U75 Preview 2: Chill of Ravenloft Loot

[Kitty2Meow]

Hello, everyone! We have a new Lamannia today with your first look at items for Update 75: The Chill of Ravenloft. For those of you familiar with the Isle of Dread and the Dino Bone crafting system, you should find this system to be very similar - Named items have a number of Lamordia Augment Slots in place of base effects. Using ingredients you find in every chest in the expansion, you create Augments that can fit in those slots. We'll get into more specifics below!

Quick Overview on Feedback:

• This is the first look! It's very likely there are places where an item isn't great, or has a static effect that overlaps with the crafting system. Just let us know, and we'll make adjustments as needed.
• Feedback that actually tested on Lamannia is infinitely more valuable than feedback that didn't. Let us know if you got on the server to take things for a test drive!
• The feedback we're most likely to act on:
  • Tells us what you want to see. Just telling us you don't like something is fine, but we're more likely to act when knowing what you DO want to see.
  • Isn't hyperbolic or overly generalized. Feedback that takes the time to discuss specifics of what you do and don't like is more likely to be acted on than "this is trash" or "this is the best/worst thing ever" with no elaboration.
  • Any posts with personal attacks will be entirely ignored and the post dealt with per the forum rules.

I see there is a Solar Gem of Dodge Cap, but I don't see a Gem of Maximum Dexterity Bonus. Will there be Gem of Maximum Dexterity Bonus as well?

 

[Kitty2Meow]

Additionally, You have a 10/16/33% chance (on Normal/Hard Elite) to get something from the Named Item Table.

• Once you have reached the Named Item Table, you have a chance to get one of the following:
  • Standard Named Item A
  • Standard Named Item B
  • Standard Named Item C
  • Standard Named Item D
  • Sun/Moon Augment 1 (Sun/Moon Augments have a lower chance of appearing than the Named Items above.)
  • Sun/Moon Augment 2
  • Sun/Moon Augment 3
  • Small chance to upgrade to the Rare Item Table. (The odds of reaching this table are higher than in past content).
    • Standard Named Items listed above are unique to that dungeon, like most end chest items in the game.
    • Sun/Moon Augments listed above are a mix of brand-new Sun/Moon Augments (see below) and ones introduced previously (giving access beyond the packs they were introduced in).
    • Once you have reached the Rare Item Table, you have a chance to get one of the following:
      • Rare Named Item A
      • Rare Sun/Moon Augment 1 (In a few dungeons, this may be Rare Named Item B)
      • Rare Sun/Moon Augment 2

Hi SteelStar,

Would you be able to disclose the % of the "Small chance to upgrade to the Rare Item Table." ?

Thanks.

 

[pirotessa]

Hi SteelStar,

Why do you keep asking for player feedback and not using it? Please refer to this thread you started for any number of ideas on effects for weapons/armor that are currently not included or available through dino-bone crafting.

https://forums.ddo.com/index.php?threads/steelstar-asks-u69-3-what-effects-are-hard-to-find-on-quest-loot.14479/

Pretty sure nobody asked for Dino crafting 2.0 with all of the same effects with higher bonuses.

 

[droid327]

Pretty sure nobody asked for Dino crafting 2.0 with all of the same effects with higher bonuses.

I actually dont mind that there are direct upgrades as you progress through Legendary

It just sucks they're on weapons, and transferring sentience is so onerous...

 

[Lichcrak]

Hi SteelStar,

Would you be able to disclose the % of the "Small chance to upgrade to the Rare Item Table." ?

Thanks.

Data miners have it at 6% doubt SSG will say it

 

[Wongar]

I will echo what many others have said in the thread - the grind for loot as proposed is just too great for me. This was already the first expansion I did not purchase top tier on per-release, now it looks like it may be the first expansion I don't get at all. I can't subject my self to the pain again and will need to find something else if this is the permanent direction.

