A detailed description of the mess that is the current upgrade system

[omgFIREBALLS]

For a brief intro:

• Weapons and armor have quality tiers, going from Common +0 all the way to Legendary +3.
• Each tier improves the item's stats, and if the "tier difference" between you and your opponent is large enough (4), the one with the better equipment gets an additional 35% bonus. As in, my weapon is so much better than your armor that on top of the impressive damage my upgraded weapon is doing against your weak armor, I get an extra 35%.
• So, having upgraded gear makes the game a lot easier. And, to go between tiers, say from Fine +3 to Exceptional +0, you need Adra or its upgrades (Awakened Adra etc). This is a bottleneck. Update: Only applies to uniques. Since uniques are pretty much objectively better than plain equipment however, we still want to do this.

On my first playthrough I tried to upgrade my starting gear... I spent all of Dawnshore struggling to reach Fine (while a lot of monsters have Fine equipment). Then I spent all of Emerald Stair struggling to reach Exceptional (which monsters tend to have there). Then I just started buying upgraded equipment as soon as I got into a new zone instead, and started preaching this method too.

People discovered that uniques you loot will scale up to whatever you currently have equipped (or maybe in your possession). You have Exceptional armor; you loot Exceptional unique armor. Someone on Reddit galaxy brained how to best take advantage of this. Inspired by this post, I started a PotD run. I avoided all uniques until I was able to buy a Fine armor and weapon (Update: If anyone wants to follow in my footsteps, I've been informed it's cheaper to upgrade plain items to Fine, and that requires no Adra). Then I selected one weapon and one armor that would be my equipment for Dawnshore and broke down all other uniques. Since I looted them as Fine, breaking them down gave me Adra, which I turned into Awakened Adra, which eventually allowed me to (combined with buying Adra from merchants and looting it here and there) upgrade my weapon and armor to Exceptional before even leaving Dawnshore.

Had I played normally, I would have had Common equipment when looting these uniques and not received any Adra for scrapping them. I also would have probably saved some of them because hey, maybe I'll want to use them, or I want to keep them for transmog. And this is where you say, hey that's what I'm doing and experiencing. I feel you. You're struggling to upgrade because you didn't metagame. Anyway, it gets a little worse.

What I'd done in Dawnshore wasn't even fully optimal. Even better would be to pick one slot to focus on (I choose armor because I'm very passionate about not getting oneshot), looting my desired armor, then looting all the uniques for the other slot (weapon). Not until I had upgraded my armor to Exceptional would I loot all the other unique armor, which would then, you guess it, drop as Exceptional. What's it matter? Well, Exceptional armor breaks down into Awakened Adra directly - if I loot it as fine I only get 1/3 of that since it takes 3 Adra to make 1 Awakened Adra. That would make it a lot easier to upgrade my weapon and I'd finish the zone with more [Awakened] Adra. I'm even thinking about starting over and doing this. I will, either way, play Emerald Stair like that.

I expect to finish Emerald Stair with Superb +1 or +2 equipment. I expect anyone who is playing Emerald Stair right now without research or metagaming is struggling to reach Exceptional (unless they bought it). Which I am about to waltz in there already sporting.

The light at the end of the tunnel here is that playing like this doesn't actually get you something you cannot get with a sane playstyle, but you get there sooner and you have a more pleasant journey except for the starting ritual of avoiding uniques. "There" meaning Legendary +3 equipment.

I'm not looking to start a riot here. I don't believe Obsidian are happy with this either. Let this post inform your decisions, and feel free to post ideas for how to solve this mess. I can think of an easy one - let transmogs just be a catalog of appearances you've looted rather than requiring you to keep the item around. I like how my armor looks right now, but I will be replacing it in Emerald Stair, and keeping the old one afterwards means I'm not getting Awakened Adra out of it.

P.S. You want to get even more degenerate? Loot no uniques in Dawnshore at all, buy Exceptional equipment in Emerald Stair, then loot Dawnshore

Edited yesterday at 10:54 AM by omgFIREBALLS

[Lonlon]

 

I tested this feature extensively and I must warn you that it makes the game way too easy (even in PotD). When I reached act 2 I just stopped metagaming around unique scaling because it completely broke the game.

