Suggestions for upcoming patch

I dislike the idea of localised drops. Lets assume we only have 4 ubers for simplicity, which do not have any farm benefit other than sets/uniques:

K3K only drops sets
TA drops Sets and SU
Fauzt drops Sets, SU & SSU
Duncraig drops Sets, SU, SSU, SSSU

There are many non desirable outcomes of this scenario.

1) If you are an experienced player who wants to efficiently farm sacred uniques you just roll the build that is most efficient for the highest tier uber. It doesn't matter if this is duncraig or fauzt or anything else. There is always some build that excels in clearing a level with cheap equipment. So what happens is you know that if you farm anything else just to break the repetitiveness or for fun you will not be getting the best items, so you feel like you are wasting your time by not sticking to the same area - it just leads to more boredom.

2) New players get locked out of the trading economy. Currently if you are not that good you can still farm destruction bosses, do Nihlatak runs or maybe spam Tran Athulua with your Trap rat. Even though these are not the most efficient farming locations you still get enjoyment from the activity because you know that at any moment you can get something godly. Otherwise you feel like your time spent doing this repetitive activity is not fun and stop playing.

3) You remove the excitement of seeing a sacred unique drop. Right now you can go outside in the destruction Blood Moor, kill a flit and get a leather gloves sacred unique. The chance is low, but it might even be demonic touch! If drops were localised and you know that these gloves are only geglash's dusters - you will not care about the sacred unique drop. Sacred uniques are the top tier items for a reason - getting a unique version to drop should always be exciting. The moment we allow the average player to not get excited about a sacred unique is the moment a lot of people will stop playing the game. (why do you think D3 tanked on release? Yes it was not the simplified gameplay or the difficulty - it was because 99.9% uniques were vendor trash)

Agreed, getting Segnitia in den of evil is the best feeling ever.

how about different uber for different ingredient that can be used to craft endgame item?
Kinda like act3 sewer and skull economy.

I dunno how to explain this but let me try explain some of d3 stuff

1. Bounty give ingredient and some earlier / mid game recipes
2. Keywarden have chance to give which you need to farm (only problem in d2 is that boss stat is same, need scaling here)
3. Rift have uber-ingredient and chance for keystone (Im thinking if only wirt leg is not free, and if only cow is more interesting / harder places)
4. Greater rift have gems where you grind for level - hmm, probably specific pick-1 specific charm that can be cube upgraded and limited tiered ingredient (add probability like shrine blessing which can fail)

So basically you just need to make some hard to find item as ingredient for end-game item.
I think elemental rune was in correct direction, except it is not as a way to slowly progressing a end game character.

*As SP player i still hate act3 sewer drop rate though, duping them is so tempting if I can find it one the first place.

suchbalance wrote:I dislike the idea of localised drops. Lets assume we only have 4 ubers for simplicity, which do not have any farm benefit other than sets/uniques:

I'm not suggesting localizing gear like that.
Let me elaborate on my suggestion.

(All numbers are arbitrary)
We start with current MXL numbers. Then we double the damage that monsters in TA do, triple the damage for Fauzt, and quadruple for Duncraig. Let's ignore the other ubers for now.
Next we add a new stat "Global Damage Divisor%". This is a new stat that any item can spawn with, and all damage your character takes is reduced by (1 + GDD/100). So if you have 50 from your body armor and 50 from gloves, you'll take half damage from all monsters.
Finally we distribute this stat among all the items such that:

K3kBA has 65% chance of dropping gear that has GDD of 0-5, 30% of GDD from 5-15, 4% of GDD from 15-30 and 1% of GDD from 30-50.
TA has 30%, 60%, 8% and 2% respectively
Fauzt has 20%, 30%, 40% and 10% respectively
Duncraig has 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% respectively

So you still have the chance to get something godly to drop in K3kBA, it just would be more efficient to raise your GDD to at least 200 and start doing TA.

