Legendary crafting recipes have received several changes:
Philosophy
- Legendary crafted items are meant to be both a stepping stone into end game items and a good place to spend crafting materials at the end game. While we like the fantasy of having the unique crafting materials, obtaining them was either keeping too many people from being able to complete the recipes in a timely manner or encouraging game flipping and similar less than ideal patterns of play in order to acquire them. As such, we are removing the requirement for unique items when crafting Legendaries.
Unique crafting materials are no longer required
- Legendary crafting materials will no longer drop
- Existing Legendary crafting materials will now be grey and have had their sell prices increased
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This is yet another example of how the game designers did not fully flesh out this system during the development process.
First of all, it went completely against their original philosophy where one of the things they wanted to get away from, was the targeted farming that was prevalent in D2 (Mephisto and Baal runs for example). Yet this is exactly the system they went with for legendary crafting materials (certain monsters dropping these materials). Thus they should have known their design would result in the game flipping behavior.
I do understand that an ulterior motive of this design was to give players a reason to farm other areas of the game. The implementation once again turned out to be lacking as #1, there was just too many unique crafting materials which needed to be chased down (with each tied to a specific monster). If the objective was to get players to play other parts of the game, then the amount of specific materials should be much less, and can also be acquired by just playing the game (like demonic essences for example).
Simple rule of thumb -> KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
Secondly as was noted, crafted legendary/set items are meant to be a stepping stone. However, if you look at many profiles, many players have nearly the same setup (Ring of Royal Grandeur) with two pieces of Aughild’s (usually shoulder and bracers) because the eHP and elite damage bonus provided are too good to ignore or Born’s/Captain Crimsons if building a cooldown reduction build.. By gating drops with RNG (though they’ve now given many set items the same quality weighting as Blackthornes – meaning that one now stands a better chance at completing set items), many players are utilizing crafted items as end game gear.
That’s an unsurprising design flaw which is again due to the root cause issue being the poor itemization and extremely underwhelming legendary items (because all they’ve been doing since the original launch has been trying to put out these fires, which prevents them from spending the sort of time they should be on giving the ideas, design, and content, depth.
As mentioned in my previous post, I’m playing D2 again. Even 14 years later, the Act II quest where you retrieve the Horadric Cube, the shaft, and the headpiece of the Horadric Staff, is a perfect example of a well executed design. I can essentially do any of these three tasks in any order (though I usually get the cube first since one of the first things I always did was begin converting all my rejuvenation potions into full ones, transmuting those gem chips into slightly better ones which will go towards giving me my next power boost, etc).
Haedrig and Covetous have of course replaced the functionality of the cube in D3 (cube recipes were one of trial and error discovery though – sort of a mini-game in its own way; PoE uses a similar system where certain items that are vendored together, will craft a better item). I do realize that the general market demographic Blizzard wants to cater to (a wide range) means this kind of system (where recipes need to be figured out) will never be included in the game again.
And as I noted in some other previous post, there was a lot of potential which the devs could have done with all of this clutter (like being able to convert them into other regeants or being used towards increasing the quality of ones items). I mean they had a system like that in vanilla (converting ten pages of jewelcrafting plus some gold, into one tome of secret).
But instead of making all these items worthwhile (consolidating them into just two unique regeants; one for legendary crafting and the other for set item crafts) and allowing them to drop anywhere in the game world, they went and shot the horse again by completely removing all of that content. What I’m looking at is the amount of wasted design hours (both graphically and algorithmically) which had they not gone this route, could have been better spent on say, making a lot more legendary items better.
Is this surprising? No. Arena PvP with Team Deathmatch also amounted to wasted time and resources. Loot 2.0 ended up being a colossal waste of 1.25+ year because as I’ve noted ad nauseum, it ended up being just a bandaid fix which didn’t even improve itemization. And this is why I believe Seasons/Tiered Rifts, will end up being similarly underwhelming (it will sound good on paper but the execution and implementation will follow the exact same pattern as the above). And even though it will be on PTR, people need to remember the developers tend to tune out on most of that feedback except the most egregious ones where they also see balance issues (closed beta during vanilla and RoS as evidence).
