Info Item Team Thread - Item/ingredient/major Id Changes, Updates & More (updated 28/03/2020)

Spell costs are extremely overpowered

Take this build as an example: https://wynndata.tk/s/z2kc8x

This is effectively full sustain. You can cast 4 meteors, 2 heals, and 4 ice snakes, per cycle, with spare. Solely from the spell cost and mana regen boosts on AIC and Dragon's Eye Bracelet, you have more mana than many players can effectively use. And this is on mage, the class that benefits least from extra spell sustain. AIC is a Hive item, thus heavily favoring one playstyle over others, while Dragon's Eye (in addition to the same problem) comes at basically no investment in endgame (and honestly pretty minor investment at-level, I have used it).

Spell costs really should require more investment - personally I think they should require high non-Int investment, since spell costs are essentially a substitute for higher Int. For example, if Dragon's Eye Bracelet had let's say 85 Def req, but base -19% 3rd spell cost, this would probably prevent it from being too overpowered at endgame (-1 cost on high Int spell-oriented builds but high req to meet) while still having utility at midgame (investing 90 Def is more costly at level 60, but at lowered or no Int you'll get the equivalent of -2 cost generally).

 

While spell costs right now are very powerful I personally have to disagree with them being extremely overpowered. The calculation of %spell cost in my opinion does cause a problem with balancing it but after that is fixed/changed I think we could get a better idea on how op it actually is. In game messing around with it I find that at super high intel I tend to opt for mana regen over spell cost reductions as I don't really need them that much. I think really as long at more -spell cost items are put only on non intel items it will be fine.

Dragon eye is the most powerful and imo only overpowered of the order of the grook items because it can be stacked with anima and bomb arrow is 3rd spell...

What I personally would say could be done is perhaps having -raw spell cost only on a few select items outside of the chestplate slot (like anima) and then featuring %spell cost reductions across other items with higher non intel reqs. This spell cost system is new so yeah balancing it is hard but personally I think its mostly fine and am hyped to make spell builds without the use of intel that are actually good :D


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NEW THREAD BASICALLY

also while I'm here I got a few buffs/nerfs in my opinion that are needed right now after messing around in game and on wynndata.

Hive boots: Both Heph and Gaea both feel weaker in builds to me compared to most other hive items. Heph has that -3rd spell% but it feels like it does nothing (maybe make it raw instead?) and feels awkward to fit in a melee or spell build. As a life steal focused item however it works nicely if you dont go heavy melee (obsidian helm) or spell with intel (abyss).
Gaea hewn on the other hand are very nice and tanky and give good spell damages but outside of specificly using fire/earth spell they aren't that great, and even in fire/earth spell sometimes heavy melee hybrid with obsidian framed helm is better. for fire/water im going to go anima for damage or eden blessed to be tanky. If im going earth spell im probably going to go chaos or even abyss (i still hate abyss so make a meme of that) maybe it's just that these items are in a worse slot than some of the other master items but I cant help but feel they are underwhelming and overly specific in builds.

Another couple hive items caught my eye in needing nerfs or buffs
First is Humbark moccasins as I don't really see much reason to use this item when accelerator exists.
Turbine greaves are in a perfectly fine place if you want them to be good for their level and not good endgame, given im not sure what the goal is with them that's just a thought.
Insulated Platemail should get its earth and water defenses back in my opinion but I can understand due to the level of the item why that seems unlikely to happen.


I suggested a bunch of buffs/nerfs to mythic and legendary reliks before but crimson pls...i really badly want to use it endgame but it sucks.

Sooooo messing around with my next assassin build I was planning on using black because it's actually good and alot of daggers right now aren't. Sitis got overnerfed and ivory being mana steal makes it utterly useless but the two daggers that I feel really need some love are Manna and Thrunda ripsaw.
Manna lacks the spell damage it needs as a mana regen weapon and only hits 4.4k spins on this build https://wynndata.tk/s/tyr3gu Then with melee the item isn't really great because voidstone or big arm are just better. I get that the item is tanky with its 1800hp and 175 raw hpr but all around those tanky features don't make up for the drawbacks at all really.
The other daggeer that brings me sadness is thrunda ripsaw. In my personal opinion this thing should be hitting as hard or harder than current black and sawtooth due to the glassy nature of thunder builds. The life steal, raw spell, melee/thunder damage %s all make for a really neat weapon. The main issue is that the damage it brings to the table feels subpar compared to black or sawtooth which can do similar damage while being more tanky. All around all it needs in my opinion is a damage buff to really fit the feel of a thunder weapon.

