U75 Preview 2: Chill of Ravenloft Loot

[Nickodeamous]

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

Agreed here.

I crafted boots specifically for quests that require 40 jump (when I dont have it yet). All skills can be crafted if and when you need it. No need to slot a skill (unless you absolutely have to while leveling).

 

[szczekus]

I looked more on heroic crafting. My thoughts:

- some Dolorous and Miserable heroic augments (Dreadful acid/spark, miserable acid, etc) seems to have "string table error"
- at least Miserable Arcana: Light description says it gives 70 equipment bonus to light spellpower (and added this amount in my character sheet), but item description say it gives 159 sp

Could we have more variety of enchantment augments (even unique enchantment) for this crafting (especially thinking about heroic version)?

My ideas:
- insightful spellpower
- equipment spell lore
- Cerulean Wave (or Freezing Ice)
- Transform Kinetic Energy or Energy Siphon
- On Harmful Spellcast: Sounding or Radiant Glory - or their equivalent in more proper dmg types (maybe need to scale it little down, but in general i think it will have much more use on heroic mid lvl than late epic-legendary items with these enhancements, when this amount of dmg is insignificant)
- some new On Harmful Spellcast enchantments, like vampirism (especially when all heroic blank weapons have vampirism 1, which not really address casters playstyle), body feeder, transmuted platinum, blind, confusion
-physically or spellbase triggered DoT effect like incineration/crushing wave

 

[Kimbere]

Treasure Tables:

• When opening a Quest End Chest:
  • /snip
    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

Thanks to dataminers for providing the below info. You provide a much appreciated service to the community.

Once you get it to the Named Item Table:
56% chance to get a named item
38% chance to get an augment
06% chance to move to the Rare Item Table.

For comparison, Myth Drannor and Night Brigade is 5% to get to the rare table.

This is great news! In response, I will be updating my New Game/Expansion Buying process to match.

I'll increase the percent chance of getting to buy a game on the rare list from 10% to 11%.

That will make my monthly chance of getting to buy The Chill of Ravenloft 0.73% instead of 0.66%. Maybe now I'll get lucky and be able to buy it sometime before 2035 instead of 2040.

I'm so excited!

 

[Ratman]

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.

And if I’m spending reroll shards, I really want (expect, TBH) to see an upgrade to the chance of loot. Maybe an extra 1% for every optional too. That encourages both playing and spending but gives you some hope. With 1600+ pulls on Goranthanil and zero artblade cloaks I have to say I’m pretty spent on spending.

 

[ACJ97F]

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:

Somehow... SSG can't figure out why we're just skipping buying expansions. With the staggering feedback from Myth Dee-dee-dee,
they had a meeting and still thought it would be a stellar plan to do exactly the same thing... combined with another crafting system.

/golfclap...

On the upside, all the money we're saving.

 

[Kimbere]

Heh, something just occurred to me. Basically, Chill of Ravenloft = Myth Drannor grind + dino crafting mats grind.

So after all the months of negative customer feedback about the MD rare loots, SSG's response is, "We hear you, really we do. We had hours and hours of meetings to discuss this. Here's 1% less grind on the rares!"

Also, SSG's response is, "Here, have some extra dino mat farming grind to go with that 1% less rare grind."

This is some truly meme level corporate weaselspeak.

 

[SquireZed]

Hey everyone! Thank you for the feedback so far. Hitting a few quick points:

People correctly assumed we made one for every spell school, but you're right, there's not a lot of point in having this one.

I'm going to remove the Divination ones, and likely replace them with:
- Solar Gem of Elemental Absorption: Slotted Effect: +[3/10]% Artifact Bonus to Fire, Cold, Electric, and Acid Absorption.
- Solar Gem of Critical Confirmation: Slotted Effect: +[2/4] Artifact Bonus to Critical Confirmation and Damage.


Good list of ideas for crafting, will look at it. We do need enough to not exist in the system to make the base item static effects meaningful, but we'll take a look.

Alignment-based critical damage (including on past items) should be fixed in this Preview - If you see places where it still isn't, let me know and I'll fix them.

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

Will consider the changes to the Amulet.

There's quite a few instances in this loot where static effects are Insightful or Quality because the Enhancement equivalent exists in the crafting system - We can do a review to see if there's spots where it makes sense to swap to Enhancement in the static effects though.

Shields are meant to have slots like other named items. There's some weirdness with the shields in general in this build, some of the changes we made to them don't seem to be in the build.

Warlocks certainly have a fair few gearing necessities, but we've been making adjustments to Eldritch Blast in the last couple of updates, and have plans for the future as well. Like anything else, these are just new options.


