Enchanted Realmers!
Over the last couple weeks since the Team Letter we have seen many people both excited and concerned about the things we announced. Now, it’s time to show off the first big feature on Testing, Equipment Rarity! We are looking for all kinds of feedback on the new systems and have included an enormous amount of details to read about in this post. We will be trying our best to address any concerns or ideas you have. So strap in because this is a long one.
Quick Start
Log in to the Testing Server and check out the Shop. You’ll want to pick up the items in the box “Equipment Rarity Tools”, and then grab some Quest Chests which will be sent to your Gift Chest.
If you’re in a hurry and need to get items fast for testing, you can optionally use the Crucible which will give you a large loot boost. If you prefer natural loot, you can simply dive into the Realm and start playing.
Each of the test artifacts can be used in the Enchanter to target a specific kind of enchantment:
- Tier 4 Test Artifact: T4 enchantments are the best of the generic enchantments.
- Unique Test Artifact: Unique enchantments are stronger than generics and somewhat more interesting too.
- Awakened Test Artifact: Awakened enchants are among the most powerful enchantments, but can only appear on specific UT items…
For this test session, there are new Awakened enchants available for the following UT items:
- Corsair Ring
- Crystal Bone Ring
- Spider’s Eye Ring
- Snake Eye Ring
- Bramble Bow
- Poison Fang Dagger
- Staff of the Crystal Serpent
- Doom Bow
- Demon Blade
If you’re still reading, the rest of this post is dedicated to a full systemwide explanation of the Equipment Rarity Update.
Equipment Rarity
The headlining feature of this update is called Equipment Rarity, adding new rarity tiers to all equipment in the game. These tiers each reflect a number of Enchantment slots an item can have, with uncommon items having 1 slot up to Divine items having 4. These slots will always roll with enchantments in them using a new revamped enchanting system we will talk about later.
Items that are enchanted will obtain a colored glow associated with their tier and replace the UT/ST/Tiered icon in the bottom right with a new icon showing the amount of slots an item had. This icon can also be seen in bag previews when mousing over bags or holding cntrl.
Any item that drops has the following chances for slots, 50% for uncommon, 37.5% rare, 25% Legendary, then 12.5% Divine. Items roll for slots when they drop in a cumulative manner, this means an item has to pass the uncommon roll before it rolls to upgrade to rare, then pass rare to roll to legendary and so forth. Seasonal characters have a 1.1x multiplier on these odds. While this does equate to Divine items being very rare we will not be using them as a point to balance around and they instead will act as high end goals for long term players, or just as super lucky drops for any player. We expect most players to be running 2-3 slot tiered items and 1-2 slot UT items when they’ve settled into a final build. There will also be different ways to “skip” tiers in the future with some loot sources starting a drop at uncommon and thus increasing all the other odds by not having to roll uncommon first. Shiny items for example always drop at rare or higher.
Additionally as we have mentioned in the producers letter the base drop rate of all UT items has been increased across the game, roughly doubling or more many drop rates. This allows base versions of items to be even more common for players and also influences how often you will be seeing these enchanted items.
Enchantments
Accompanying the new expansion of the available enchantments slots is a system overhaul for the enchantments themselves. The main goal of which is to add many more enchantments including extra rare unique enchantments as well as rebalance the general power of enchantments. This comes in the form of a few new features which are explained below.
Enchantment Weight
All enchantments now have a weight value associated with them, this effectively sets their likelihood of being rolled by comparing the weight to the weight of every other enchantment. This allows us to control the rarity of enchantments unlike the old system where everything was equally likely.
Categories and Labels
Now that players can potentially obtain up to 4 enchantments it is important that we can control which enchantments can roll together. This is done by having specific labels on enchantments that are incompatible with other labels, usually labels of the same type. This means if you roll a Weapon Damage mod you cannot Get a Weapon fire rate mod on the same item in the other slots.
Most of these Labels can be considered Categories of enchantments in which you are only allowed one of an enchantment in each category. Some of the categories are: SIngle Stat, Dual Stat, Weapon Damage, Weapon Range, Ability Modifier, Reward Mods, and Regeneration.
A full list of currently implemented enchantments and their details, weights, and labels. Can be viewed here.
Bonus Relative Stats
Replacing the old Relative stat enchantments is a new type called Bonus Relative Stats, this works similarly to the old relative stats but instead only considers your bonus stats and not your classes base stats. This is because we found those older enchantments were often just flat out better than flat stats and also relied too heavily on what your base class was and not what you were building. This new enchantment type should be used as a tool to accentuate stats you are already focusing on instead of granting free stats for no build cost.
New Enchantment types
We have a selection of new enchantment types available that hopefully will offer more options and decision making when rolling your items.
Dual Stat Modifiers: Have two smaller flat stat bonuses rather than one bonus
Tradeoff Stat Modifiers: Lowers one stat slightly in order to give a single stat a larger bonus
Bonus Relative Modifiers: A stat mod that increases your stat by a percentage of the amount of that stat you already have on your gear.
Stat Conversion Modifiers: A bonus relative stat mod that gives you one stat based off the total bonus of another stat
Stat Mod Multiplier: Only on abilities with stat mod implemented, multiplies the stat total of the scaling stat of your item, for example if you have 100 wisdom and a 20% stat mod multiplier the item will scale as if you had 120 wisdom. This will be added to more abilities as they gain full stat mod support.
Damage Resistance: Found only on armors, gives a small amount of the newly implemented damage resistance.