The breakpoint for me is when you start to NOT loot uniques to let them upscale and THEN you come back later to salvage them. If you do that, you will have access to way more high level materials/adra than you should and you will completely destroy the game. Dont salvage uniques, it will just spoil your experience. This is my own rule now :  I never salvage uniques.

That's my advice, you do you, but you've been warned 

EDIT: on the other hand, if you are willing to exploit this "feature" to the max, you SHOULD be able to upgrade a weapon all the way to Superb +3 mid act 2 (or even late act 1 if you're a gamer but i'm not sure whether the unique "pool" is large enough to achieve that or not). I'm sure you can imagine how this would break the game...

EDIT2 : if you can craft Adra Ban with corrupted adra (I doubt this knowing how previous adra recipes unlock), you may even be able to reach Legendary as early in the game... Scavenger rank 2 will help a ton here.

Edited yesterday at 01:40 PM by Lonlon

[Lonlon]

The exact route you have to follow in order to achieve Superb +3 ASAP is the following :

1) Choose a non-unique weapon you will upgrade all the way to Superb (this does not require adra, only gold). Preferably a one hander because it's less expensive. Let's call this weapon your "Template". Note that you can buy a Fine weapon from an act 1 vendor, could be better (in terms of gold/material economy) than starting from scratch (this I cant tell but it shouldn't make a huge diff).
2) Skip all lootable unique weapons in the game (you need to make sure you NEVER display their tooltip because, as soon as you make the game "load" their tooltip, their quality will be set forever and they will stop scaling with your Template's quality). (Note : vendor uniques upscale the same way but they cost a lot more gold when upgraded... not worth imo)
3) As soon as you are able to pick the scavenger rank 2 talent (cant remember the exact level), start upgrading your Template as a madman. The key part here is you can upgrade any material *3 for 1 material of the tier above.
4) When you are short on mats, go ahead and pick-up some unique weapons you left behind in order to scavenge them (they should've upgrade to match the quality of your Template), but not all of them, just enough to have the materials you need to upgrade your Template to Superb.
5) As soon as your Template reach Superb, go loot THE unique weapon you want to use for your build, along with any other unique you left behind. Salvage those useless uniques and upgrade your weapon of choice to Superb +3.
6) GGs you broke the game.
 

Note 1 : you now have tons on adra by salvaging all those Superb uniques so you could upgrade any other unique you want.

Note 2 : you can do exaclty the same with armors...

Note 3 : upgrading your Template will cost you about 15k gold (in PotD) so spare your gold accordingly, you dont need to salvage everything you loot, just enough to upgrade your Template, vendor all the rest. Also you could use a unique weapon as your Template, this will cost you adra instead of gold BUT you will be stuck at Exceptionnal +3 until you learn how to craft Corrupted Adra (and I wont spoil when that is).

Edit: There might be a better route but this is how I achieved it quite early in the game (before reloading because the game was way too trivial  )

Edited yesterday at 02:44 PM by Lonlon

[thelee]

6 hours ago, omgFIREBALLS said:

Each tier improves the item's stats, and if the "tier difference" between you and your opponent is large enough (4), the one with the better equipment gets an additional 35% bonus. As in, my weapon is so much better than your armor that on top of the impressive damage my upgraded weapon is doing against your weak armor, I get an extra 35%.

where are you people getting these numbers? honest question! i've been scouring around for these numbers, and this is actually the third distinct number i've seen. (poe wiki says 60%. i saw a reply to one of my posts on reddit saying 20%. this is the first time i've seen 35%) i don't see any tooltips in game that illustrate this. (before the day 1  patch i would get really weird tooltips that told me i got 0%)

 

anyway, i think it's clear waht the intent of the unique scaling was (to avoid "wasting" resources on upgrading mundane items only to find a better unique that now you need to invest in), but it's a shame that it's so easily metagamable.

my only thought is they should probably make resources a bit more plentiful and that you get back more resources when you break down upgraded items, and then not have uniques scale at all. this issue exists as it does right now because resources for upgrade are surprisingly scarce, even with thorough exploration.