Will definitely consider item based bonuses to Blast Dice.


There are definitely fewer named Rare Items than there were in Myth Drannor. It's one of the pieces of feedback we've taken from the past few updates and worked in for this one.

Please let us know which ones and we'll get them fixed! Most items have fewer than normal due to the Lamordia Augment Slots, but if there are any that aren't following the scheme listed in the OP, let us know which ones specifically.


The "Treasure based on class" only applies to quest end rewards lists. Admittedly, it's a system I'd love to either revamp or eliminate someday - The lists are old, and classes are diverse enough in how they function these days where it isn't necessarily MORE likely to offer you things your specific build uses.


I'll take a look, thanks.


Myth Drannor had 3-4 in its Rare Tables depending on the dungeon. In some cases, it was 3 Rare Named Items and 0 Rare Sun/Moon Augments.

We've adjusted that in Lamordia by:
- Raising the rate of reaching the Rare Table
- Locking the number of Rare Items to 3
- Locking the breakdown of that table to 1-2 Rare Items, with the other 1-2 being Rare Sun/Moon Augments.

--------------

One further note: Standard Named Items are more likely to appear in end chests than Standard Sun/Moon Augments, but we're discussing adjusting that further toward the Named Items.

Keep the feedback coming! We'd love to hear more about static effects on specific named items, which ones you'd like and what's not on any that you'd like to see.

In the meantime, I'm going to get started on adjustments for next preview.

Liking pretty much everything I'm seeing here. Very excited.

 

[Cowzrul]

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.

The 33% isn't even 33%, at least not for me, and several other players that have logged drop chances, it's more like 24%. Which makes all of these numbers substantially worse. I don't know why I keep trying to get literally anyone at SSG to acknowledge this, but I really wish they would. I've only farmed for a small number of names items and managed to have it take 40+ attempts to get a plain named item. I assume it would take me thousands of pulls, or literally years of ransack to get a rare. There's no point in even playing the game at that point, it's just wasting my time mindlessly repeating quests to get a virtual lottery ticket that only pays out in worthless DDO platinum.

 

[LunaticFringe]

I don't know if this has been suggested already, but I'm wondering if the amount of mats needed for heroic crafting should be dropped. I mean, once people hit 10, they're off to The Other Ravenloft, and as such any significant grind will just not be used as it's much more transient than at Legendary. Maybe 5-10 of each mat?

 

[mikarddo]

I dont really see myself bothering with the heroic crafting or the items. Heroic levels fly by and storing more loot at different levels take time and space.

Heck, I just made 34 and still had 5 pieces of heroic Ravenloft gear on. So swapping gear every few levels is just not efficient.

 

[Abramax]

I dont really see myself bothering with the heroic crafting or the items. Heroic levels fly by and storing more loot at different levels take time and space.

Heck, I just made 34 and still had 5 pieces of heroic Ravenloft gear on. So swapping gear every few levels is just not efficient.

with this stuff you ll be good until sharn/vecna stuff
You ll save space as you ll probably destroy all ravenloft stuff

 

[Kimbere]

with this stuff you ll be good until sharn/vecna stuff
You ll save space as you ll probably destroy all ravenloft stuff

Anyone who cared to was already skipping RL gear and going from Fey to Sharn.

 

[Matuse]

I tried making gearsets out of Ravenloft, Sands, Greensteel, etc in the 10-12 range. Couldn't do it. My level 8 gear of Fey/TOEE/Dread was just straight up better.

I do 3 -> 8 -> 15 -> 20 -> 30 -> 40.

If it doesn't fit in those level ranges, I don't even look at it.

 

[Frieling Slyhand]

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?

Just to point out for Devs who don’t play Ddo, a dodge cap increase without a dex cap increase is worthless and a trap.

I miss Lynnabelle; they actually understood and care about player experience.

 

[Putti]

Hey everyone! Thank you for the feedback so far. Hitting a few quick points:

I'm going to remove the Divination ones, and likely replace them with:
- Solar Gem of Elemental Absorption: Slotted Effect: +[3/10]% Artifact Bonus to Fire, Cold, Electric, and Acid Absorption.
- Solar Gem of Critical Confirmation: Slotted Effect: +[2/4] Artifact Bonus to Critical Confirmation and Damage.

I've never really understood percentages being reduced in heroics. It being a percentage means that it's already scaling proportionally to the level you're at. This means you're getting double scaling when the number is reduced, making them much worse than the static numbered ones.

 

[Wini]

I am not supporting rare loot or bloated tables, and Chill is just the the same or worst of MD experience. It's unfun, unfair and keeps me off the game experience.