Come to think of it, it might make sense to add another stat "Enemy Global Damage Divisor -X%" and also similarly raise the GDD of the monsters in those areas. Assuming that's possible. Then they'd be tankier and do more damage.

suchbalance wrote:1) If you are an experienced player who wants to efficiently farm sacred uniques you just roll the build that is most efficient for the highest tier uber. It doesn't matter if this is duncraig or fauzt or anything else. There is always some build that excels in clearing a level with cheap equipment. So what happens is you know that if you farm anything else just to break the repetitiveness or for fun you will not be getting the best items, so you feel like you are wasting your time by not sticking to the same area - it just leads to more boredom.

Well first of all there are multiple areas that you could group together under each tier. MedianXL has enough ubers for it to not get boring. This complaint would be valid in any other game, but not MXL.
Secondly it doesn't matter whether you're an experienced player or not, if you would implement the system I'm suggesting it wouldn't even be possible for your character to survive in the best areas until you've managed to farm a high enough divisor in lower areas. Taking 400% more damage is massive, there's nothing like it in MXL right now. Especially if the monsters also have 400% more hitpoints at the same time.

suchbalance wrote:2) New players get locked out of the trading economy. Currently if you are not that good you can still farm destruction bosses, do Nihlatak runs or maybe spam Tran Athulua with your Trap rat. Even though these are not the most efficient farming locations you still get enjoyment from the activity because you know that at any moment you can get something godly. Otherwise you feel like your time spent doing this repetitive activity is not fun and stop playing.

New players could still do all that in what I'm suggesting.

suchbalance wrote:3) You remove the excitement of seeing a sacred unique drop. Right now you can go outside in the destruction Blood Moor, kill a flit and get a leather gloves sacred unique.

Yeah, that should still be possible.

Even if we assume your idea is implementable, it is not very good.

- You require every single character in the game to get this new defensive stat on their equipment. Bad design. For example right now in mxl defence is a very important stat but glass cannons like assassins and bowzons/javazons etc can thrive without it. No other stat in the game is necessary in every area. (yes even something as ubiquitous as resistances is not needed in TA for example)

- Every single existing runeword/unique/set etc. item has to be reworked to include your stat - huge workload.

- No skills have this stat and yet it is of paramount importance. Do you just add it to every passive skill on every build? Won't that make all these skills bland? Maybe just to some or maybe to none? Don't you think this stat makes the gear you have equipped WAY more important to your character performance than the player's skill level? I don't think that's a good thing.

- You are punishing experienced players by adding unnecessary tediousness based checks. Why am I being forced to do K3K 50 times and then TA 50 times just so I can run fauzt? Is what people will be asking. If you know what to do and how to best achieve it you will progress faster through the game than someone who does not. Your stat runs counter intuitive to good play. It doesn't matter how long you have been playing, or how well you planned your character, or what your APM is - if you don't have 55 Archon points no Fauzt for you!

- Limits. Say I need 50 Archon points to have Fauzt monsters be scaled as they are now aka the minimum for it to be doable. Let's say I'm a newbie and I farmed gear from lower ubers or traded for items that give me 100 Archon points - now I can faceroll fauzt without any defence/dr/block or sustain. As a newbie what have I learned about the actual interesting median xl stats? Nothing. Why does this happen? Because your stat reduces ALL damage - the effect is super powerful. And while in theory you could always say "the numbers can be balanced right to prevent this" in practice they cannot.

- Not to mention that the concept is extremely long winded and will be hard to explain to newer players.

@drops idea:

it's still very early to discuss something like this. Also current drops are a result of several years of tweaks and rebalance. I think it's much better to do safe changes and address small problems to get the desired result instead of doing a massive rework from one day to the other. Some of what aerial says I agree with and I had this in my mind. Personally what I would do is give ilvls a bigger relevance. Right now, median highest level is 120, and everyone is 120. So ilvl is a nice feature that isn't doing much in the game.