 

Quote

I expect to finish Emerald Stair with Superb +1 or +2 equipment. I expect anyone who is playing Emerald Stair right now without research or metagaming is struggling to reach Exceptional 

it me. before the day 1 patch that adjusted the scaling, i was hitting a lot of hard gear-check encounters. with the new scaling, i can actually progress through skill alone and incremental subtier upgrades.

Edited 22 hours ago by thelee

[Lonlon]

6 minutes ago, thelee said:

my only thought is they should probably make resources a bit more plentiful and that you get back more resources when you break down upgraded items, and then not have uniques scale at all. this issue exists as it does right now because resources for upgrade are surprisingly scarce, even with thorough exploration.

A simple fix would be to cap the quality of unique in act 1 to Fine, act 2 to Exceptionnal and so on...
This way we would still be able to "invest" in this feature but not break the game, transforming all uniques from act 1/2 to superb is just too much.

Personnally I dont know the exact numbers behind the quality system. Before the patch it was something like 90% reduction/increase i'd guess. But you're right, now it's much smoother.

[thelee]

8 minutes ago, Lonlon said:

A simple fix would be to cap the quality of unique in act 1 to Fine, act 2 to Exceptionnal and so on...
This way we would still be able to "invest" in this feature but not break the game, transforming all uniques from act 1/2 to superb is just too much.

yeah that would fix the unique system, but i got into my mess because i was upgrading different items, not realizing how rapidly expensive upgrades would become. the upgrade system as it stands right now is surprisingly punishing about not picking one weapon and armor and sticking with it, you basically can't experiment.

fine and exceptional gear are also prohibitively expensive. when i was stuck in emerald stair at extreme gear-check levels, i was about to dump my entire net worth (and everything i found so far in dawnshore and early emerald stair) into buying one exceptional bow. because you can only either sell or breakdown most gear, it creates a very scarce economy with the two choices in conflict. while you can respec skills and stats pretty easily, the game being so gear-bound and so gear-scarce actually means you have very little room for experimentation. i wonder if a solution is that in act 1 fine gear is expensive, but then merchants in act 2 sell fine gear for less (and also fine gear in act 1 becomes cheaper), but exceptional is still expensive. at least there's a cheap "floor" for gear in case you go up the wrong path, character-wise.

 

edit: according to the wiki, in early versions of the game you couldn't upgrade mundane items across quality tiers. i wonder if honestly that's a better approach and just make fine and exceptional gear a bit cheaper. upgrading a mundane weapon/armor/shield/grimoire from common +3 -> fine +0 is basically a trap in terms of how ridiculously expensive it is of your upgrade mats.

Edited 22 hours ago by thelee

[Lonlon]

31 minutes ago, thelee said:

fine and exceptional gear are also prohibitively expensive. when i was stuck in emerald stair at extreme gear-check levels, i was about to dump my entire net worth (and everything i found so far in dawnshore and early emerald stair) into buying one exceptional bow.

I agree.
For what it's worth : I heard that vendor prices scale with difficulty. Maybe PotD economy is just supposed to be scuffed  (you can lower your difficulty to easy while bying from merchants then switch it back to PotD but... yeah.. meh)

[thelee]

9 minutes ago, Lonlon said:

For what it's worth : I heard that vendor prices scale with difficulty. Maybe PotD economy is just supposed to be scuffed 

ah if that's the case, then maybe it's kinda OK? PotD is not really supposed to be the "f*** around" difficulty, at least without the "and find out" part. still, was a pretty rude shock. the day 1 patch really salvaged my current run.

[omgFIREBALLS]

1 hour ago, thelee said:

where are you people getting these numbers? honest question! i've been scouring around for these numbers, and this is actually the third distinct number i've seen. (poe wiki says 60%. i saw a reply to one of my posts on reddit saying 20%. this is the first time i've seen 35%) i don't see any tooltips in game that illustrate this. (before the day 1  patch i would get really weird tooltips that told me i got 0%)

Eh, I think something in-game told me, but I can't find it. This article says 35% too.