From the Twitch Q&A: enchanting and ceiling

[hilfazer]

Agree.

 

I'd also mention that Black Jacket is not going to like inability to enchant elemental lashes.

 

you can't just put Flaming on anything. That's one big change.

[Boeroer]

No. Part of the reward for going into dungeons and completing quests is finding new items. Good move by Josh.

You should elaborate more on that.

 

Because you can still find new and better items with even cooler enchantments. Nobody said they should place less items. Of course it's cool to find new weapons which are better because the area is more dangerous and so on.

If you don't want to use enchanting to pimp your existing weapon so that it can at least keep up with the quality level of the new ones you found that's totally OK.

 

But why take away the option (and it's only an option) to pick a fitting weapon for your build and stay with it? It makes no sense in my opinion. You already have the drawback that you have to invest a lot of money and rare resources in order to do so.

 

As I said: makes no sense in my opinion - to cut something that gives you more interesting options and more variety with so little efford. It's like designing low level spells which become obsolete once you get higher level spells. Who honestly wants that?

[hilfazer]

Designers want players to see their work so they are... helping them doing that.

One example is in this thread, another example is multicalssing:

 

"We've got that new awesome feature - multiclassing. And you'd better make use of it because we are reducing max party size."

Edited February 6, 2017 by hilfazer

[MaxQuest]

Referred twitch response:

 

 

Source: link

Question: Thoughts on recipes for unique weapons and armor? What are your ambitions for the enchanting system?

Answer (JS): Recipes for unique weapons and armor are things we can do. Often those feel better as quests. If it's really just a one-and-done thing where it's like, "Bring me the three parts of Thor's Hammer", that doesn't really need to use the crafting system because it's just a thing where there are three parts and then it's done. And if it's that unique and special then it feels like that's a thing you find, and then you bring them to the master smith and the master smith says, "Here's Thor's Hammer". We can certainly have stuff like that and people like that stuff, and that's cool.

The enchanting system. What we're doing with the enchanting system is we're trying to make the enchantments feel less generic, much more specific to the individual weapon. So, for example, if you have a weapon that is a Flaming weapon, you can't just put Flaming on anything. That's one big change. And if a weapon is a Flaming weapon, and you want to advance that to something else, you can change the Flaming property into, for example, a Flaming Burst, or you can change it into a Flaming Chain where the flame hit will actually bounce to other people. That way the flavor of the weapon feels like it remains true to the idea of what it is, but you can still bump it up a little bit in power. We also are trying to establish a ceiling for a weapon, so that you're less likely to really want to try to use a weapon from the beginning of the game all the way to the end. There's a sort of planned cap to how powerful a weapon becomes. If you want to keep using it you have the ability, through enchantment, to extend it but eventually you're going to, "Eh, this is not really cutting it anymore, I kinda want to switch to something else".

Now, the cool property on it, because it's not something that can be thrown on something else, hopefully that will feel like a compelling enough reason that you enjoyed using it. And you might even want to keep it in your back pocket for special occasions. But there is that idea that I'm going to find another thing and switch to that, which I know a lot of people complained they didn't have that feeling from Pillars, because you could keep enchanting something all the way up to Mythic and then put Durgan Steel on it.

 

 

And if a weapon is a Flaming weapon, and you want to advance that to something else, you can change the Flaming property into, for example, a Flaming Burst, or you can change it into a Flaming Chain where the flame hit will actually bounce to other people.

I have suggested enchant crafting several times. Was thinking of a system where you could combine a subset of known/learned enchants (that match the item) to any weapon. (always wanted to have annihilation/wounding with speed ^^)

 

Looks like Obsidian decided to give something similar to Tyranny's sigil expressions/enhancements a try. Kinda curious how it will work out. I just ask for a lot of play-testing for balance reasons.

 

This also partially explains the need in ceiling. As such enchants have potential to get out of hand. On the other hand, they could still be gated by character level limitation...

Edited February 6, 2017 by MaxQuest

[Boeroer]

Sure, all those things need to be balanced. But I'm talking about simple quality enchantments at the moment which won't turn your simple dagger into the best weapon in the game. It's just a way to keep up with the new stuff in terms of quality (fine,exceptional and so on) while putting money and ingredients into it.

 

Because Josh explicitly said that they want to prevent that you enchant your early noob weapon to legendary but are forced to equip a new one. That's what totally puzzled me. Why on earth would you want that? It also keeps players from enchanting until the late game because they don't want to waste resources on stuff they will throw away anyways.