Wands all around seem nicely balanced but one request...FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE BUFF PHOENIX WING AND STOP MAKING IT AIR BASED JUST MAKE IT FIRE CAUSE MORROWIND EXISTS!

Bows are mostly fine gale might be a little to powerful tho...

Spears though...I have a hot take on why warrior is bad alot of the time. A wide varity of spears don't cater to the tank class it is but rather to the standard elemental stats most other class weapons have. In my opinion Tidebinder is the strongest legendary spear because it has great tanky ids with sustainability and good damage. Braker falls into a similar category as it has good defense %s and great damage. Spears like Hive, Proxima, and Wick all seem good because of their minimal drawbacks or their fair drawbacks when put with their tanky nature. Other legendary spears tend to suffer from drawbacks that don't directly effect the build but rather effect the entirety of the class. Quinque, The forsaken, Zephra, Infidel, and Bedruthan all seem to fall in this category of good but not great mostly due to great damage but lacking the all around sustainability a tank class should have. the rare spears charging flame and supernova fall in this as well but being rares they don't need to be made op or anything. Then the other end of the spectrum we have spears like Ignition and Harwrol which give great tanking abilities but really struggle to make up for it in damage which leads to them not being very good in pve because they can't break hp walls of bosses very well. so yeah there's my hot take anyone else agree?

Armor mostly is well balanced across the legendary spectrum in my opinion, a handful of items across the board could use small buffs/damage tweeks but overall not all that much to serious (buff scorpio pls). However here's what is serious...y'all nuked memento to the ground. This isn't even an overnerf this is just a straight up nuclear fallout for memento as if you aren't a mage the item is just flat out not useful at all. The -ls makes melee nearly unusable and thereby makes curse a suicide wish. The 3/4 mana regen gives you no real reason to use it over capri unless you don't have agility, but if you don't have agility riverflow or ornate shadow boots tend to be better options in most builds. Personally I'd do one of two things with the item. Either give it some neat major id to mage only or mostly undo the nerfs this patch (or at least the -ls nerf) to make the item more viable.


Tldr: hive boots need buff, buff humbark and turbine greave, insulated platemail pls buff, manna and ripsaw need buff, memewing needs buff/rework, gale may need a nerf, spears a fundamentally messy, memetoes are in nuclear fallout and need a huge buff.

 

I partially disagree and partially agree on your spell cost thoughts. Draoi Fair is also super powerful, on average I'd say about as strong as Dragon's Eye. Even at high Int I'd still basically always use Dragon's Eye or Draoi Fair for the equivalent of several mana regen (depends on class, etc.). Anima-Infused Cuirass is effectively about 8-11 mana regen for a mid-skill player, and much more for those who can spam faster.

Generally for costs, I'd say percent costs and raw costs could both get uses - depending on the item and what it brings to various playstyles. So for example, if an item has mainly fast melee benefits aside from the spell usage it should get mainly raw costs, but if it has more heavy melee benefits it should get more percent costs (and especially towards the TFA end there should be mainly percent costs) since heavy melee is reliant on spell support for hit continuity. Of course, on spell builds a -19% base spell cost is going to be basically the same as -1 cost. Speaking of which, spell cost numbers should take into account roll ranges (bases -19, -25, and -38 are pretty useful).

My biggest thing is that spell costs on spell builds shouldn't be freely available without significant skill point investment. I personally would say they should be placed around something like 80-110 single-element reqs, net 130-160 dual-element reqs, and around 180-250 rainbow reqs (depends on the item and how it's oriented, etc.). Every spell playstyle should have access to all of the spell cost modifiers in some way (trying to push spell costs into a single spell playstyle is not going to work out - we saw how this went in revamp already, and the same applies here).

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I think Heph boots is fine. It has some niche uses right now that should expand much better once we get spell cost items on many armors and non-relik weapons. Gaea-Hewn I think mainly suffers from the fact that the health regen has basically no use - the only benefit of that health regen right now is to counter Sizzling Shawl or Fate's Shear or whatever. Incidentally, if health regen gets buffed to a usable rate (e.g. if we get /4s hpr) I expect the use rate of Sizzling Shawl to decline somewhat as its downside cuts into something meaningful.

Agree that Humbark Moccasins are really mediocre right now. Turbines Greaves are a bit eh (walkspeed pls) but not total garbage like they used to be I guess. RIP Insulated Plate Mail even though it was kind of already killed before by the double whammy of Def fix and "ele defs don't matter".

Crimson -1 manasteal hurts pretty heavily although tbh it's not as bad as it used to be: https://wynndata.tk/s/sx654d

Manna is partially held back by its defensive stats not mattering but also is a bit weak. Thrunda Ripsaw just kind of has low damage (base x speed = 905 or so). Gale's could use a very very slight nerf but overall I think it's more than alternatives aren't always that good. Alka Cometflinger in particular is a really bad weapon.

