Update 63 Preview 2: Card of Curse Cleansing

[Lyrin]

The intention is that acquiring the decks will be relatively quick, and starting to get the benefits of the system will also be relatively easy. Fully optimizing all of your gear sets is not intended to be easy nor shortcut significantly with something like the card of cleansing; rather, the card will give you an opportunity to get another chance for a particularly high-value item that you really want to replace the deck effect on.

I can see the benefits of the system, provided the cleansers drop rate is not too low. Please be sure it is unbound.

It would be hysterical if it only drops in normal/hard difficulty quests and includes a label "Put this on the Auction House. Vets will pay dearly for it!"

 

[canicus]

Huh? Applying cards to leveling gear is a waste of time because gear changes far too often. Oh boy, you got +2 stat or +1 DC on a level 5 Feywild named item rather than on one of your legendary raid items. Big whoop, the impact is negligible. It'll be replaced in a few levels by something else.

I agree, as long as the buffs from these "curses" remains small (SSG Please for the love of Pete Sampras keep these buffs small!) the buffs won't give too much of a benefit and the gear will be replaced soon enough. If the curse removal is sufficiently rare, it would be an absolute waste of time to re-roll curses for low level gear. If I didn't need a remover myself for an end-game item, I would much rather make a ton of shards than attempt to get a different curse on Cinderfingers.

 

[canicus]

Please be sure it is unbound.

We just have to hope no one starts duping these. Ideally because SSG is able to effectively prevent this without feeling like they have to make them BtA

 

[The Blonde]

The intention is that acquiring the decks will be relatively quick, and starting to get the benefits of the system will also be relatively easy. Fully optimizing all of your gear sets is not intended to be easy nor shortcut significantly with something like the card of cleansing; rather, the card will give you an opportunity to get another chance for a particularly high-value item that you really want to replace the deck effect on.

I find that very worrisome personally. I was hoping that the decks would require a fairly long time to acquire. By the way you phrase it, one can expect to enchant dozens of items, which would contribute to power creep significantly.

Additionally, please make sure to carefully review the remaining possible effects of the Deck before you take it to Live. As of Preview 2, some are very, *very* minor, while others are the equivalents of actual feats (or even stronger!).

Lastly, I would like to mention that I am not a fan of the minor/major curses thing; I'd rather there was just 1 version of each curse. Reason being that even if you *do* get the minor version of an effect that you consider beneficial for the item, it will always feel bad to know that a better version of said effect exists and you could have gotten that instead. In other words, minor curses come with a de facto "feelsbad" moment, regardless of what they are, at least for me.

 

[Hephaestas]

Huh? Applying cards to leveling gear is a waste of time because gear changes far too often. Oh boy, you got +2 stat or +1 DC on a level 5 Feywild named item rather than on one of your legendary raid items. Big whoop, the impact is negligible. It'll be replaced in a few levels by something else.

Sure would be silly wouldn't it. But as long as the system ships this way, it's still something one could do - which you disregarded the point here.

I think most endgame players would agree; endgame systems should be tailored to, and only work at endgame which is all I'm saying.

Besides, what sense does it make for some random new player or fresh character even to be running through the harbor and - if I am to understand this all right, an endgame material that is to function with legendary content drops in a chest. Where's the synergy in that? Sure, it's a small thing but I really think systems in this game should be fleshed out and packaged better than that.

 

[Fhrek]

I would like to mention that I am not a fan of the minor/major curses thing; I'd rather there was just 1 version of each curse. Reason being that even if you *do* get the minor version of an effect that you consider beneficial for the item, it will always feel bad to know that a better version of said effect exists and you could have gotten that instead.

Re-reading the effects... they could made some form of sort this. Minor just apply on heroic gear (Lv. 19 and below), while Major will roll for Epic and Legendary gear.

 

[CBDunk]

Applying cards to leveling gear is a waste of time because gear changes far too often.

Given that 'end game' is currently a moving target, with new gear coming out every month or two and the level cap going up every other year or so, I'd argue that leveling gear is likely going to be changing LESS than end game gear.

Think back a couple years to when the level cap was still 30. Most active players with dozens of past lives will have replaced nearly all of their 'end game' gear since then... and virtually none of their levelling gear. That effect is only going to become MORE pronounced as the level cap continues to increase.

Further, they've already said that getting decks is going to be relatively easy (seems like a drop rate of about four quest runs per deck), while getting cleansing cards will be quite rare (zero known to have dropped thus far). That means people will easily be able to get enough decks to curse all of their end game gear and have more left over... why NOT curse some levelling gear at that point? Indeed, since levelling gear is relatively easy to replace, why not keep cursing copies until you get the one you want? Or curse cannith blanks until you get (or buy) the one you want and put the levelling stats you want on it?

Basically, I guarantee that people will use this system on levelling gear. Indeed, I suspect that will be the PRIMARY use unless we eventually get to a point where end game gear isn't going to change much for at least a couple years.

 

[popejubal]

Huh? Applying cards to leveling gear is a waste of time because gear changes far too often. Oh boy, you got +2 stat or +1 DC on a level 5 Feywild named item rather than on one of your legendary raid items. Big whoop, the impact is negligible. It'll be replaced in a few levels by something else.

I’m still going to drop a curse on my true seeing goggles with Masters Gift augment. That’s probably the only one unless I have a zillion extra cards.

