Game Design Update
May 28, 2012 in News! by Motorskull
Just posted on the Diablo 3 site is a state-of-the-game post that gives a snapshot of the game as it stands now and where the designers intend on steering it in the near future.
Issues touched on include:
- Collected game data
- Skill ‘nerf’ philosophy
- Inferno difficulty
- Item comparisons
- Crafting costs
One thing that’s absent from the little bit they say about crafting is the disparity between items that the BS can make vs items you can find out in the world. I’d like to see BS items be potential equals for found items (since the mats you put into them are, in some cases, staggering) rather than being depressingly second rate as they are now.
To be clear, I’m thinking about just the lower number of affixes on BS crafts compared to found items. I don’t mind having the BS as a gold- and mats- sink and I don’t mind being disappointed by getting cruddy items out of my crafting attempts. I do mind having the crafted items not being worthwhile making in the first place.
Motorskull you are missing the point on the BS. Its there to help fill in gaps when you need to boost some of your gear, but the drops are not falling your characters way. I used a crafted rare wand for 6 levels cause it was the best weapon I could find for my Wizard.
A small boost is ok, but equal? No. crafting helps out a lot, but people always think that some of that stuff is always supposed to be equal to what you find and it should’t be. It should be used as a stop gap when your luck is not running good.
I respectfully disagree, for two reasons.
Firstly, the point of the BS is as an equivalent to D2′s gambling system, “but better”. ( http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=26560536896&sid=3000&pageNo=2 ).
Secondly, you can find set and legendary recipes for the BS, which are potentially as good as anything you find in the world. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3NkFxpb4hI&t=11m15s )
Note that I am talking about the potential of a theoretical craft item being equivalent to a found item, not a guarantee and furthermore, I am talking about plan drops you get in the world, not the level-up plans everyone gets. That’s a very important distinction.
Think of what you’re plowing into just one high-ish end item. It is many thousands of gold’s worth of broken down items, a further gold premium to actually craft the item, yet more mountains of gold and mats to get your BS up to a level able to craft high end items in the first place, and time (or gold or real money) spent in Inferno grinding up Tomes, and finally, getting lucky enough to find a worthwhile smithing plan in the first place. All for an item that, when you make it, may end up worthless.
Stop-gaps against runs of bad luck are all well and good, but who says your luck will change when you roll up an item in the BS? For that reason alone you should be able to potentially make something equivalent to you might get out in the world.
Otherwise, then you get a crafting system that is pointless. Why put any time and effort into it, when you could just vendor everything you find before going to the AH and save yourself all the trouble?
Well the thing is this: You are right it is gambling….but only up to a point. In D2 you had no idea on what you was getting at all and it was pretty much a waste of your gold.
But in D3 when you craft something you are guarranteed that the item will have certain properties EVERY time you craft, now the stats will change and sometimes will be better or worse, but you know that the BS item will have X,Y and Z unlike a lot of stuff you will find out in the world. It only seems worthless in your eyes cause its not giving you a lock on something great with great stats, but that would fly in the face of what Diablo is with items. Even with items you know will have definte stats/powers there is enough randomization that yes that item WILL have certain things, but may roll out crappy. That is just the nature of the beast that is this game and sometimes people need to accept that you can and will roll crap no matter how much time and effort you put in.
Heck my friend I call him the crap rare hunter. He finds at least 3 times more rares than me, but easily 95% of what he finds is so bad that we laugh at how he talks to the item in vent saying “Ok are you gonna be crap….WHY YES you are and the streak continues!”. But he never views it as a waste of his time cause he is doing what he likes. Crafing is a component that you can completly ignore if you want, and the game continues on, but if you want to craft itis a good side addition that will always give you something that you can use depending on what you was looking for.
But overall we both agree crafting could use a boost so that it gets more use during the leveling up to 60 correct?
We’re approaching the problem from fundamentally different points of view
Yes, I’d like to see more made of the crafting system at all levels of the game. I think there’d be only a very small subset of players who’d argue against that!
And another good point you make is this; yes – you should be able to ignore crafting, just as some people choose to ignore the auction house (and I’d wager, like some people with a fistful of cash are going to ignore the world drops). But, you shouldn’t ignore the crafting system just because it’s not worth participating in.
I disagree though, that you’re always going to get X,Y,Z stats you want on an item… unless you’re talking about a crafted set or legendary. What I’m primarily interested in are end-game plans for rares; the stats you get on those are exactly the ones you’d get from a world drop. The only thing you know about when you craft the item is that it’s going to be, say, a sword and that it will be rare and have the number of affixes in the recipe.
This is where the problem comes in. You’ve already ‘won’ the slot machine roll and had the rare plan drop for you. Great!…but now you have to win big again to actually have a shot at making a half-decent version of the item. And the cost involved in getting everything together for another roll of the dice are not inconsequential (see above)!
I am no maths guy, but with a six affix rare item, and assuming a pool of only six affixes, I think you have about a 1 in 720 chance to actually get all those affixes in the top tier of whatever the game selects for you (ignoring ranges of numbers withing those tiers and ignoring that you may not like all the affixes it gives you).
For crafting cost alone of the 6-affix rare sword (just the gold, not the mats you have to somehow acquire for each try) you’ll probably have to pump in about 123 million gold to get the ‘perfect’ sword. Of course, you could ace it and just have to pay 171,000. Or you could be there forever. Just like you can get lucky out in the world… or not.
This is where the lack of equivalence gets me – not only do you have to ‘win’ the rolls multiple times (first to get the plan, then for any attempts to make it), you have to grind up the mats (or gold equivalent). But there are swords out in the wild that have 7 affixes, where you only have to win the roll once.
To me, that’s enough of a ‘tax’ on the crafted item. Apart from that (being lucky on your rolls for affixes), the two items should be functionally identical, but at the moment, they’re not. Hell, they even talk about the crafting system in the Blizzcon vid I linked as another form of item drop!
I’d just hate to see people come to regard rare plan drops as a booby prize that’s not worth picking up rather than something exciting that they want to spend time making because it’s (potentially) cool.
I just want my BS to be useful beyond taking the place of my Neph cube, which really is the only reason I use him now. I have almost an entire Stash tab full of mats because everything he can make is complete garbage to what I am already using. Even new characters that I make I find my self in the same position of my hand-me-downs to stuff I find are much better than anything he can craft for me. There has been the occasional situation where I’ll have something that could possibly be improved by using the BS to craft something better, but after the 5th roll on the item and about 50k in gold later, I find myself asking what’s the point?
That 50k in the auction house could have scored me an item at least 5x better than what I was attempting to craft from the BS, or I could just wait another act till I end up finding something new anyway.
In the beta, he actually felt useful, most of the stuff I found couldn’t compete with the wares he could fashion! He had a use, beyond turning my blues/crap yellows into magic dust! Give me my neph cube and mystic in place of Haedrig and I’ll be one happy camper… shouldn’t he still be mourning the death of his wife anyway? That or still scraping bits of her off the ceiling. I blame his terrible crafting ability on depression.
I’m loving some of these changes! Now give me an option to repair everything in my stash either in game or in the AH. Also a difficulty indicator near the mini map just like Diablo 2 had! Also, if it’s not too much trouble… a mail system. Oooh, oooh, and private chat lobbies!