Info Item Team Update Thread - Latest Updates, Rebalance Changelogs & More - Update 28/6

I'll correct myself, it has no good PvE uses. Even normal endgame mobs have at least as much health as the player. The only option for Virgo that I can think of is King of Hearts cactus, although even then plenty of bosses can dps too fast to heal or just oneshot you (cactus build vs. Cybel is going to run into some problems...). For an endgame legendary item, it really sucks.

 

Ok, so, to address some of the issues in regards to the relationship between IM team and the community, and some of the community grievances on rapid changes for ingredients.

"At this point, I'm sure the IMs are just laughing while nerfing our builds"
The answer to this should be obvious. We are not about that. We hate to see you guys unhappy and be frustrated as your items get nerfed either, coz that means we're not doing a good job and you guys aren't having fun, for a team of people that strive to improve the game for everyone to have fun, that is not the optimal outcome. But being sentimental is one thing, and having to cater for the betterment of the game is the other. Balance is as subjective as it is systematic, if you can't see a reason behind a certain change, it may be coming down to one of the following three reasons.
A - We are not omnipotent and we don't see all the best possibilities, this goes to items and ingredients as well. eg. hive weapons got changed like 8 times over the past 3 years
B - There might be systematic constraints on how and wt change can or cannot be done. eg. why did bonder's hpr got nerfed from 300 to 245 and not 250
C - We have to account for future changes.

"If the ingredients are properly playtested they won't be so OP on release and then they won't get nerfed and screw people up"
I've addressed this on multiple occasions but, the ingredients were initially made for a different crafting system with different sets of mechanics, where individual ingredients were allowed to be much stronger but there are much more rules and penalties that fundamentally restricts what players can make. That was changed at the very late stage of development. The IM team was not able to react quick enough to fix every issue as that was also during the holiday season where the majority of the team were not available. This is why the fixes come in batches soon after the release and we are still doing systematic formulating over the system.

"Salted says crafted items are mythic strength why are you guys nerfing so many things"
What salted said is true, but with a catch. Crafted items can reach mythic strength yes, but only if you use the best of materials and ingredients with very optimised recipes. You are not supposed to gain massive power or utility by stacking powders or multiple of the same or low tier ingredients, those recipes being allowed to be too good hurts the game and fundamentally undermines the established item system and the evolving crafting system.

"I won't ever post any good crafting recipes in anywhere again because the IMs are just going to nerf them once they see it"
The IMs have faith in the community where we are on the same team, we all want the game to be better and stabilise as soon as possible. You guys know as much as we do that hoarding the OP recipes for as long as you can savour is only going delay the inevitable, and make our job slower, and extend your period of suffering from constant changes to ingredients. The faster problematic ingredients and recipes are spotted, the faster we can set up a standard and stabilise the crafting scene, as well as restore community faith in the system.

"haha they did this change that is so bad I know 100 more ways to do it better"
That is the last thing we want you guys to feel, and that isn't productive nor does it help the game. The IMs aren't omnipotent, mistakes we do make and ideas we do lack, even in the midst of that, we are still often able to strike an accord with community members that wants to improve the game as much as we do. This is why we stress so much effort in promoting two-way communication. If you have feedback that you want to make, please go write it in the IM changelog thread, this thread. It helps us to notice your feedback and it helps facilitate discussions. And frankly, if you make a good suggestion in somewhere we would notice, don't think we wouldn't care about it, because we do. We wouldn't hesitate to bring up any good suggestions from you guys to the team and do a discussion over it. We know there are good talents within the community, and we would love for you guys to join the team to improve the game together. This brings me to my next point.

"Since I disagree with how the IMs did their changes I won't ever join them to improve the game"
We don't discourage players with vastly different viewpoints to join the team, in fact, we encourage that, as long as you convey your viewpoints in a mature and logical manner during debates. A lot of the IMs when recruited all brought in different views on the system, and slowly we ingrained everyone's opinion and evolved the system. And you will get to do that, whether it is with regular items or crafting. Some of you might have spotted the IM application status has changed to IDLE. This is because we are currently wrapping up a wave of applicants and we will be hoping to change the app to include ingredients related questions for our new set up ingredient team.