In the future, with the expansion from levels to 150 - this not only affects players but also monsters. So the concept of ilvl can be re-introduced since ubermonsters/areas will have more varied levels. This can allow for some nice tweaks, such as separating the three layers of uniques a bit.

The major problem however with drops right now are runewords/crafts. That's one of the main things to address before unique items / drops can be reworked nicely. If not, the wave of complaints will be strong, and hate to admit it, but they would be somewhat justified (can't really farm dfautz for shrines with tiered uniques, can we?). Right now, only a very small group of individuals can succeed without uniques and that is because they're highly experienced. Once the game is intuitive enough so that the progression of tiered uniques into end game gear can be done naturally, then sure, let's make great uniques rarer and what not.

@morphs idea:

I mostly agree with you here. "Unless this is the only way to create a skill that alters character breakpoints", yes, this is ultimately what morphs are all about, and there isn't another way to achieve it.

Ideally, there could be a togglable configuration on whether you want to see these or not.

Personally, I think superbeast is the most iconic morph in median and probably the coolest thing you get to see as a new median player. It buys you right away. But other morphs are indeed somewhat ugly (tiefling, deathlord, treewarden, trap rat). I think deathlord can be removed without major drawbacks (necro attack anim could be fastened without major consequences). Tiefling isn't so easy (making assassin have caster animation can be bad, some wdm skills use it, like atmg). Treewarden should be replaced with bear, which is a pretty legit morph (like wolf). As for trap rat, that's a tricky one.

@archon:

damage divisor is already implemented. I don't see what's the point of using it in your idea though. If you want to make monsters do more damage (2x, 3x) in the uber order you mention, this is already possible.

Either way, the goal of DD stat is to effectively expand monster's health, not much more than that. Considering 1 million health is currently the highest safe damage for a monster, the new safe cap should be around 1 billion. Technically, this could be pushed further, to say, 10 billion, but this would nullify missiles with less damage than 10k - for example, skills like flamestrike at the very endgame, do between 1k and 5k damage per frame, so these would do nothing. The nice part of damage divisor nullifying aspect is that it punishes multihitting, which is what currently makes bosses so short-lasting atm (as well as %CB; but CB will be reworked as it's completely broken in median atm).

An additional use of damage divisor will be in boss event fights. But we haven't really shown this concept to the community yet, so it'll have to wait. Either way, my point here is that DD is intended to be used for this and nothing more, else things could become really messy.

Yeah this reduction stat really was implemented to expand monster's life without rewriting the old engine from scratch. Basically, if you have a monster with 1,000,000 life, and give it 100 damage division, it effectively simulates 100,000,000 life.

archon256 wrote:(All numbers are arbitrary)
We start with current MXL numbers. Then we double the damage that monsters in TA do, triple the damage for Fauzt, and quadruple for Duncraig. Let's ignore the other ubers for now.
Next we add a new stat "Global Damage Divisor%". This is a new stat that any item can spawn with, and all damage your character takes is reduced by (1 + GDD/100). So if you have 50 from your body armor and 50 from gloves, you'll take half damage from all monsters.

Perfect, just pick ranged one or make a suicide char and farm duncraig. Other ubers become useless. Also summons will die instantly without that bonus.

I noticed one funny thing

The name "damage divisor" but it was implemented "to effectively expand monster's health"

Just a joke.

But seriously, about morphs. Currently I'm working on Elder Scrolls 3d models conversions and so far I can tell that creatures have many different modes - Cast on self, cast on target, cast on touch, several types of attack (for every arm, like 2 for left and 2 for right). If my little project ends successfully, the issue with bad morph animation might be fixed.

Personaly I like morphs, even in current state. I don't want to see my boring chartacter model, playing every build. The unique gear has the same display as rare/magic/crafted, so there is no point to remove morphs. Owerall the gameplay in MXL is so cool, I don't think that we need to remove something. Exactly the oposite: I think it would be better to add some new fetures instead.