 

He obviously has some reaons to think this is a good thing, I just can't figure out which obscure reasons those might be. 

Edited February 6, 2017 by Boeroer

[MaxQuest]

Because Josh explicitly said that they want to prevent that you enchant your early noob weapon to legendary but are forced to equip a new one. That's what totally puzzled me.

Agreed. Cannot think of any balance-related explanation either.

Maybe only of a "realism" related one:

You find a rusty dagger.

- You cannot apply a Flaming Burst enchant to it. The dagger will crumble.

- You can polish it a bit, and increase it's quality by a limited amount. Maybe you will even be able to enchant it with something basic.

- But you still cannot increase it's capacity enough to hold a powerful enchant. A rusty piece of iron, won't become mithril.

Having low level weapons (of low-level metals?) have limited capacity removes the necessity in unrealistic gating based on character-level. Also it gives you incentive to periodically dive into a latter game content in order to get that [i+1] weapon earlier (be it good or bad).

 

Tbh it wasn't an issue for me. But maybe Josh was emailed with tons of immersion-breaking reviews?

Anyway, that's the only reason that I can think of right now.

Edited February 6, 2017 by MaxQuest

[Boeroer]

Man, this immersion crêpe* really annoys me.

 

*excuse my french 

[DozingDragon]

Maybe this will be implemented with a material system? Maybe this is how March Steel will be superior to Wyflan? In that case, maybe we will be to upgrade the materials?

[Pasi]

I have an idea for simple enchanting mechanic: enchantment transfer. Pick one enchantment from an item, pay gold and transfer it to other item of your choosing, destroying former item in the proces. Of course you would place some restrictions on this system, like one transfer per item to prevent crafting op weapons. With that system all unique items could be used, either to be wielded by a character or used as a source of an enchantment. 

[blotter]

Because Josh explicitly said that they want to prevent that you enchant your early noob weapon to legendary but are forced to equip a new one. That's what totally puzzled me. Why on earth would you want that? It also keeps players from enchanting until the late game because they don't want to waste resources on stuff they will throw away anyways.

 

I'm not sure if this is necessarily the reason why they decided to implement an enchantment ceiling, but Sawyer does also reference complaints from others that they don't get much of a sense of progressing to new and better weapons throughout the game. If this ceiling is an effort to enforce that, I'd tend to agree that this particular method has no real advantages over introducing new weapons with interesting features of their own to entice players to switch over.

 

Similarly, I'd argue discovering new weapon enchantment options and materials can provide a similar sense of progression and excitement for the player, but this ceiling would adversely affect it by limiting the player's options for applying them to their existing equipment.

 

 

 Agreed. Cannot think of any balance-related explanation either.

 

 

Limiting the range of weapons/armor that happens to be worth the players' time and resources to enchant could make it easier to balance equipment in the sense that it might spare developers the effort of considering powerful enchantment combinations that may arise by advancing unique low-level items. That's about the only thing I can think of, and it would only make sense if particular item qualities only existed for certain low-level weapons, armor, or accessories. Of course, that would make this decision even more objectionable to me and, I suspect, to others since it would increase the incentive to hold on to such unique equipment.

[HoopleDoople]

The hunt for ever better gear provides a lot of motivation and reward for players to continue their journey. Allowing early gear to be enhanced to end-game quality detracts from this. On the other hand, allowing early gear to be enhanced to end-game quality allows for a wider variety of end-game builds. You definitely don't want to end up with one weapon always being THE weapon for a specific class or weapon type (like the Holy Avenger in BG2, which also could be acquired long before the end-game).

 

What baffles me is I thought PoE already solved this problem. There is a limited amount of crafting material necessary to upgrade early gear end-game quality. You can make a few of your early favorites end-game gear but you'll definitely want to use some items that already come with high level enchantments. With the White March expansions the total number of upgrades allowed may be slightly higher than ideal, but that's a simple numbers change in PoE2.

 

I think the real issues with limited weapon progression in PoE are the limited number of competitive unique weapons and the act 2 quest explosion. If you wanted to use a Pike, for example, your option is really just Tall Grass, which can be acquired fairly early. The vast majority of game content becomes available early in act 2 so players can seek out much of their preferred gear fairly early on. Stricter pacing allows for a smoother gear progression, though it is debatable to what extent this is worth the loss of freedom.

