I guess the biggest issues with the gear rework is there is no longer an upgrade path for gear and RNG is relied on too heavily. I’m sure there has been many discussions on 3.1 and 3.2 already and you’ve probably already thought of this but anyway.
Without thinking about this too deeply I have taken the theory behind the spell rework and added it to the gear rework. Because with the spell rework you get multiple copies of the spells to upgrade your spell I keep thinking about doing that with the gear as well. Not that we need to do more farming, but anyway…
For lower rarity gear you can add several of them together to get the next rarity gear. Given that you to get a lot of low rarity gear you would have to add many of them together to get to the next rarity. This would give the bonus of all the gear in chests being more valuable than just Either. This option is possibly difficult to handle attributes and joining honed/non-honed gear but there are options.
Once you get to mythic I was thinking you could join two mythic pieces together (of the same colour) using a follower and the quality of the higher piece would be increased by maybe… 5% of the lower quality piece. This would give a slow but steady progression to better quality gear and stop the disappointment of getting a mythic piece you want only to find it is a worse quality that what you already have. Wishlist: It would also be great you could choose which attributes to keep from which gear too.
(N.B This method could be applied to lower rarity gear too (with a different % increase) instead of the earlier option and once it goes above a certain quality it changes rarity to the next rarity. This also gives the option of evolving multiple times to rare to try for the colour gear you want or epic for a specific attribute)
Personally I don’t like much the idea of going back to needing duplicates to evolve items (which was let behind a long ago due to making things too difficult for players). It is better than not being able to evolve items, sure, but again it requires too much farming. I would prefer a system in which you can use an universal resource, for example aether. That way you can work towards your goal by getting any kind of gear, and not only by farming specific dungeons. I think that the follower rework could be a great opportunity to answer our concerns by applying some new crafting options.
My wish list for new crafting options would be:
Crafting specific gear, being able to select rarity, set and slot.
Reforging only specific attribute slots (so that you can decide which attributes to keep and which to roll).
Reforging gear quality, so that you get a random quality for a given gear piece while keeping rarity, element and attributes.
Getting those options through other means than crafting, such as described above would also be nice. But we really need some further options so that RNG is not the only way to progress our gear. That way farming chest would stop feeling so much like a chore you must do if you want to keep progressing but without a real guarantee of getting what you want, and more like a way to quicker progression with the added thrill of the lucky drops.
When the Gear rework was first mentioned way back when and no specific details were given, I actually thought it was going to be based on the idea that Gear would be upgraded by using dupe copies of each item as you suggest.
I never knew this. Must’ve been pre-Playstation release days?
One of the stated goals of 3.0 was to simplify gear improvement.
TBH, I’m not sure why they thought it was a problem. You leveled up gear with gold & shards, and paid few more resources to cross the benchmarks. All they’ve done now is to move the gold/shard cost into scrolls and turn those benchmarks into ‘honing’. And now you have 2 things to keep track of - the individual gear and the associated scroll. … Doesn’t seem simplified to me. But … shrug
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Anyway, joining pieces of gear (2 rares morph into one epic?) seems to me like it would further complicate matters.
A solution needs to fit into the post-3.0 structure seemlessly, and with minimal complications.
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Thankfully, I think that’s easy:
By spending aether, a fully honed item of one quality level can be upgraded to the next. … E.g. a fully honed epic gets converted into (and with the corresponding improvement of stats and addition of an attribute) an unhoned legendary.
This would be done either as a final honing level at each quality tier (most straight-forward), or as an ability followers have.
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Not only would this be a seemless incorporation, I’m guessing it would also be low-coding-cost. The code that used to make this transition (e.g. epic → legendary) should - I imagine - be easy to repurpose.
Also, it would give a meaningful use for aether.
Right now - unless I’m missing something - all it’s good for is for followers to make you a random (and thus probably useless) item of a certain tier. … That’s just another version of the gacha slot machine. Another opportunity for frustration and negative feedback the vast majority of the time.
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So that’s what I see as the simplest and most straight-forward way to restore the ability to evolve gear, which ability never should have been removed in the first place!
When the game started item duplicates were needed to upgrade them. 0.35 update Patch on May 2021 changed that and introduced relics. The reason was:
First all relics were set dependent (like current mythic relics) but that was also considered to be too tough on players so it changed into rare, epic and legendary relics being universal and only mythic relics remaining set dependent. And now we go back to “needing duplicates” for spells (spell pages) and for gear even worse since we no longer can evolve it. The changes are clearly designed to promote grinding and therefore spending money to shorten the times. The problem is that by making the game more grindy it is also becoming less casual friendly and more boring for those that aren’t either paying or hardcore farmers.
What if we had some kind of blueprint system that you could either buy with a tbd resource like aether or work your way through via mythic salvaging, like say salvage a Royal Chest 3x then you can craft them, there are so many options available when it comes to crafting I hope the devs will do good things and take inspiration from good games like Grim Dawn, PoE and Last Epoch but not Diablo and all the turds coming from Korea and their +XX lvls of upgrades with abysmal chances of success and risk of breaking your comps or gear.