Update 63 Preview 2: Card of Curse Cleansing

[rabidfox]

So how do the bonuses get applied to the items?

You pick 12 cards (I guess no duplicates) and you add ones you want on your item... then you apply the deck to the item and you get one of the random twelve?

12 cards of each type, so 48 cards total = 1 deck. Deck then gets applied to an item.

 

[Mordenkainen]

12 cards of each type, so 48 cards total = 1 deck. Deck then gets applied to an item.

wow so it's literally 1 out of 48 chance to get the one you want.

 

[rabidfox]

wow so it's literally 1 out of 48 chance to get the one you want.

No. The cards don't have anything to do with the effects at all. There's 4 types of cards that drop that are combined to make a deck. It's literally just eating 4 slots of inventory space vs 1 type of card dropping and needing 48 of them. The effect applied by a deck is RNG off a big list (around 70 something choices).

 

[Mordenkainen]

No The cards don't have anything to do with the effects at all. There's 4 types of cards that drop that are combined to make a deck. It's literally just eating 4 slots of inventory space vs 1 type of card dropping and needing 48 of them. The effect applied by a deck is RNG off a big list (around 70 something choices).

So... you need to collect all 48 cards including rares. And then after all that you get 1 out of 70+ chance to get the effect on your item you want.

This ain't worth it, not by a longshot. The smart people will be selling completed decks and/or those cleansing cards.

Anyway,

 

[rabidfox]

So... you need to collect all 48 cards including rares. And then after all that you get 1 out of 70+ chance to get the effect on your item you want.

What? I don't think I can explain is more basically than I already have. There's only 4 card types. You need 12 of each; 48 total. There's no rare cards, there's not 48 different cards.

 

[Mordenkainen]

What? I don't think I can explain is more basically than I already have. There's only 4 card types. You need 12 of each; 48 total. There's no rare cards, there's not 48 different cards.

Don't understand.

If you listen to Cord's stream today he definitely said there were common,uncommon, and rare cards.

 

[rabidfox]

Don't understand.

If you listen to Cord's stream today he definitely said there were common,uncommon, and rare cards.

And unless they changed something from what I saw on lam, he was likely talking about the effects applied via the deck. With some being more likely than others to apply.

 

[Mordenkainen]

And unless they changed something from what I saw on lam, he was likely talking about the effects applied via the deck. With some being more likely than others to apply.

That's even worse. So that means the really good ones can be like 1 in 1000 chance of getting.

This is just ... wow, not even worth it at all.

 

[Kelledren]

Thought about this quite a bit this week and here's my honest feedback. Apologies for length but I have a lot to say so I hope the devs read. I went on Lam for preview 2 and crafted a bunch of items. This Cursed Card crafting concerns me a lot for a variety of reasons. I think it has the potential to really harm DDO and I hope you all reconsider putting this into the game.

First of all, it's so much power creep. At every level of the game. This is awful for DDO. Each bonus individually is minor but considering you can add one bonus to every piece of every gearset including weapons means as a combined whole it's going to make a big difference. I would prefer this be relegated to minor artifacts only, or weapons only, or items we loot from the upcoming 4 new quests only, or sentient weapons only, or something. Some kind of limit to the power creep. The game does not need to be made easier at every level. We already have issues with reaper getting too easy over time due to power creep. Please put limitations on what items this can be crafted on. Also once this goes live, there's no getting rid of it ever since it's crafting for nearly every item that is in DDO and will ever be in DDO. You'd have to powercreep it into irrelevance by commonly adding Fortune bonuses elsewhere on regular items.


If the intention is really for the cleanser to be for high value items and occasionally use only then it shouldn't be in the DDO store. I hope it isn't. Because if it's in the store and priced around what toolkits/bonepickers are, it being an occasional use item will not be the reality. Surely you all have to know this. The reality atleast at endgame is people will buy it in huge stacks to keep rolling the dice on getting the optimal effects. Which would be more pay to win than I'm comfortable with, and I really don't like that. I hope the whole system being designed to have so much RNG is not to encourage people to buy mass amounts of the these in the store. Most endgame gearsets are optimized consisting of items unreasonable to reattain like those with high reaper/mythic bonuses and raid gear so reattaining the items to try again isn't a realistic option. And even if you did retain, it's only 1 extra roll of the dice on the effects list anyway so it's far from a reasonable solution.

I understand and do not expect optimizing gearsets to be easy but I do expect it to be possible if we put the work in. Such as the raid set augment crafting in DDO. Those augment set bonuses are a huge amount of work to attain but I do not complain about them because they're directly farmable. Put in the work and you will attain them. Under this system for Cursed Card crafting however, it's for all intents and purposes impossible to optimize your gearset. This is because no direct path to working towards our optimal gearset exists since the crafting is all RNG with no recrafting option directly farmable, with what appears to be 50+ effects possible based on the lists players in this thread have compiled. And I assume the % chance to get the effects won't even be uniform across that list and won't be made public by the devs so we won't even know the % chance to get the effect we're aiming for. I really really hate this.

This is all such a huge bummer since working towards an optimized gearset is the entire point of playing endgame in DDO for most players, and this system takes that away. Can you all just give us an option to craft the effect we want like almost every other crafting system? it's fine if it costs a lot more cards than the RNG option you're presenting now. Why does engaging in this crafting system have such a huge forced RNG component? I don't find it fun, it's just frustrating. If you polled players I guarantee you 90%+ of them would prefer the RNG be taken out entirely.

Please reconsider putting this into DDO.

