all this crap? They are not roaming gypsy hoarders. They are not pulling wagons of crap behind them. Bite the bullet and redo the loot algo.

3

If you’re going that route, why do beast/non-humanoids drop anything at all? Why do void-corrupted humans drop weapons?

4

I would go as far to say that in CoF, you should collect bounty rewards AT Cof HQ.

5

I mostly agree, though that would require a revamp/change to how loot drops are handled as it’s a public zone. If they just did that & all the loot dropped on the floor as it currently does then technically anyone in that zone when it happened could have it gifted to them.

Personally I’d like to have it dealt with similar to how PoE handles boat/mapping loot in Kingsmarch, you can redeem it when you want though you’d also be able to collect it in the field as well if you want.

6

You have a setting to not see gold piles smaller than X, that should fix the issue. Once you have a million gold, you can start ignoring gold piles smaller than 1k or 10k or however much you want.
I think you still pick up the gold if you move close, even without label as well, but I’m not sure on this one (I know this happens with the new D2R filter, never actually used it on LE).

This seems fine to increase already existing tiers, but how would you handle adding a new affix for void resist? A new UI popup asking which one you want? That seems cumbersome.

I would rather they implement the solution Mike talked about 2 years ago (or more) where they would make it so that mobs drop affixes less often but when they do they would drop more. This would make it so that you’d only get a few affix-splosions and you could pick them all up in a single click (even better if they just implement autoloot for them). It would prevent having to click lots of small groups that are too far apart to be vacuumed.

That, coupled with another solution Mike talked about (being able to bulk exchange shards at a loss, like 100 int shards for 5 hybrid health ones), should reduce affix clutter tremendously, both on screen and in the materials list.

Alternately, you could simply reduce shards into common/uncommon/rare. When you add/increase tiers you still see the same UI (you get to see the whole affix list, not just the ones you currently have shards for) and it just spends the corresponding shard. Basically the same as the current system, it just consumes different (and vastly less) types of shards.
(this system actually solves the first question I posed above, but I’m too lazy to go up there and edit it :laughing:).

This, however, would require quite a big change in the code and I don’t think it’s likely to happen.

Honestly, I don’t think RoS makes much sense. Initially you hoard it because you only have a few and 2k gold is a lot. But very very soon you get to a point where you have lots of all the common affixes and you’re only shattering the rare/class affixes, which leads you to having more RoS than you spend (especially if you use removals for extra shards).
I would actually change this so that you can always shatter everything. Maybe for a small gold quantity like 200 gold, but, honestly, that is so irrelevant (like the 2k gold are irrelevant very fast) that they might as well just make it free.

Where are you keeping all your idols and all the weapons/armor you’re carrying in your inventory?

I know this was just poking fun, but if we’re going realistic then our inventory should only be a 4x4 square, at most. :laughing:

Yes, this would be a good thing, already suggested several times. Even better than that would be to have the prophecies in the list become green or whatever and when you click on them you get the actual drops.

Everything’s being revamped though, so who knows if this will even be relevant next season?

They would need to be in your party, though. I don’t think they would be elligible to get the items if they were just there and you added them to the party afterwards.

7

You handle it the same way it is currently handled. You put in an item with a empty suffix slot, you click the + symbol on the empty suffix, it should automatically take you to the suffix page with the list of suffixes you can add, same as usual. That page shows if you have the shard you need and if you had a “Resistance Shard”, all the resistance affixes would be available to select. Upgrading an affix would work the same.

Maybe I’ve confused you as to what I am describing? I’m suggesting only that the existing cost associated with adding/upgrading affixes is replaced with a “category” type affix instead of that specific affix. The point of this being to reduce the amount of shards that they need to drop which makes the event of dropping a shard feel more special (because it is more rare) and making it easier to know when you have dropped the shard you might need (since you don’t get piles of 30 shards dropping at once when absolutely noone is bothering to read all the shards before collecting them).

8

Yeah, I did “fix” that issue a bit further down when I went a step further and reduced shards to just common/uncommon/rare. As I said, I was just feeling too lazy to go back and edit it. :stuck_out_tongue:

9

Ok, I see now. I think reducing things that far would be too much. I think keeping affixes in categories works a little better since there is still some variety in the type of shard reward and simply because they are already thinking of affixes in terms of category, at least when it comes to the item filter.

For example’s sake, the filter currently has the following categories:

  • Attribute
  • Melee
  • Spell
  • Throwing
  • Bow
  • Damage Type
  • General
  • Health
  • Block
  • Resistance
  • Armor
  • Potion
  • Dodge
  • Health Recovery
  • Ward
  • Stun
  • Critical Strike Avoidance
  • Leech
  • Parry
  • Movement
  • Cooldown
  • Reflect
  • Mana
  • Minion
  • Ailments

Plus there are currently 5 class categories Acolyte/Mage/Primalist/Sentinel/Rogue. Those 5 categories each have between 54-74 separate affixes. I propose that each class has 4 class category shards (to match the base class + 3 masteries) and those 54-74 affixes get divided into one of the 4 categories.

I think with this adjustment, they could probably cut affix drops down to 20% of current levels and people would still have an abundance of shards to craft with. They would be helping alot with item clutter though

10

Neither suggestion (yours or mine) is particularly likely to be implemented. They would both require massive rework of the current code, for little reward.

The solution Mike proposed 2 years ago is much less work and would result in the same end result. Namely less shard drops but in higher quantity (so you don’t end up with a bunch of 1-2 shard drops that are all outside of each other’s range. Being all together means a single click (or, even better, autoloot) would immediately gobble all up) and being able to convert shards at a loss (like 100 int for 10 hybrid health or 5 warpath shards).

This would mean you see less shards scattered across the screen and it means you also have a use for shards when you already have 1k of them but only 1-2 of the class specific one you’re looking for, since those are often the bottleneck when crafting.

11

I don’t agree it’s that much work but I like the thought of something in late game that acts as a sink for excess shards. Even if they made the change I am talking about and cut the shard drop rate to 10% of what it currently is, I think people could quickly end up with an excess. I haven’t played that much for S4 (4 1/2 characters through the campaign and all the way through the monolith) and I have 11K shards.

Thanks for your thoughts.

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12

Circle of Fortune could definitely do with less items. You should have higher chances to find glyphs, affixes or runes rather than generic random drops. Prophecies should be the way to target farm items, not as much praying to RNG.

What I like the most about this suggestion is that you wouldn’t need to use removal of runes or basically get lucky with the skills you want as much if it’s non exalted.

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