"I only want to do ingredients and not regular items so I can't join the IM team shrug"
If you enter the team via the new app, you will be assigned as either Item IM or Ingredient IM base on your preference, or you can be both if that's what you want to do. The Item IMs will specialise in regular item making and rebalancing and Ingredient IMs will do that for ingredients. However, both teams are expected to carry out basic discussions and decision making on both divisions, so if you are an Ingredient IM, you still have a bare minimum of responsibilities to contribute your opinions and ideas when you are needed in certain discussions. However, the majority of the time your jurisdiction is still ingredients. Further details will be given if you actually get in the team, and if you are not confident with the other system that you are not interested in, you will be given basic training during the trial period provided you are accepted for your basic understanding on both systems. But basically, this is to ensure the two systems won't diverge into two totally separate things and is still going to be similar in scale.

I might edit more in if I think of any, but I hope this formally addresses some of the more prominent issues floating about in the community.

 

Give us information on powderssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

 

Reading through old posts, I've noticed most of the current IMs spent a lot of time arguing with Selvut and each other over item changes, prior to the formation of the Item Team.

 

kick everyone and accept my application

________________________________

._.

 

We'll see what we can do

We still do that a lot ngl

 

I think that as of right now, jeweling isn’t worth doing because it seriously got shafted with the amount of good ingredients it has. I chose jeweling because accessories are kind of hard to come by, but jeweling has the exact same problem; Jeweling ingredients are hard to come by. This means that jewelers like myself have a very limited choice in what items we can make. Also, why is it that there’s like 5 jeweling ingredients with %spell damage, but other ids, such as health bonus, are completely absent from jeweling? Here are some ingredients that I think jeweling needs more of:

Mana steal (The only way to get it is to flip voidstone sample, but that uses up 2 of your valuable slots, which isn't desirable when your accessory isn't focused on mana steal)

Elemental damages: (I wanted to make a good water, air, and thunder necklace, except guess what, I can't because there's no jeweling ingredient that gives air damage .-.)

Health bonus (There are none. Crafted accessories, the ingredient-less ones included, have no base health, so why can't we at least add some via ingredients )

Mana regen (I understand that mana regen shouldn’t be easy to aquire on accessories, but a level 50 ingredient should not be the only mana regen jeweling ingredient)

Poison (I don't care about this since it does such trivial damage, but nevertheless, the only real option you have is flipping ivory tusk, which will net you lots of negative raw health regen)


And there’s others that I probably missed, but you get the point.


TL:DR: Jeweling isn’t worth it because of a lack of ingredients, there’s also some important ids, like health bonus and elemental damages that aren’t covered at all by jeweling ingredients.

 

You really thought they would not add new ingredients?

It's just like normal items. They grow in number after some time.

 

I figured that, but it’s been almost 2 months since the update and jeweling has gotten absolutely nothing to help it out. The new patch helped leveling scribing a bit more bearable (and I understand why that hasn’t been done for jeweling yet, it’s because consumables are consumables, while the values for jeweling have to be selected carefully so you can’t wear the same op recipe four times at once) but still, I’m getting a little concerned.

 

Ye thanks for the feedback.

Jeweling, scribing and consumables will see more choices in the near future, we'll take a look at the IDs that you suggested and see where they fit in. But yeh the ingredients will slowly grow in numbers.

 

Item feedback time.

tl:dr: Monster sucks.


Long version:

I've been using Monster for a really long time now, and I cannot find an incredible rewarding way to use the wand. I get that it's supposed to be an offensive fire wand, seeing as how it has a strength buff and extensive damage bonuses, but it just doesn't cut it. Its base damage is too low to make it an amazing melee wand, and the -intelligence hampers it as a decent spell wand. As a tank wand, Monster would be fine, except the -water damage means that Lament does the job better, as the bonus HP given by Monster can easily be replaced by tankier armor and accessory pieces.