Hi Axel,
I watched your video today and agree and disagree with a couple takes. I’ll start with the agree part- I am always worried about power creep too, but I am not sure how much these bonuses will add at end game at this point, particularly since it will take a long time to get the exact bonus you want. I do feel they should roll back on some of the epic and legendary monster nerfing they did with the stat squish, just a little (start with ~5%ish) to make the game and reaper a little harder. Imo this would address the root cause of the “this game is too easy now” crowd.
Now the disagree part. In your video you mentioned optimizing your gear many times. I don’t think this system was designed to do that. Sure sometimes you will get lucky and something would help you out at end game. And if you hit all your gear with curses- at some point you may have a couple decent bonuses- but I think that’s how you should look at this- just a random bonus. Maybe good, maybe bad, but just spin the wheel for just the fun of it. Now I know many people, partially myself included, try to grab every bonus possible for end game gear. But if you are able to look at this system as not part of that optimization grind, you will have more fun with it. We’ll see how often the cleansing cards drop- but I think many people will finally pull one, get all excited, then have another bad curse roll anyway.
Just got to look at it as a small chance of maybe something good vs no system or bonus at all. My take anyway.

 

[Vorph]

But I bet he'll trade the card for 2,000 Astral Shards and we'll earn another perma-player.

Or more likely he'll get fleeced with 100k platinum because you need astral shards to trade in astral shards and theres no real ingame way for newbs to gain them early on.

 

[Vorph]

I do feel they should roll back on some of the epic and legendary monster nerfing they did with the stat squish, just a little (start with ~5%ish) to make the game and reaper a little harder. Imo this would address the root cause of the “this game is too easy now” crowd.

Stats aren't what makes the game too easy, dumb and predictable ai is. You can scale stats all the way up to r10 and people can still pull the same tricks over the same dumb mobs. The only people that a 5% stat bump is going to make the game harder for is the same people that are already struggling it.

 

[Kelledren]

Stats aren't what makes the game too easy, dumb and predictable ai is. You can scale stats all the way up to r10 and people can still pull the same tricks over the same dumb mobs. The only people that a 5% stat bump is going to make the game harder for is the same people that are already struggling it.

Fair point Vorph. I don’t just want sacks of hit points either, but finding someway to increase the difficulty back up on mobs so they are not romfl stomped in low to mid reaps by a single blaster I believe would be a good thing. You don’t even need tricks to do this.

 

[Shear-buckler]

It is better to make the cleanser available like the legacy augment unslotters: for 1 copper piece.

The farm should be getting the curse. Not re-getting the item 140 times, or cleansers to skip re-getting the item once.

If cleansers are sold in the store for a dollar it changes to "you can now just buy perfect-cursed items for $140". What a fun game that would be, where you can realistically only buy the best items. That's the only thing worse than not having them drop or rarely.

I agree. You should just be able to override a curse with a new one and they should absolutely not be added to the store if they are not readily accessible in game.

 

[Rincewind]

I wish there was enough time to do this, but I think my solution for this cleanse (with the posible store p2w issues) vs override could be that every time you override a curse with another deck you need more, like double so 1,2,4,8,16,32. and this can all be deleted with a cleanse. that would not only remove the curse but also restart the number of decks needed to put a new curse in the item.
The numbers can be a little more forgiven, but you get the idea, this also follows thematically the idea of a curse.

 

[Smokewolf]

Hope that the cards are all tradeable... Otherwise it would be a missed opportunity to utilize the auction house, requiring players to buy more shards.

-Smoke

 

[Mordenkainen]

I'm telling you guys, the best thing to do is not embark upon this endless journey of grind in the first place.

 

[WickedSloth]

While the amount of RNG is just bonkers, I don't expect much change before live. With that said, I think choosing a desired "suit" with a specific group of stats would go a long way to smooth over the player base. Meaning, once someone completes a deck, they can choose to roll for a caster stat, a ranged stat, a melee stat, or a defensive stat. There are still enough curses to make the RNG abysmal, but this would make it less rage inducing.

 

[Mordenkainen]

While the amount of RNG is just bonkers, I don't expect much change before live. With that said, I think choosing a desired "suit" with a specific group of stats would go a long way to smooth over the player base. Meaning, once someone completes a deck, they can choose to roll for a caster stat, a ranged stat, a melee stat, or a defensive stat. There are still enough curses to make the RNG abysmal, but this would make it less rage inducing.

Or.. you know... just don't participate. Why is everyone so hell bent on doing what is obviously a scammy grindfest.

 

[WickedSloth]

If you think you can get any measurable number of players to sit out and protest the new shinnies, you will be sorely disappointed.

 

[TANUKING]

Imagine.
You are a Wizard.
You want to raise your DC with Deck of manycurse.
To do so, you need to get Spell DC+1 and Int +2.

Cleanse Item is so rare that you give up reattaching it,
I decided to choose two items from my equipment that are easy to farm and add Spell DC+1 and Int+2 to each of them.
I chose two items, Item A and Item B, and started farming QuestA and QuestB respectively.
Naturally, it did not give Spell DC+1 and Int +2, but I was lucky enough to get Spell DC+1 on Item A. However, I could not get Spell DC+1 on Quest A, but only Spell DC+1 on Quest B.
However, we need to continue Farming Quest A because Item B also has Spell DC+1 and Int +2. However, the Farm of Quest A must continue, because Item B may also receive Spell DC+1.
The Farm between QuestA and QuestB will continue until a combination of Spell DC+1 and Int+2 is achieved.

This is the amount of Farm for just two effects on just one character.
What happens if there are more effects you want to grant?
How many times more Farm would a player running multiple characters have?
Will the day come for you when you can update your equipment to match the DDO update?

Pay to win if Cleanse Item is sold in DDOshop.
Risk of reduced QOL if Cleanse Item drop is very low.

Is the Deck of manycurse being considered from the player's perspective?

I guess the days of peaceful Item farm for Mythic boost and Reaper bonus as of now will never come back.

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