I disagree with spears - I think it's a problem with the design of Warrior in general, where unlike every other class spells don't provide any useful damage avoidance utility. Every other class can prevent themselves from being totally hammered at when playing spell builds - the classes without good ways to deal with avoiding ranged mobs (Mage and Shaman) have healing benefits, while Archer's range and Assassin's Vanish plus blindness from Spin provides similar utility. Melee has health sustain benefits to manage around this (in theory, RIP the pitiful health regen in EFA) while heavy melee builds get spell support to help deal with the added problem of melee mobs that can't be battered back with fast hits. At best, Warrior has Inspire on Charge, but I'm told that's really hard to pull off in practice - not to mention when the Inspire boost runs out you don't have any Warscream defense benefits, and even with the Inspire boost it's not really damage avoidance, just a bit of extra mitigation. If Warrior received damage utility in spells this wouldn't be a problem - the IMs wouldn't have to design one class's weapons vastly differently just to make it work, as you're suggesting.

I think Memento is in a pretty good spot right now actually. It fills a niche of mana/damage combo armor for boots pretty well, while also preventing throwing it on everything for that niche by penalizing hybrid.

 

Draoi imo is not as strong cause earth/intel outside of a few builds isn't as strong as fire spell in anima or whatever. But while I personally Don't feel those specific items are super op I would agree that all around more raw spell reductions should be used on higher sp req items.

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Heph I've messed around with and it just feels niche but I suppose you are right as more spell cost items come around they will likely become more useful. Gaea+shawl or MAYBE with hellstrand spell build ig other than that it lacks use and hpr is in a

yeah good but not great. still needs a buff but neat build i might try it out.

hellstrand and alka are the best alts for spell archer imo

Hmm I see something worth noting regardless is that many weapons aren't tanky enough for the class/do enough damage regardless of if warrior had damage utility. In my personal opinion every spell could use some sort of change (maybe not bash if they fixed the bugged damage buff) and war scream should give 5 seconds regen 3 or somthin. but yeah...warrior is painful...

Pre patch it was really the best legendary armor in the whole game (non hive) perhaps im over reacting from that because its so much worse now. But in all the builds ive been using I find that niche of mana and damage usually is better filled with other items such as capri, riverflow, shadow, ex nihilo, etc. Granted memento has both damage and mana regen which only capri has but I have yet to find a build in which they are the best option as opposed to a before mentioned alternative. but heyyyyy maybe I'm crazy :P

 

Updated!

 

The expected "we didn't do much pre-analysis on the impacts of LQ and we don't want the mythic market to crash and burn" update.

I welcome this, it's been ridiculous.

 

The social experiment "What would happen if we doubled mythic droprate?" is finally over.

 

@Altakar why was vortexian nerfed? while i understand 35k dps was broken for mage it couldve been alleviated by adding some kind of melee damage reduction rather than killing the playstyle as a whole

 

this doesn't look like a royal hydrangea buff . .. .. .. .. . ...

 

Btw, can anybody explain to me how certain ID percentages change with nerfs/buffs

For example, when a ID spread goes from (2-3-4-5-6) to just (1-2-3-4)
The 50% old ID which would be 4 in this case, would it change to 2 (33%) or 3 (66%)?
I can assume that other ids switch to the closest matching possibility, but how does it go for this specific example where 2 possible options are equally far away from 50%

 

Finally

 

Depends on actual roll of .3-1.3 (or .7-1.3 for negative IDs) or whatever it is that you can't see, then it's figured out from there idk which way rounding works on ids tho

 

So every ID that currently settles on 50% for example, could be any number as long as it's closer to 50% than it is to the neighboring 25% and 75% ID?

 

We have no reason to believe that this is how ingredients are rolled. (I'd actually be quite surprised if this was the case)

 

Oh was he talking about ingredients? Yeah I might be wrong then, although he never specified

 

Collapse is really bad right now, the unreliability of the weapon is just not worth using.
It needs a damage increase similar to fatal to justify the 0 base minimum damage, or even better give it more powder slots on top of it.

 

Regardless I must agree with collapse being bad. However honestly warrior mythics right now are incredibly well balanced in my opinion with every one but collapse being good.


Guardian currently does a perfectly fine amount of damage for the amount of sustainably it brings as a mythic tier spear. Being a tank with guard is not very difficult with all the IDs it comes with. You also can build high fire damage without giving up all defenses becoming a 8k hp glass cannon.

Apoc gives incredible melee sustain allowing for drawn out battles as a melee class that possesses great tanking ability.

