I think we need to wait and see how the balance becomes after factions come in.
First it will be important to know if most people will join the trade or SSF faction. Trading needs many people in it otherwise it won’t work. It’s only because the RNG works better in very large numbers that trade can become a good system. You might never have that drop that you’re looking for within a season but with enough players someone will have that drop and you may buy it from them. If most people join the SSF faction then trading will suffer from that.
Likewise, the balance for the SSF faction will be very important. You’ll need to boost drops enough that you have a reasonable chance to get the most rare items as long as you play long enough. If you play for 10h a day and yet barely ever see 4LPs, then SSF faction becomes useless as well.
Right now, good loot is really hard to get, especially for more casual players. But it’s still EA. Personally I’ll wait for 1.0 and the factions to see how it works out and keep an open mind until then.
I’m afraid it will be even worse. The chances right now are not good enough and for traders could be a nightmare. But who knows…
For CoF I would expect it to be better than what we currently have, so I was very excited about the factions. Once they said they would nerf the actual drop rate It put a damper on my excitement.
If a maxed CoF Faction will have the same drop rate as we have nowadays, I ain’t thrilled about this. The deterministic factor alone in my opinion won’t be able to sustain a good balance of enjoyment with the current system.
I hope I’m wrong;
I think that’s a very safe assumption, personally. I honestly think that RNG loot in ARPGs doesn’t rise past the level of “tolerated” for most people, and if the Trade faction isn’t more popular by miles I would be amazed.
Even with drop rate reductions or whatever, I can’t imagine anything that CoF will offer can compare to being able to directly convert items you don’t want into specific items that you do want, and being able to do so on a many-to-one basis (IE, sell ten items to afford one).
I think one problem with the way you portay it is: You make it look very black and white. Either fail or success, but there are things in between that.
The unique can possibly be not rolled perfect, but there is a difference between perfect and “trash”
Depending on the slot and build there are also possibly mor than one or two good exalted affixes. And even on thsoe there are rolls ranging from lowest to highest.
And then if you have 1, 2 or 3 LP unqieus its on you using that for items that potentially have completely useless affixes or try using them on exalted items that at least have somewhat useable affixes, even in the worst case.
Yes there is a lot of RNG, but you do have a lot of control over how and what you use it.
I personally adore the dynamci between 1 or 2 LP uniques and almsot perfect exalted items.
On one side you don’T want to use those perfect exalted items for 1 or 2 LP unqiues.
On the other side the chance of not hitting something that is useless is negated for the most part.
Obviously it depends on the exact items and build using it, but I still love the dynamic.
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how the costs for trading (MG favour) & benefits for CoF pan out.
I thought I remember the devs saying a max rank CoF-aligned character would get similar drop rates to what we have now with MG having worse drop rates, then CoF get some other benefits (“prophecies” or whatever that skew the drop rates in a particular direction) but what those benefits are & how they’re costed (favour) we don’t know.
Fair point. I should have been a bit more specific in that I was moreso speaking to min\maxing. You are absolutely correct, a bad roll here and there or non optimal cache transfer isn’t going to make most items trash. I meant that you once you have most of the items you need, but want to squeeze out another 10% or even 20% from your build, anything that doesn’t roll just right and then transfer right is essentially a trash bound item because you really needed everything to be just right.
This gives me a more positive bent to thinking 1.0, with all of the things being added, will have some sorts of good adjustments to the current dilemma.
In one kingdom, the king called all the adventurers and told them that there was a huge black mountain on the border of his kingdom. And inside the mountain there is a magnificent diamond. And every adventurer can get it. You just need to dig up to this diamond and it’s yours. And he gave all the adventurers spoons to dig with.
Adventurers have come to the mountain, and wise men are sitting in front of the mountain.
You need to dig faster, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the first sage.
You need to dig more efficiently, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the second sage.
You need to dig in one place, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the third sage.
You need to dig in different places, then your life will be enough for you to get to the diamond - said the fourth sage.
And why with a spoon? - I asked.
Shut up!! - other adventurers shouted to me - Who are you to argue with the sages?
I then returned to the town, took the train and in 15 minutes found myself in a neighboring kingdom. I went to the nearest shop and bought a black mountain diamond for $ 5.
Once you have a few ranks in CoF you will have comparable quantity and quality of items drops as the current game.
Read that again. For that to be true, the current drop rate and quantity are going to be decreased.
Edit 2: I see from the following posts which I missed, that it’s understood already that the drops rates are being nerfed for the trade faction. I’m sad that I’m guilty of a behavior in others that always annoys me. But I’m also chuckling, because when I mused a couple months ago that this was likely to happen, there were multiple folks, including EHG Mike that pointed out there were no plans to do that.
Edit 3: EHG Mike never said there weren’t plans, he said the opposite. I’m full of shit.
That means that if you are going the trading route, your drop rate is permanently decreased from now. A perhaps pessimistic way of looking at that is, if you go trading, you must trade.
Edit 1 (I got the number wrong, this was first Edit): I didn’t make the italics part harsh enough; “you must trade” means you must spend every moment of your play time accumulating enough … let’s just say ‘gold’, so that you can afford to buy the items that you want to make a build. A significant portion of your playtime will be spent buying and selling. Looking for deals, buying low/selling high. Will this game have enough players to support that playstyle? I have to admit, I am pessimistic.
Yeah it was most likely because right now LE offers nothing but the item hunt as content. Monolith is done rather fast. Imagine you get items in a meaningfull time. I don’t talk about D3 levels of drops but then again PoE levels of drops are crap again. IF EHG aims to make the droprate in 1.0 like it is now if you play CoF, CoF will be a bit of a joke for me.
I think it’s a good thing to reduce the droprates and most likely noone will have problems with it at the end of the day. It still will lead to some frustration for sure ^^.
Am I playing a different game? What sense of generous item drops? If they’re talking truckloads of junk drops, then sure. But I think the general complaint is that getting good drops is the problem.
If all CoF does is guarantee the current level of frustration, then what’s the point? “Hey, we sense there’s an issue with item drops and rng. So, what we’ll do is make it worse, but you can grind some faction rep to maintain the current level of frustration… have fun!”
Well that’s a double edged sword. On one side you give to little meaningfull drops and on the other side you give to much meaningfull drops. To me this is a rather easy thing: there is little to none content right now and they need to stretch the time from 0 to hero in as many ways as they can. This is understandable but it isn’t feeling all to good.
As for many other things they most likely will balance this over and over again untill they find a sweetspot. When they think trash droprates are their sweetspot and playing the game feels unrewarding guess what… I play other things untill the game becomes more likeable for me.
I don’t know what is going on in this thread. So many baseless speculation despite more information being available. Why read the info about trade factions if I can just rant and speculate.