Mana and Life Regeneration: A new enchantment that can give you regeneration directly without giving you the associated vit or wisdom, this allows for much higher regen values.
XP/Loot/Dust drop modifiers: Modifiers that can increase your various rewards earned.
And many new proc modifiers.
Decimal Value Stat Modifiers
You may have noticed in some of the images so far things like +2.1 Wisdom or +2.6 Speed. This is new tech for enchantments and effectively works as a granular balancing tool. Player stats are still whole numbers but we wanted to be able to more precisely control the balancing on some of the stat enchantments.
Decimal Stats always round up, this means if you have 2.9 or 2.1 of a stat that will still be a total of +3 to the stat, but this allows us to put a little extra power in individual modifiers without it being as high when we have that modifier on all 4 of a players pieces of equipment. This is mostly experimental and might not have that big of a balance impact in the end but we are hoping this lets us at least temper off stats a small amount when a player is making a “perfect” Build without making certain enchantments too low impact.
Unique Enchantments
Unique enchantments are more powerful enchantments that are much rarer than normal. These enchantments can range from simply having a stronger stat boost than normal to entirely unique effects or combinations. You can only have one Unique Enchantment per item so roll them wisely.
Awakened Enchantments
Awakened enchantments refers to any enchantment that is specific to an item or items. Using old engravings as an example Buzzing Bullets would be an awakened enchantment under the new system. Awakened enchantments do even more unique things than unique mods as they can be built and balanced around specific items having them. These can roll like normal enchantments but will only be available on those specific items. We are planning to really build out the selection of Awakened enchantments over time but we are starting with mostly earlier game UTs. You can also have only one Awakened enchantment but are able to have them in combination with a Unique enchantment.
Artifacts
Artifacts are a new Item type that are replacing the old engraving system. These items can be selected when rerolling in the enchanter and will alter the reroll with various effects. They can increase or decrease the weights of various mods, exclude mods entirely from being rollable, or add new mods into the pool for unique mods like the aspirant items. These items let you try to roll for specific mods instead of just rolling the entire pool at once and hoping you get one specific mod. Artifacts do add a bit of dust to the cost of rerolling though so there is some cost to using them.
These will drop all across the game with varying levels of strength and effects. Initially we will be including a set of artifacts that bring back the old Tarot cards with each card representing a specific stat type (and the fool doing something a little different) which will drop effectively everywhere in the game. These artifacts are meant to be used often so they are stackable and have a chance to not be used when consumed. We will also have a few more at release and intend to roll out more of these over time.
Enchanter
The enchanter screen has undergone a few changes to make the enchanting experience better. When opening your enchanter you will still see all of the items you can enchant on the left, but the right side now shows a more compact view of the enchantment list and contains a few new features.
Each enchantment on an item has a Box next to it, this can be clicked to lock that slot, meaning it will not be rerolled in the next enchantment operation. This incurs a multiplier on the overall cost of the reroll.
There is a new dropdown where you can pick an artifact to use for your roll, and finally there is a cost breakdown for the enchantment so you can see what is contributing to the overall cost.
Items now only use one color of dust based on the tier of the game they belong to, items dropped in adept or below will use green dust, veteran content will use red, and expert content and some of the rarer items like Realm Whites will use Purple. Artifacts have their own costs defined so you could have an enchanting operation that uses both purple and green dust but not red. Additionally the dust cost for items no longer increases when you roll, you are free to reroll your item for as long as you have dust to reroll with.
Forge
The forge has also received some changes and improvements to tie in with Equipment Rarity. First the UI has been vastly improved with plenty of options for filtering what equipment you are looking to forge. This should make it way easier to find what you are looking for when forging which is needed as the amount of items in the forge increases.
Newly forged items roll for enchantments just like dropped items do, so its a good idea to recycle your unwanted items into new items to try for better enchantment slots. Additionally if you craft an item with all of the items ingredients being of the same rarity the resulting item will be guaranteed to be that rarity or higher. This can help in your pursuit of high slot variants of specific items.
Items cost generally less forge fire to craft and you should get a little more Forgefire per day so you can use the forge without being as time limited.
Tiered items from tier 7 and up will also now be able to be made in the forge, these have no material values and instead need 4 of any item of the same slot and tier. A t9 Sword will require any 4 t9 weapons to be crafted. This was introduced so you not only can offset bad rng with tiered items into the endgame but also lets you use the forge for rerolling rarities just like you can with UTs.
These changes do come with a nerf to the forge however. In order to prevent players from just recycling the same item into itself repeatedly to try and get better slots all items in the forge starting from adept and higher now require two items from their dungeon (or from similar content if it isn’t a dungeon) to craft like endgame items did before. Marks have been removed from the costs of item forging as this is redundant with this new requirement. This means you need to do the content where the item you want to forge actually drops, and is a way for us to hold forge back a little as items themselves are also becoming much more common from drop rate buffs.
Things missing from PT
We are aware of a few things missing from this PT and are intending to add them in for a later PT and actual release but we wanted to get this system out to you guys to get your feedback as early as possible. The things that are missing and known issues are as follows:
- Locked enchantments and Artifacts selections don’t stay after rerolling so you must reselect them.
- Forge does not show the rarity of selected items unless you mouse over them
- New collection icons for the new forge requirements are not yet in
- Stacks for artifacts are fully consumed currently, they should only consume one item in the stack
- Even more unique and awakened enchantments.