Alka is easily the highest melee dps spear in the game and can give warrior a less tanky option to absolutely destroy mobs and bosses in extremely short amounts of time. The -sp change from 1.19 did hurt the weapon a little bit but all around this spear is in a really good spot right now. And yes...spell Alka is also quite good as well. Great weapon that works really well with warrior.

Idol and Thrunda both feel as though they embody what warrior spell should be. They possess the ability to deal damage on a curve of survivability. You have the option to make an actually viable glass cannon warrior build. Or you can make a somewhat tanky build that has the damage output to remain viable, something that majority of non mythic Spears are unable to do. Neither of these weapons feel overpowered in my opinion but rather makes it feel as though the difference between spell warrior mythics and legendaries is much greater than that of other classes (yes I talked about legendary Spears sucking before lol). Regardless both these weapons feel great and are perfect as they are.

Hero in my opinion is basically a slightly lower damage version of Thrunda and idol but possesses more versatility. Glass cannon hero, the generic air slap build, is very powerful. Tank hero provides good damage output with very good survivability. Melee hero gives very high raw dps and hybrid hero can do basically everything well. The weapon is extremely versatile and always feels strong but never feels as though it has an intended use or stands out. I'm not really sure if this warrants a buff or a nerf or rather just some sort of change to give a bit more direction in how to use it. Regardless the weapon is in a good spot it could maybe just use one little change to really push it to where it should be as a mythic.

Collapse though...oh man oh man this thing needs help. Honestly I don't even know what it's trying to be or why it exists. In melee It seems as though proxima has no issues in getting more dps and having actual survivability. On paper spell collapse is not bad and can even push to 20k uppercuts. However in practice your mana sustain is terrible because mana on rainbow items is hard to come by (even with the mana steal id), your damage output is very inconsistent, and you become a glass cannon which is what warrior shouldn't be. Then there is melee collapse which is all of the above except your damage output is actually consistent, and by consistent I mean consistently bad. Honestly I'm not sure what can be done with this spear because the glass cannon concept of warrior is just all around not good. I mean as crazy as this might seem has just straight up inverting the defenses ever come to mind as a change to this item? This spear is just bad right now unfortunately and needs alot of changes to be a strong mythic tier option.

 

Collapse did need help before indeed, now it is among the top tier mythic spears.

What is it trying to be, you ask? 5 mana steal, tons of melee% and really high spell damage, this does not sound like hybrid at all. On paper spell Collapse is not bad however in practice it's not merely good but pretty much amazing. Uppercut cancel works wonders. If Bash overwrote War Scream with it's 50% damage boost, Uppercut canceling would be broken good with this weapon. With this method it is not difficult to land melee attacks to refill your mana, especially if you are fighting bigger groups. The exploding especially makes it effective for this purpose as it significantly increases the damage output. And it looks pretty darn cool too.

Sustaining your mana, considering how many mana options there are available for rainbow (Third Eye, Moon Pool Circlet, Morph-Stardust, Stellar, Atlas, Gold/Diamond Hydro Bracelet, Prognosticum, Capricorn, Fermion, Winter's Essence (I would probably avoid the last two)) and Collapse alone gives 5 mana steal, makes me wonder how could it be an issue.

Reference build: https://wynndata.tk/s/rnquzg - here is a hybrid build that both deals good damage and yet is far from being a mere glass cannon. As long as you can keep your defenses positive or really close to 0, the -defs% should not cause issues. If you are still worried of your mana, you can use either Capricorn (although it would be a waste to throw that life steal away) or Third Eye. Gaze upon the decline, Stardust has arisen.

The 0 base minimum damage on a weapon with 3 powder slots and 60-90 Neutral damage.

Besides, Collapse reacts vividly to any source of damage buff (mostly talking about powder specials, not crafted potions and other shit) and it's damage skyrockets in an instant. The "unreliability" of the weapon does not hinder it's effectiveness, it rather makes it balanced.


I have been using Collapse for a while now and have not really faced any of your complaints or stated issues. Collapse is heavily underrated and underestimated. It does not need another buff at all.

 

You are stacking raw damage with collapse, it kinda defeats the purpose, you might as well use something else that's more consistent https://wynndata.tk/s/6zfu12.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the collapse also requires a good roll for your build to work, so not only the weapon damage is RNG dependent, the weapon stats is also RNG dependent for it to be good/ decent, unlike collapse, Fatal is only RNG dependent on the damage roll.

 

What do you mean with raw dmg? Also even though theres rng there still is an average. Its not as if you're just casting spells just once or twice. Especially for long bossfights the average dmg output won’t deviate that much.