[anameforobsidian]

As more time passes I think there's a growing divide between people who loved PE's systems and people who were lost, confused, or dismayed.  I count myself among the former.  However, how many times have you heard the following complaints on the forums?

 

1. Weapons are boring, none of them do anything special.
2. Enchants make every weapon generic.
3. Health is confusing / perverse incentives.
4. I hate the rest system.  I want to be a master blaster every fight.
5. Engagement is destroying MURICA!!!!1!
6. Elaborate & well-researched complaints that the speed system makes no sense and may in fact have gained sentience.

 

You know as well as I that we see them all the goddamn time.  Josh's reasoning in trying to fix this is hardly mysterious.  Josh is perhaps over-reacting to criticism, at the expense of the few but devoted people who love the system.  Here's been Josh's response to each:

 

1. More soul-bounds.
2. Limited Enchantments.
3. Getting rid of health with (justified) trepidation.
4. Minimizing per-rest abilities, while slyly including them in regenerating resources like grimoires and empower.
5. Making engagement class and item specific.
6. Slowing down the overall speed of combat and working on the interface.

 

I would respond to the complaints with the following:

1. The combination of soul-bound weapons made flashier weapons for more casual players to love and left unremarkable weapons for number crunchers (marking, prone on crit).  Stormcaller vs. Borresaine is really interesting for grognards, and non-grogs already have Stormcaller.  In essence the status quo works.
2. Soul-bounds are the fix to this too.  The flashiest weapons can't be enchanted, and the enchants now fill the gaps for non-grogs.
3. The grey bar made the whole thing pretty plain.  Perverse incentives don't exist with wounds; wounds do nasty stat damage.
4. The rest system is excellent, providing both carrots and sticks, even if game-y.  Also, some players like the strategic element.
5. Chill codexian.  That said, I think the engagement changes sound mostly reasonable.
6. I think the speed system could be fixe....  THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THE SPEED SYSTEM!  NOW LET'S TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH WE LOVE OUR HUMAN ORGANS.  THEY ARE NOT SLOW, WET, OR GROSS AT ALL.

Edited February 7, 2017 by anameforobsidian

[draego]

anameforobsidian

 

mic drop

[JerekKruger]

Engagement is destroying MURICA!!!!1!

 

Wasn't this a core part of Trump's election campaign?

[limaxophobiacq]

Yeah, I also think this is a terrible idea. A lot of the most fun and best looking weapons and armors in PoE come pretty early in Defiance Bay and Dyrford; all the high interrupt weapons (Mosquito/Vile Loner/Shatterstar), Hour of St. Rumbalt, Tall Grass, and Borresaine, as well as Angio's Gambeson, Sanguine Plate etc.

 

It would suck to not be able to build around the abilities of those items just because the game forces you to throw them away for something with higher numbers on it in the late game, which would only be fixed by creating other items with pretty much the same abilities that are of the same weapon/armor-category but with higher numbers but then what is even the point? You're just making a Sanguine Plate Mk2 for us to find in the late game when you could have just let us keep our Sanguine Plate and increase the numbers on it.

Edited February 8, 2017 by limaxophobiacq

[illathid]

Eh, I get the concern. I had most of my equipment set pretty early so it made every new item I picked up essentially became vendor trash. This wasn't a huge deal for me but I could see it being a problem for some people. 

[JerekKruger]

I feel like the solution is not to enforce a ceiling on how high early equipment can be enchanted, it's to ensure that the variety in unique enchantments is sufficiently wide so as to make later items still be appealing.

 

I think the problem with vanilla PoE was that none of the unique enchantments were particularly exciting (there were better ones and worse ones, but they were all pretty bland), and whilst the White March I improved this a lot, this suddenly meant that a lot of the most interesting items were available fairly early on, pretty much ensuring that later items would all feel disappointing.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

I feel like the solution is not to enforce a ceiling on how high early equipment can be enchanted, it's to ensure that the variety in unique enchantments is sufficiently wide so as to make later items still be appealing.

 

I think the problem with vanilla PoE was that none of the unique enchantments were particularly exciting (there were better ones and worse ones, but they were all pretty bland), and whilst the White March I improved this a lot, this suddenly meant that a lot of the most interesting items were available fairly early on, pretty much ensuring that later items would all feel disappointing.

Yeah, this is the real issue.

 

As an example, take Blunderbuss cipher. If you build a character for that weapon, you have three real options:

 

Leadspitter at level 4/5, which has rending and is good and effective the whole game, especially since rending is ultra important in a blunderbuss vs. armored targets.