Everyone says that Lament needs a buff, but I honestly don't get it. Lament, just in general, is an amazing wand. It gives better DPS than Monster through spammability, and better survivability with stronger heal strength.

The problem with Monster isn't that it's a straight-up bad wand. It has good IDs and a pretty good damage output. It looks fine on paper. But in usage, it feels awkward to use because it hampers you in at least one way no matter which playstyle you attempt to take it in.

I've given this feedback on Monster a really long time ago, so I'm sure some of you might be aware of this issue. However, I was never given a clear response or any counter-arguments to my points. I'm writing this again because I'm actually curious as to what some of the IMs think about the wand. Since it appears that communication between the IMs and the community is becoming more transparent, I hope to hear what you guys think this time.

 

When I say to buff Lament it's really just a joke, ofc I want it to be buffed just cuz it can, but I still realise its a good wand.

But there always 2 arguments people make against it that are so stupid.

The first one is what you said right there, stop prentensing meteor is spamable, it takes almost 2 seconds to fall, which converts its dps to like 7-8k on a good build, about equal with good monster builds.

And comparing anything with Monster and saying "It's good because it's better than Monster" is ridiculous. Of course it's better than Monster, everything is.

 

I'll admit that the DPS might not be too different (that's something I should actually test), but spamming has other advantages as well. I've used Lament, and there's nothing more annoyinguseful than being able to spam heal. It's much harder to make a Monster build that can cycle meteor and heal as effectively as Lament. So yes, while Lament might not be that amazing in DPS, it also has the potential to spam heal along with meteor, making well setup Lament builds really hard to kill, while being able to dish out fair damage. Unfortunately for Monster, it can't compare to Lament in survivability thanks to the defense SP being useless on everything except warriors.

 

Yeah, the DPS is similar, but meteor is 1/second or so, meaning more like 13k + snake + melee + powder specials DPS (but yeah, similar DPS, but just more survivable).

 

Thanks for your feedback! So we started a discussion base on your feedback last night. Since we wanna flex on our amazing teamwork, this is basically what happened.

So the discussion basically started off with me being me


Poke agreed that Monster's strength is hard to shine through


and Electro followed it up when I brought up whether Monster is on par with mythic standards


When discussing whether the damage is an issue for Monster, Major disagrees but brought up other mythics as an example and suggested the downside of other mythics are at least properly compensated whereas it is not necessarily so for Monster.


Xavier later made a pretty conclusive point on the topic with the following


I hope this answers your curiosity of

Afterwards, the discussion kinda trailed off with some ideas and whether we work on Monster or not, as well as how about are we going to do so. The discussion is still by no means conclusive since that is only half of the team's input. If the team reaches a consent in the near future, we will hopefully keep you guys posted, and who knows, maybe you'll wake up one day and find Monster has already been changed.

Spoiler: Bonus

 

Thanks for the response. It's nice to know that feedback is being directly taken into consideration by team members, and makes it really motivating to provide more.

But yeah, Monster is in a very tough situation right now. I agree that the damage would be fine if it weren't for its downsides. Having said that, I still think that ramping up the damage would be the easiest way to buff it without greatly changing the significance of certain IDs/rolls. It would also stay true to its apparent theme of an offensive fire wand. Increasing the HP would also be an interesting way to encourage glassier build styles.

But yeah, those are just my last few suggestions on the wand. You guys know more than me about items and rebalancing, so I'm sure you guys will find a good way to change it if you guys choose to do so.

 

Simple questions on powders...

Are we getting more information about powders on weapons used in the crafting grid soon?

And when are the changes planned to be implemented in the game?

 

Is it possible for a weapon to give negative skill points in an area that it has a requirement for?

 

cascade

 

Nice, I assume this doesn't affect the ability to hold it? An interesting gimmick would be an item that requires req in a skill point but also cancels out that skill point.