After watching Dr3adful’s recent video on the issues with CoF (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjMmY0xARz4) along with my personal experience trying to navigate the legacy stash tab and remove only stash tabs, I think a stash system rework could be warranted.
The current issues are:
CoF is encouraged to pick up good gear (particularly exalted items) for future builds due to not knowing what build(s) will be played in the future. This causes a bloated stash, with hundreds of items that we will probably never use.
Once your stash starts hitting large thresholds (I’ve got ~150 - 200 tabs across legacy, 1.0, and 1.1) you get massive latency spikes. The latency is clearly noticeable when searching items or swapping through your cycle/legacy tabs. This works counter to point 1, actively encouraging players to not pick up the gear that drops. Which ultimately hinders your experience as a CoF player, especially those that play on legacy + cycle and want to try many different builds.
MG essentially already has unlimited stash space. Either in the form of the bazaar storage that they can use to list items, or their own favor/gold that can be used to purchase anyone else’s items. Their items for the sake of this argument are essentially “liquid”. Assets that can be traded in and out at the times of need for the items they want.
For the issues listed above, I’d propose two solutions. The first would likely require an entire rework of the stash system and some back-end query stuff on EHGs side. The second would be less intensive, but would likely have caveats.
Solution 1 (mentioned in Dr3ad’s video):
Create a Minecraft modpack style “computer storage” system.
Essentially instead of opening your stash to a stash page, your stash would work similar to the way your computer stores folders and files. Every item stored could take up space, but everything could be organized/categorized for quick searching among multiple categories (folders). At a high level, you’d select the category for your search (armor types, weapon types, accessories, idol). Then you can select base type and/or unique and/or rarity as a sub search. You’d then see the items in your stash that are returned from your search. No tab priority would be necessary, since everything goes into the same black box, and you just find what you want when it’s required.
Solution 2 (I can’t remember if Dr3ad mentioned this or not):
Create some system that works with the ingame crafting systems that allow us to craft exalted affixes, from previously shattered exalted items. This would be a liquid asset for CoF. If you get a piece of gear, lets say body armor, with a T7 flat mana, then let us shatter the T7 affix, and save it for another piece of body armor. You’ve already gotten the item to drop, it’s just a matter of deciding if you should stash said 6 slot body armor in your stash. Limit this crafting to only single exalted items, so you can only ever craft exalted items with a single T6/T7 affix. double/triple/quad (is quad even possible!?) exalted items are still chase items, and are the only exalted items that start to take up stash space.
Let me know what you guys think. Looking forward to S2!
Honestly, I think all the stash really needs is either some sort of loot filter applied to it, where you can add the same rules as you would on your regular loot filter. Or some regex-like search like PoE1 has.
Performance needs to be fixed, but I’m not sure if having a “bag of holding” would fix it. In terms of performance, there really is no big difference between the current system and the ones you propose. It’s a database bottleneck either way.
I’m sure they’re looking into both issues and hopefully we’ll see something in Season 2.
100% agree stash tabs need fixing. They get to be a mess really quickly. I even tried cleaning out my legacy stash and even after a lot of consolidation it still lags.
As far as changes to CoF, I think there’s a lot they can do to make it feel better for target farming so that you don’t need to hold onto potential build items as much since it’d be easier to go after what you want when you actually play the build. I think some crafting things could make this better, although I’m not so sure about just being able to craft exalted affixes. That kind of defeats the point of what they are. They are meant to make drops important while still allowing for some crafting to shape your items.
I do think there are some problems with the way exalts and bases can make upgrading your gear after a certain point too RNG. But I think there are probably some other solutions. More target farming, culling lower tier bases as you go higher in corruption, maybe something to make removing the non-exalted affixes on gear easier, scaling FP more with corruption, etc. I think for all the options the crafting system has, it’s really rare for me to find an item I can go through all the steps to craft on it. I have tons of the roll range reroll runes because I never have FP left by the time I have the affixes I want on an item.
I think a regular loot filter style search would definitely be helpful. Regex for your power users. I like that.
Target farming base type seems to be the bottleneck for me. Especially as a Sentinel main. I’m looking for those juicy +700 and +550 armor chest and helms. I highlighted some other bottlenecks that I also face with the current crafting system. 35 - 40 FP on some of the exalts that I find when I look through my stash and try to craft is just abysmally low .
The stash search limit is pretty annoying with the current naming system. If I want to search for health/lightning resist idols, I have to search for Vigorous Stout lagonian idol of Sparks which doesn’t fit in the search bar so I have to search for vigorous stout which gets me wayyy too many results.
If I want an ivory ring with void resistance, its awful to check every ivory ring and most rings with another higher tier suffix will not show up if I search for ivory ring of hope.
I agree on all points. I can share my experience with #2 above.
I’ve been prepping for the season in offline mode, once I get 8-10 stash tabs the lag when opening stash, switching tabs, is still noticeable. However, the same situation is MUCH more noticeable when in Online Mode.
I quit the Harbringer/Lizard patch pretty early due to the constant lag when accessing your stash. If this is not fixed in 2.0 I probably won’t play. I’m not sure how something like this isn’t close, if not the top of the priority list.
That was already fixed. Pretty quickly, in fact. You still have some lag, especially if you play for a long time, but nothing like the start of the event. That was fixed in about a week.
When I’m playing for a few hours, with about 60-70 tabs, it will eventually degrade to a point where I’m waiting about ~1s for it to open. Which is not ideal, but far from the seconds it froze the game before (sometimes even crashing).
Yes, I played after the patch that “fixed” the issue, it did reduce the lag but by no means fixed it completely. I do agree that the lag doesn’t start until you’ve played the game for a few hours. However, in my mind the issue is not really “fixed” if I have to restart the executable every several hours to achieve normal functionality.
Ok. You said you left soon after, so I didn’t know if you had tried it after the patch or had given up due to the tabs freezing the game.
Yes, the performance still isn’t great. I expect they’ve looked into it and it’s better in Season 2. I hope, anyway.
Wouldn’t a simple solution be to allow tab deletion??? This would at least allow the player to quickly cull their obsolete tabs. It’s mind-boggling that this doesn’t exist.
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