You are departing from your casual crowd, it feels very bad for us. We wanted ingredients like a pity system, to get sun, moon or rare pieces, not to craft regular base running-water-staples.

We wanted Randall Lyric back, with sun/moons. Or perhaps we wanted these Augments on the filigree loot slot. I am not farming a quest months to try out a build and then tr into another build the next day. This is beyond preposterus.

All we get is a kind of ultímate corrupted wish, feeling very sad about it...

 

[Scuddy]

Farming for an item, farming to unlock crafting slots, and farming for an augment is a lot of farming with gear that's uncrafted and sometimes unusable until crafted, with it missing basic needed things. If one is to do this, it might be helpful if the farmer had easier access to some simple but necessary augments while the player is farming, even if they are pretty standard and lackluster sun/moon augments. It's really no fun to farm for things like the slavelords craftable gear until it's 75% completed or so IMHO. I think all of this gear needs to be more usable from day 1 to meet a player's basic build needs to be better embraced.

Consider leaning into augments harder here, but in a different manner. I did not see trapping/skills or just normal enhancement stats represented like they are on colorless/yellow/blue, etc., augments (I get enhancement stats are probably eventually craftable with mats like dino). A lot of times, with expansions, you get a macguffin that you can trade in for weapons with damage types appropriate to the pack to someone like Valanice Daventhorn in MD, perhaps have macguffins of something that can be traded in for normal 8/30 skill augments and stat augments (for level 30 enhancement stats maybe +12 which is two lower than the IoD finished crafting enhancement stat level), maybe make skill Solar and stat Lunar or vice/versa. This could be instead of or in addition to a weapons vendor. This would add value to the expansion by at least having all or most of a players Sun & Moon slots be able to easily have something slotable in them pretty quickly once a player finds the gear, and while they are farming for better augments, even if it's a bit lackluster for most classes and would just fill stat holes until it's crafted. It would also allow greater choices in the gear tetris colored augments they slot. IMHO, for some players, there exists a transition period where they don't have all of the colored augments they might need to lean completely into the Sun/Moon system, and they find gear that is not usable in its found state, as it's missing the very basic skill/enhancement stat stuff they need. A system like this might allow them to go all in on Sun/Moon from almost day one, because they would at least have a somewhat usable and basic piece of gear that they would then just need to work on finding better Sun/Moon augments for once stats are crafted. No doubt, while farming to unlock the craftable parts of the gear, they would also be finding some better augments to replace the enhancement stat ones once they craft some craftable recipes. The lack of crossover in simple stat and skill augments is perhaps one of the solar/lunar system's current shortcomings. Normal augments are at least purchasable from NPCs and not just on the Shard AH. This system currently lacks this. I also believe that for some casual and other types of players, the heavy time commitment is a barrier to entry on something like a complete solar/lunar gear set and that this could bridge that divide a bit by better meeting some basic needs.

I get that you can put augments of these things in but some players do not have them and if they slotted them all, then they have no room for other necessary things that they might be missing like false life, deathward, resistance, fort, spell schools, spell dc's or whatever that are competing for the slots they have and take away from the ability to use some of this gear for some players.

The profane skill augments could also be put on the same vendor to get them off the augment drop list, so they did not compete with better augment drops.

 

[Kitty2Meow]

Thanks to dataminers for providing the below info. You provide a much appreciated service to the community.

Once you get it to the Named Item Table:

56% chance to get a named item
38% chance to get an augment
06% chance to move to the Rare Item Table.

For comparison, Myth Drannor and Night Brigade is 5% to get to the rare table.

It has been 2 days, since no official has responded (or countered) to those datamined % chances, it is pretty safe to assume those numbers are real.

If this is the case, 33% (on Elite) chance to get into Named Item Table, and 6% to get into Rare Item Table, then the chance will be 33/100 x 6/100 = 1.98% chance to get into Rare Item Table.

There are 3 Rare Items in the Rare Item Table, if assuming an equal 33.33% per item, then the chance of getting the Rare Item that I wanted will be 1.98/100 x 33.33/100 = ~0.66% chance to get the Rare item I wanted.

If I run the quest once a day, and if I am lucky enough, it may take me 151 days (100/0.66) to get the Rare Item I wanted.

But wait, since this is just a probability calculation, there is no guarantee that the Rare Item will drop within 151 days.

*** The calculation may not be accurate, but it gives an idea of the "so-call" improved chance of getting the Rare Item.

 

[Eoin-1]

I might be missing something here, but on Lamannia I was comparing the level 34 weapon with my level 31 weapon from Isle of Dread and the IoD weapon base damage is actually stronger.