For reference, I ransacked several chests every week on multiple toons for more than 9 months in MD without ever seeing several items drop. Like many others - I finally just gave up and quit trying. I ran a first life toon on different server for a fresh start, live off the land run while I was farming MD for my mains on my main server. I ran most of it solo (no friends on server and no LFMs) It ended up taking me 98 quests runs over 14 weeks of ransacking Portal to Below on reaper to pull the fallen age shield. I never saw any rares drop, but I lost count of how many times I got bracers and boots - so many bracers and boots... The rng is just too bad with the number of items in the chest - even without the rares.

I absolutely hate the raid boss rares in the wilderness - especially when I had to try and solo them on a 1st life build. Devs have to remember that not everyone is always playing maxed out DPS toons in a full group, and that some classes just have bad boss DPS. On an every thing possible complete melee DPS toon, they are easy. On a first life DPS caster cleric, they were absolutely horrid - not hard, just the enormous bag of HP coupled with low DPS I got so frustrated/bored I did not even finish either on the 1st lifer. I'm not asking for a participation trophy, I just think we need something better than mind numbing casts for a 1/2 hour+ on a giant bag of hitpoints with no real threat and no skill required.

I am fine with rare loot and chase items and understand RNG can be unkind. It took me years to pull a jibbers. I have opened countless chest in Saltmarsh, think I have over 500 star fragments in the bank, and have never seen a Nebula. I'm OK with this because both were nice to have but not required items. It's the multiple rares per chest that are required to fill out a gear set that I can not accept.


My suggestion (mostly repeating what others have said)

- Provide a way to get loot that is not RNG dependent. Trading collectibles like sands does is a proven (implemented copy paste?) method

- Reduce the number of items in the loot table. You should never be looking at 100 runs to get a common item
-- Have three or four named items max in end chest on the main loot roll
-- Put augments on a separate roll
-- Put rares on a separate roll

- Make rares an incremental upgrade to "common" named items so that entire gearsets are not locked behind getting a rare item.
-- This makes rares a chase item and not a required item

- Do not gate items behind the wilderness raid boss rares
-- No rares in wilderness chests is a good start
-- Maybe scale the rares based off the party so they are still doable by a low life, non-optimized build. Remeber, wilderness areas are "Normal" and should be accessible by normal toons.

 

[Dom]

Yes, just like using a skill augment isn’t going to break your build.

They aren’t great - but they will get used.

You're right, it won't break it, it'll just make it worse

 

[HolyPoek]

I hope by next preview we can maybe see a few more stats on items such as:
Insightfull Doubleshot
Quality Deadly
Profane Lifeforce

Those are some stats that we used to get from previous gear (for example University archer's Cloak in vecna) and its very hard to move forward with new gear without new usefull sources for these stats.

 

[Wisefreelancer]

The Leg HP trinket stood out, and some kind of restriction is needed. My vote is artefact like most other people it seems!

Leaving drop rate commentary to others, I really like the way the loot is set up this time:

• At first I was disappointed its mostly a copy of Dino bone crafting - even though that was fun, its not many levels away. A few more augment options would be good - some way to get dripping magma and its new variants is kind of needed to compete with more recent weapons, for example.
• The actual items are done much better than Dread Isles though. More crafting slots in general even on the normal loot makes it more flexible. But even better there are some really exciting effects in the non-crafted stuff. Qual Assassinate, that Sound power from LGS, the Leg HP trinket. Stuff I'd want to slot and craft on, not just pick at random because the augments are the best
• One exception - not enough insightful spellpowers! They are such a pain to slot...
• SOOO pleased to see Sun/Moon sticking around and being built on. Separating it from loot table shenanigans, its the best loot innovation in years for me

Only downside is no new filigrees again - its starting to feel abandoned. I get they would probably be a big amount of work alongside so many new augments and crafting stuff this round, but I really hope they are back in the not too distant future.

The warlock item choices are interesting - its now possible to get 15 dice from set and item effects (excluding filigree) which is a lot of power to put directly on gear. You can get a lot of SA dice on gear which I guess is similar (although not 15!) but there's also a lot more SA dice to go round generally so I don't really know if it might be too much.

