Game Mechanics Item Tester Team

Yeah, elitists are rare but are something I think a tester team should be aware of. Most people will have a good experience with good support from others.

For an example of an item the average player can't use, the obvious examples are things like alka or archangel, and I was going to find something different, but then I realized that most builders will only use good items and that I couldn't think of any well known good example of a weapon, armour piece, or accessory average players couldn't use 9 times out of 10 that wasn't more due to parts of the game outside the design of the item. What I can say though is how elitist builders could hurt the average player, and that is through getting things nerfed into the ground or encouraging making things hella glassy.

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That is a very fair criticism and far better than what I have been seeing on that specific part of the suggestion I made. Also yes, I would really like to hear from the item team in general, not just one or two members, if this would interrupt their work flow instead of helping both them and the game as a whole.

 

I nominate Druser as one of these item testers.


id also like to be apart of this but idk if only a set amnt of ppl can join or if it would just be any1 interested.

 

But are these items that good players could use? Being a bad item doesn't immediately make it problematic in this sense.

Defensive items and builds are broken through the roof.

The reason why glassier alternatives appear unfriendly to most of the playerbase isn't really because of item balance (whether that's hypothetical or actual). Last year most build aid requesters appreciated offense, despite defensive builds being just as powerful*. In fact, TWA happened to be prevalent then.

* to be fair, far cosmos hadn't been buffed yet, so this isn't entirely true. i still think my point holds despite this caveat.

The much larger contributor is enemy power creep, especially 1.20 content. This sidetracks into an entirely different discussion, but raids are one of the single most toxic additions to the game, even worse in my eyes than CHAMPION rank being pay-to-win.

 

oh god oh fuck qzphs digging up the dark history please anything but build vending machine people still make fun of me for that to this day

 

tbh it was a pretty solid idea, just falls prey to the inevitable update cycle decay problem

 

Fair enough. It's quite easy to judge without looking deeper and thinking about everything that they have to balance.

I think being ambitious is important and not making all items generic is a good thing, but given the arguments against current lunar spine, I think it's at least in need of changes. Reverting it is the easiest solution, but far from the best, as you've pointed out. Also—against lunar spine (not a case for old lunar spine), I feel like its very odd to have this weapon on mage, a low dps class that can't really spam spells for damage (unless on pure) when the whole idea of lunar spine is smack mobs and cast as many spells as you can to deal damage before your mana runs out. Perhaps would be better suited for a class that gets more use out of spamming spells.

Kinda confused at this, but is it not a problem that some items didn't change along with the game moving along?

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not a good look for the argument of better interactivity between the item team and playerbase

 

Yeah I'm just emphasizing that it being unique is a net positive from what it was before, not that its current iteration is flawless.

It's phrased like a grave sin when it's more of an inevitability with an item pool of this size- if not these, then other items would have been left behind. And we're only discussing endgame here, there are legitimate horrors at lower levels. Stuff being left behind won't just be solved by a tester team, it's more of an issue of the update cycle and how content is balanced.

 

Fair enough, but I think the item team could help, such as changing the items to make sense with the updates. Somewhat unrelated but still kind of relevant is the distinct lack of non-mythic melee mage items (man gaia's current state makes me sad) and meh non-mythic spell warrior items.
And yes, we are most definitely overlooking lower levels, for example, that's one of the big problems with the non-rng lifesteal change that was suggested.

 

So, about this...basically everything you're asking for, in terms of item testing, requires more than just hypotheticals and guesswork. It requires actual usage ingame to test, which means the item testers would need access to our testing servers and files in order to do their job effectively- and at that point, they're logistically the same as Item Makers already.

It seems like other people have addressed the points, but right now the team isn't looking for any more members- As a matter of fact, Salted's specifically restricted the size of the team since before, since with more voices discussions and planning were too messy, and there were unfortunate situations where the team was basically split in half due to opinionated issues. So, from a logistical standpoint this whole thing is impossible- And trust me, we've asked Salted plenty of times if we could have more members on the item team. He's made his decision final, and we have to respect that.

We're aware that we've not been the best about updating the Running Log, and I have to take the heat for that one. It's easy to forget which changes to add when a lot of what happens is in preparation for a big bulk update and can't be put on immediately. Apologies for that. Just remember that, as has been stated, we are volunteers and we are trying our best here.

 

Makes sense to me. That puts an end to the thread then.