Calamitous Light Crossbow 5.8 (1d8+2) +15 = 63.00 base damage (no set bonus or sun or moon)
Attuned Bone Light Crossbow 5.2 (1d8+3) +15 = 64.20 base damage (AND it has a set bonus)

Will there be raid versions of the weapons to look forward to?

I didn't look at all of Zavina's pictures, but were the Cataclysmic and Legendary Cataclysmic weapons in this preview? They might give a power bump.

If they weren't in the preview...

Not sure if they would be raid, probably not since it looks like they want heroic versions and we haven't gotten a new heroic raid in a while. So maybe they were thinking more of a Fallen/Golden type setup. So maybe a 6.3 multiplier (5.6 > 5.8 for fallen to calamitous; golden is 6.1)?

Of course, I could just be having a fever dream from fighting off the lag virus. So maybe they don't exist.

 

[Anurakh]

Hey everyone! Thank you for the feedback so far. Hitting a few quick points:

People correctly assumed we made one for every spell school, but you're right, there's not a lot of point in having this one.

I'm going to remove the Divination ones, and likely replace them with:
- Solar Gem of Elemental Absorption: Slotted Effect: +[3/10]% Artifact Bonus to Fire, Cold, Electric, and Acid Absorption.
- Solar Gem of Critical Confirmation: Slotted Effect: +[2/4] Artifact Bonus to Critical Confirmation and Damage.

Do you replace a (useless) caster gem with a weapon user gem? Why not add something for spell crit? Casters are far behind weapon users right now.

Abjuration bonuses are currently useless as well, because the only spells they affect (banishment/dismissal—the only two) are bugged. The alchemist's sanctified vial has the same effect, but isn't bugged. However, those two spells don't work on 90% of the mobs they should work on. Until you fix those spells, these bonuses are useless.

Good list of ideas for crafting, will look at it. We do need enough to not exist in the system to make the base item static effects meaningful, but we'll take a look.

Warlocks certainly have a fair few gearing necessities, but we've been making adjustments to Eldritch Blast in the last couple of updates, and have plans for the future as well. Like anything else, these are just new options.

Warlocks have the handicap of needing all the feats a spellcaster needs, plus their unique warlock feats. It's a huge tax on feats, and now you're adding a tax on the very limited set slots. Please create a single gem that increases both pact and basic eldritch blast. Don't create more taxes on warlocks.

There are definitely fewer named Rare Items than there were in Myth Drannor. It's one of the pieces of feedback we've taken from the past few updates and worked in for this one.

...
Myth Drannor had 3-4 in its Rare Tables depending on the dungeon. In some cases, it was 3 Rare Named Items and 0 Rare Sun/Moon Augments.

We've adjusted that in Lamordia by:
- Raising the rate of reaching the Rare Table
- Locking the number of Rare Items to 3
- Locking the breakdown of that table to 1-2 Rare Items, with the other 1-2 being Rare Sun/Moon Augments.

MD was a tremendously unfun pack for me. Very frustrating. I almost quit the game because of it. Please don't make the same mistake with rare loot. Do you know that a year later I still don't have most of the rare items in MD? Do you know that I play seven characters, and that it's completely impossible to give rare items not just to all of them, but to just several of them?

Rare loot seriously hurts alts, who are already handicapped because it's impossible to have all the past lives bonuses we have in a main character's (and they usually have less repaer points), plus it's impossible to equip them with mythic/reaper/good curse bonuses because that farming is very time-consuming, and they also need raid items. Alts always have fewer stats because of all this. Adding rare loot to this is like strangling them, when now they can barely breathe. I'm asking you, please. I'm begging you. Help the alts instead of trying to bury them where no one can find them. Please, please, please.

But I know you're going to ignore me. For some reason you don't seem to understand that alts make money, because they need tomes, space, pots... and you prefer to encourage people not to play alts. So at least put the augments in a different roll than the named items, or put them in optional chests. And please don't put so many items, especially multiple rare items, in the same chest. Those number of rare items per chest are still a lot. Because if the probability of getting a rare item is already difficult on its own, getting the one you want with so much competition in the chest is impossible.

I repeat: a year later, I still don't have most of the rare items, much less have copies to equip on alts. A 1% extra chance of getting rare loot table isn't going to change this in Lamordia. MD is incredibly unfun. Lamordia will be too. I'm not going to waste money on being frustrated. Please, please, please. Don't repeat MD's mistake.

MD was very frustrating for me. I normally buy the Ultimate Pack of all the expansions, but so far I haven't bought either the base expansion, nor does what I'm seeing encourage me to do so.