 

[Erofen]

RE: Legendary Heartshard: Yes, though I'm considering either bumping that % down or elevating this item to be an Artifact. Thoughts on which?

My vote is bumping it down rather than making it an artifact. The amount of customizability is fun for a non-artifact. Dread didn't give us that option.

 

[Erofen]

Also, spell crit chance needs more item love. Please.

 

[Drachmor]

Can the salt effect match LGS/Threats effect rather than the IOD effect?

What does this mean btw? Is there a Salt effect from IOD crafting? I’m familiar with it from LGS + Threats

 

[Dom]

What does this mean btw? Is there a Salt effect from IOD crafting? I’m familiar with it from LGS + Threats

It's the Black Sands Desire rare raid augment. It applies the salt effect a lot slower than LGS and Threats

 

[Treefolk]

We've adjusted that in Lamordia by:
- Raising the rate of reaching the Rare Table
- Locking the number of Rare Items to 3

Oh, this is horrid. hundreds of runs for a single gear drop??? .33% * .05% * .33% --> .54% per open??? Hard pass. I'll reiterate this once again, if the rare loot is here to stay it should be on a unique slot from the rest of the loot (so that it rolls separately). Reductive multiplicative stacking is a punishing and unfun mechanic when used for rewards and extremely disrespectful of a player's time and effort.

As it stands, I'm completely disinterested in rare loot as a chase / mechanic. My experience so far with it involves working on some gear tetris, tripping across an item that would be *perfect* only to see the (rare) tag on the loot and it completely kills my interest and motivation. Having come back from a few year hiatus, I've overall been really impressed with the amount of "Quality of Life" creep I've seen in game; the ladder at the start of VoN4 in case you fall down, being able to purchase old Sands named items with the brass tokens that drop, updates to Chronoscope loot, the list goes on. This insistence of "regular gear" as ultra-rare chase items is a drastic departure from what I've been observing. Making interesting characters and gearing them is what keeps me engaged and part of what led to my hiatus was a dedicated month and a half farming effort where a conventionally available named item didn't drop for me and there was no other recourse (#unlucky). Getting excited over the perfect piece of gear and then learning that I'll probably never get to play with it is extremely disheartening, akin to Lucy, Charlie Brown, and that football. I'll just do something else instead.

Stick these rare items in the saga rewards, let me crunch the regular named items into currency to purchase them directly, make them show up on every 3 completion of the associated quest, something! Make sure that there's some deterministic "sweat effort" method to obtain them. Without any other options to obtain this loot, they might as well not be implemented in the game in the first place.

 

[Aaumini]

Make chromatic augments a separate loot chance. On older named loot you get both the named item AND the set slot rolled into one drop. Now you need two drops, and they even compete for the same drop chance?

I can live with the rare chances if you undilute (is that even a word) the loot table.

I think that people posting chances overlook that in groups not everyone needs the same rare drops all the time so you “should” get more chances to get a specific item as a group.

 

[Magesty/Hawc/Scaredycat]

So, this is explicit confirmation that the rare table is here to stay as a long-term addition to the game.

Want a rare item? 33% named item table x 6% rare table chance according to data miners x 33% for the one item you want.

Players don’t understand what these numbers mean.

33% sure, not so bad. 1 in 3.

6% is just a little more than 1 in 17.

Then 3 named items means 33% again, pretty much.

To get a single rare item you need is then one in 3x~17x3 = 150 pulls. Just for a single rare item that you need.

But that is averaged over many pulls. On average, 50% of your farming attempts will drop one after 104 pulls. And 10% will wait, on average, 345 pulls.

So if you need multiple rare items or even just want to ever see them, you need thousands and thousands of pulls.

104 pulls means 15 weeks of ransacks just for even odds of getting a single targeted item. That 10% (which isn’t even an outlier! It’s only 1/10!) is 49 weeks of ransacks. Now we’re talking about 10% of people who want a particular rare item will need to ransack a single chest every week for a year to get it to drop.

An actual outlier at the 99% level (if we have 40,000 players that’s 400 people - not insignificant) that number gets up to 689 pulls.