 

Scion Mica's Roar, which you don't get till late game in Hearthsong *and* it's debuff got dramatically nerfed by a patch, so it's not nearly good enough to make up for the loss of rending from Leadspitter

 

Silver Flash in White March, which would be a real alternative except that it literally inflicts a blind effect on your other party members.

 

So everyone uses Leadspitter the whole game. Which is fine.

 

I'm with Boeroer on this, I very much like the current item system. The answer is better alternative items, not adding in efficacy caps on the items you get early.

[Boeroer]

To solve the "problem" (if you think it is one) you'd only have to put more exciting enchantments (which the player can't apply by himself) on late game weapons.

 

So, for example instead of capping quality enchantments on early game weapons and thus preventing them to reach superb or legendary or whatever, you could introduce more potent and/or special enchantments on late game gear to make them more appealing.

 

This way a player who likes his spear which "only" has higher interrupt than a normal spear can keep using it. It will not be the most potent weapon in the game, but at least it can keep up in terms of quality via enchantments (=acc and damage bonuses). You don't necessarily have to throw it away.

 

In PoE most of the late game stuff wasn't significantly better in terms of cool enchantments - often only in quality. So put more creativity and efford into developing new exciting enchantments instead of putting time and work into a system which takes something away from the game.  

 

Edit: and by the way putting a great weapon right at the end of the game is not the best decision in my opinion. Except if you can carry it over to a new playthrough.

From the B to the E to the R to the A...

Edited February 8, 2017 by Boeroer

[JerekKruger]

The later enchantments don't even need to be more powerful, they just need to be varied and interesting enough that, upon finding a new enchanted weapon, it's not a simple matter of which one is better or worse.

 

For example, which is better: a sword that allows the wielder to turn invisible once per encounter for 5s or a sword that allows the wielder to blink 15 yards once per encounter? It might be that, after lots of testing one becomes clearly better than the other, but at the very least if I have one of those and I pick up the other I will pause to consider which I prefer, and perhaps even try both out for a while.

 

Edit: and by the way putting a great weapon right at the end of the game is not the best decision in my opinion.

 

I completely agree. I want to actually spend some time playing with my fancy toys rather than be given them with only a handful of fights remaining in the game.

[Boeroer]

What does work quite well though is to place a powerful item with charges right at the end. Nobody uses those except in the final fight.

Edited February 8, 2017 by Boeroer

[anameforobsidian]

A bunch of comments are pointing to the most noticeable problem.  This will mean a lot more work for Obsidian.  If you need to have multiple uniques per weapon type and level they have to make and place a ****-ton of special weapons. Weapon type has become more important given single-weapon proficiencies.  

 

There are around 28 weapon types right now.  To maintain class diversity they should offer at least two per level stage (early-mid, late-mid, end).  That'll mean six weapons.  That's hard to place at a density that makes loot feel significant.  I expect they might walk this back a bit during development.

[limaxophobiacq]

Weapon type has become more important given single-weapon proficiencies. 

 

Wait what? I've missed this, are weapon focuses now just for one kind of weapon, like Weapon Focus: Greatsword, Weapon Focus: Pistol etc.?

 

That seems like a bad idea that will either make in necessary to place far more different weapons in the game like you say or people will have to wait for lists to be made for all the loot available in the game before they can make a decision on what weapon focus to take, instead of a system like in PoE were you can really take any weapon focus and be fine.

Edited February 8, 2017 by limaxophobiacq

[draego]

 

Weapon type has become more important given single-weapon proficiencies. 

 

Wait what? I've missed this, are weapon focuses now just for one kind of weapon, like Weapon Focus: Greatsword, Weapon Focus: Pistol etc.?

 

That seems like a bad idea that will either make in necessary to place far more different weapons in the game like you say or people will have to wait for lists to be made for all the loot available in the game before they can make a decision on what weapon focus to take, instead of a system like in PoE were you can really take any weapon focus and be fine.

 

 

Its not going to give accuracy like focus though. They said it would unlock a module that does something special with that weapon. 

[draego]

I would like to hear more about this from obsidian. The example of a flaming sword can up in the callofcthulhu twitch today. So josh said the flaming sword will be the flaming sword in the game (implying the only one) which is fine but what if you find that weapon early in the game. Does this mean in the late game the sword will be useless because it can be enchanting to keep up? I mean if you cant find another flaming sword why not let players upgrade it.

Edited February 15, 2017 by jnb0364