It’s frustrating when you don’t get the affix(es) you want when creating a lendary item. Especially when an item with 3 LPs is used. As a result you lose not only this item with 3 LP, and also a great exalted item.
The most important thing is smoothness. It’s like the importance of a smooth difficulty curve for a game. And it’s same for this Legendary Item creation system.
Here are several ideas to make the experience better:
Make a new item. It is something like a glyph to make a difference in crafting, but it only works for legendary item creation. With this new item, you are able to select affixes to apply to the item with LPs when creating a legendary item. The number of affixes you can select is equal to the number of LPs the unique item has. But this new item should have a very low drop rate and can only be dropped by certain bosses.
A new Legendary Item creation system: Downgrading tiers of affixes. In this system, all 4 affixes will always be applied to the item with LPs. But the tiers of affixes will be downgraded according to the number of LPs an item has.
For example: All 4 affixes applied to an item with 1 LP will be downgraded 4 tiers. All 4 affixes applied to an item with 2 LPs will be downgraded 3 tiers. All 4 affixes applied to an item with 3 LPs will be downgraded 2 tiers. All 4 affixes applied to an item with 4 LPs will not be downgraded.
Note that these rules are just examples w/o precise calculation. I’m here just to show you the idea.
So, if you have an exalted item with T7 affix * 1 and T5 affix * 3 and use it on a unique item with 2 LPs, all 4 affixes wil be applied to this unique item but they become T4 affix * 1 and T2 affix * 3.
I personally prefer this idea because it’s smoother.
Combine idea 2 (“downgrading tiers”) with the current Legendary Item creation system. Players can choose the rules. Players like taking risks can choose the current Legendary Item creation rules, while players who don’t like taking risks can choose the “downgrading tiers” rules.
Update:
Add a new item that can be consumed to remove added affixes of a crafted legendary item to make it become a unique item with LPs again (will not change the number of its LPs). This means you can craft with this unique item with LPs for many times as long as you have this new item.
This will reduce the loss from failure in creating a Legendary Item.
For example, you have a high quality exalted and a 3 LP unique. But the key affix (necessary for your build) is gone after the craft, which means you lose this high quality exalted and a 3 LP unique. But with this new item, you lose only the high quality exalted in this case.
I agree but the rest of your post was a bit to gymnastic for my taste.
We all come from different places and for me personally, the RNG is trying to GET items in the first place. The RNG of moving the right affixes over for creating a legendary item is where everything falls apart for me.
*love the nemesis system giving me more chances but I am back to the same place as the first cycle: I will only put SO many hours into a game without having even ONE moment of success and I still find myself there.
Other people LOVE this level os RNG, which is understandable. Just because I disagree doesn’t mean I don’t respect where they are coming from. For me though, about to quit again because it’s the same as before. I invest in the same monolith over and over and push the corruption etc to try and get the boss to drop what I am after…
A streamer will say “oh it just takes about 6 times to get the boss of Fall of the Outcasts to drop Strand of Souls” and meanwhile… I am on attempt 40.
EVERYTHING I go to do in this game yields me nothing and after X hours, I have to move on for sanity.
In a way, that’s fine. A lot of people like it this way. I am just me. I personally don’t need more gymnastics added. I personally want RNG in some things and LESS RNG in other things. If they want me to stick around, make things more attainable for people who happen to have jobs other than trying to get ONE monolith boss to drop ONE thing. I don’t have months to invest in ONE boss drop. Oddly enough, I am self employed and have more time than most. I still have to waste weeks in getting ONE monolith boss to drop ONE thing. It just becomes not worth it to me pretty quick.
Love many things about the game but these constant dead ends drive me away.
It would be better if there is a Dynamic Drop Rate mechanic, just like the Dynamic Damage Reduction mechanic in this game of old versions. Items never dropped recently from a boss will have an added drop rate (will not exceed a certain number) for a player.
I’ve never seen any ARPGs with mechanic like this in terms of loot system.
RNG is a good thing but it can get things polarized, like, you either get it all or you get nothing.
This is the opposite of “smoothness” (I don’t know the correct word), which is, you can get 30% of a reward by investing some time instead of having 70% chance of getting nothing and 30% of getting it all.
Maybe? Not really sure. All I know is that I have never invested so many hours in ANY other game before without ever getting any rewards so this experience puts this game in it’s own lil genre for me. I continually invest hours for no success and also can’t decide if I LIKE the game because of this or HATE it. All I know for sure is that I disengage with it more quickly than I do other ARPGs because I have to go water plants and generally: LIVE.
Add a new item that can be consumed to remove added affixes of a crafted legendary item to make it become a unique item with LPs again (will not change the number of its LPs). This means you can craft with this unique item with LPs for many times as long as you have this new item.
This will reduce the loss from failure in creating a Legendary Item.
For example, you have a high quality exalted and a 3 LP unique. But the key affix (necessary for your build) is gone after the craft, which means you lose this high quality exalted and a 3 LP unique. But with this new item, you lose only the high quality exalted in this case.
That’s for sure. I’m not saying that all “gambling” mechanics should be gone.
But legendary item creation is a totally different gambling. If you kill a boss but it doesn’t drop the item you want, you don’t feel a big loss because actually you don’t lose anything except time.
But when it comes to legendary item creation, players do lose rare unique with LPs and high quality exalted items. This is an actual loss that players can see and feel, and these items also took a huge amount of time to farm. (The amount of time lost in one crafting might be simliar compared to lots of times of killing bosses. But it just feels different.)
Gambling has its pros and con. We should keep its good and get rid of its bad.
In general I think what the game is lacking as far as something to keep me interested long term are more deterministic/targeted forms of endgame progression. Crafting is great for early gear, but once you get later on, it’s just slot machine pulls all the way down. Waiting to find a good base with good affixes, waiting to find a unique with enough LP, good rolls, and then an exalt with good affixes and then hoping that it even works. etc.
I don’t know exactly what I want, but I just know I want some systems that let me know I’ll get there eventually, or at least once I drop something cool, it’s actually cool and not completely wasted by a second layer of bad RNG. So I’d be down for something like the rare consumable to guarantee legendary affixes or something like that.