Just for ONE targeted rare item.

This isn’t a game anymore. Something has gone terribly wrong with @SteelStar and their design priorities.

This lays out why I almost never farm and never for anything that is rare. Farming is not fun, never has been. I equip all my charactrers, and I have six mains that I play alot, based on what I have gotten, it works fine, it's fun. Maybe give that a try? People in life get fixated on things.

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

I can't think of any way to make this gear work on a caster without Elder's set.

Right now Elder's, Vecna caster set bonus, IOD caster set bonus and Autumn set bonuses provide a stacking 6% with the sun spell critical chance sun augment. I haven't tested cooking the books set, but that might also stack.

Please consider making one of the Chills of ravenloft crafting slots have the 6% artifact bonus that stacks with the sun augment. There are other options, but one option should not be nerfing those sets and reducing caster dps further.

 

[Flopperjack]

The dreadful *element* heroic weapon crafted augments have error string text and do not describe what they do.


Also is the correct value in place for weapon effects on heroic? Crafting UI and the actual crafted augment say 1d6 damage even though at level 8 the standard scaling is 3d6.

Furthermore, the shields initially seem a little underwhelming and it does not appear you can craft on them, could we maybe get them spruced up with more shield centered stats like shield bashing, shield spikes, and guardbreaking perhaps? Or are they intended to allow for crafting on it? if that is the case they could still stand to benefit from both weapon and accessory augments to be able to be considered against things like the ferrocrystal shield that is level 5.

I will also echo what another has posted here, I think it is wonderful to be able to craft items for the level so you arent shoved into specific gearsets where generally the individual items didnt fit the build but the set was nice; however, i also think a 1:1 translation of iod crafting, especially for heroics is not ideal, much of the crafting system in iod was definitely built around maximizing stats with stacking bonuses, but in heroics the values for those stacking bonuses is so small it is not worth much, I would suggest for heroics to swap the insightful/quality crit damage for crit chance instead, either making it an enhancement/insight for the two or make it insight/quality since there is decent availability for enhancement crit chance already and i think the effect would be felt more without being too strong. As for the crafting system being a 1:1 to iod overall, i have some mixed feelings about it, on the one hand i like that it would offer a straight upgrade of iod gear overall, on the other, it loses a bit of luster because iod and lamordia are so close in legendary level that iod will pretty much become irrelevant since lamordia is mostly the same but stronger with not much difference that i can see where theres something in iod i want that lamordia doesnt have or vice versa.

I would like to also bring up that it was not too long ago that the devs had stated they wanted to consolidate and reduce the number of crafting sytems because we had a kajillion, but with this we are doing a complete 180 from that and have a new crafting system almost every expansion and it does make it a bit overwhelming. I do not however have a good idea for addressing this because it would run counter to my previous comment of it feeling bad having lamordia crafting be a 1:1 of iod because it would be turning it into a bland cookie cutter crafting system to consolidate the crafting systems unless we could make a generic one and the expansions could each have a handful of unique effects they offer to flavor the crafting but that is for another thread.

P.S. Enhanced ghostly augment is in heroic crafting table and idk if you guys want that at level 8 or want to downgrade that to a regular ghostly and drop the ghostly/deathblock aug or modify it or drop enhanced ghostly.

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

What does this mean btw? Is there a Salt effect from IOD crafting? I’m familiar with it from LGS + Threats

IOD has a SALT effect that drops in the raids, but it builds up stacks from 0 so is generally less effective than LGS SALT with the exception there are some "not working as intended" interactions that are kind of fun.

 

[Klorox]

RE: Legendary Heartshard: Yes, though I'm considering either bumping that % down or elevating this item to be an Artifact. Thoughts on which?

My vote is bumping it down rather than making it an artifact. The amount of customizability is fun for a non-artifact. Dread didn't give us that option.

I agree with Erofen, here. Would prefer % turned down rather than it be an artifact.

If the 10% augment from MD wasn't an impossible drop, I would vote artifact.