 

[Ying]

Given that 'end game' is currently a moving target, with new gear coming out every month or two and the level cap going up every other year or so, I'd argue that leveling gear is likely going to be changing LESS than end game gear.

It's not about the itemization longevity of a leveling item like Feywild gear. It's about how many levels you use an item for. You're constantly swapping items as you level up. In a heroic life, I'll swap out each slot 2-3 times. So that's like 5 hours of leveling for a given item. Sure you can enchant all that gear. But is the juice worth the squeeze for heroic gear? That's a big "no" from me. People severely underestimate the grinding this system requires to get relevant fortune bonuses. It's gonna get old real quick.

 

[CBDunk]

People severely underestimate the grinding this system requires to get relevant fortune bonuses.

Grind is the reason I expect to see this being used on levelling gear.

The grind for relatively easily obtained materials (i.e. levelling gear and curse decks) is going to be massively less intense than the grind for extremely rare materials (i.e. optimized end game gear and curse removal cards). Indeed, I doubt it will even be possible to assemble a set of optimized end game gear with optimized curses before that gear has become obsolete.

Or... looked at another way: By the time you could get a decent set of curses on end game gear... it will have become levelling gear. :]

 

[knightgf]

Is it really appropriate to call the cards and the effects they cause curses? The overwhelming majority of effects do not carry penalties, and those that do are less harmful than a doom spell, let alone a curse. Wonders is more like it, especially given the random nature of the buffs and since potions of wonder exist in this game, which more or less plays a (mostly) temporary yet similar role with buffs.

 

[Grunndi]

Grind is the reason I expect to see this being used on levelling gear.

The grind for relatively easily obtained materials (i.e. levelling gear and curse decks) is going to be massively less intense than the grind for extremely rare materials (i.e. optimized end game gear and curse removal cards). Indeed, I doubt it will even be possible to assemble a set of optimized end game gear with optimized curses before that gear has become obsolete.

Or... looked at another way: By the time you could get a decent set of curses on end game gear... it will have become levelling gear. :]

But who actually farms boosted leveling gear? Most everyone I know coasts to cap at r1-3, like most people I've got my 3-5ish year old leveling sets that work just fine and there's no pressing need to expend effort to improve them. As Ying said, that stuff gets used for like a day max.

 

[Matuse]

Yesterday it took Strimtom 140 attempts to get a single specific bonus on an item. He had the luxury on Lammania of infinite cards and infinite items to test it out on. If we assume that these curse cleansers drop at a rate approximating a mnemonic pot or an ioun stone, that is potentially years of dedicated farming to get enough cleansers if your luck is bad. That's not even including the need to run the 4 new dungeons about 560 times - EACH - in order to get enough cards to make that many decks. Now multiply that by 12 in order to gear out a full set of equipment.

I think you'll see people relatively quickly filling out a gearset, just accepting whatever they get except on maybe 2-3 critical items that also have good other bonuses like mythic/reaper. Is it really worth running 10,000 legendary dungeons and looting 4 million chests to get a 4% overall increase in character power?

Most of these bonuses are very small, but the good ones are REALLY good - the +1 fortune bonus to attributes is really nice. The good bonuses tend to be percentage based, so aren't very useful at low levels. But others are flat bonuses and would be insane on leveling gear. Get a dual slotted blank and make a pair of Blindness Immunity of True Seeing Cannith Goggles at ML1 and put in a Master's Gift and a 25% fortification Sapphire, curse it with +2 Imbue or Pact dice and that's your go-to item from 1-32 with an imbue melee or Warlock build for doing Racial lives. How much grind would you be willing to put up with in order to get that? Because it would probably be a lot.

 

[badmofo]

Yesterday it took Strimtom 140 attempts to get a single specific bonus on an item. He had the luxury on Lammania of infinite cards and infinite items to test it out on. If we assume that these curse cleansers drop at a rate approximating a mnemonic pot or an ioun stone, that is potentially years of dedicated farming to get enough cleansers if your luck is bad. That's not even including the need to run the 4 new dungeons about 560 times - EACH - in order to get enough cards to make that many decks. Now multiply that by 12 in order to gear out a full set of equipment.

I think you'll see people relatively quickly filling out a gearset, just accepting whatever they get except on maybe 2-3 critical items that also have good other bonuses like mythic/reaper. Is it really worth running 10,000 legendary dungeons and looting 4 million chests to get a 4% overall increase in character power?

Most of these bonuses are very small, but the good ones are REALLY good - the +1 fortune bonus to attributes is really nice. The good bonuses tend to be percentage based, so aren't very useful at low levels. But others are flat bonuses and would be insane on leveling gear. Get a dual slotted blank and make a pair of Blindness Immunity of True Seeing Cannith Goggles at ML1 and put in a Master's Gift and a 25% fortification Sapphire, curse it with +2 Imbue or Pact dice and that's your go-to item from 1-32 with an imbue melee or Warlock build for doing Racial lives. How much grind would you be willing to put up with in order to get that? Because it would probably be a lot.

wow ONLY 140 attempts ....must have good RNG

 

[SpartanKiller13]

Huh? Applying cards to leveling gear is a waste of time because gear changes far too often. Oh boy, you got +2 stat or +1 DC on a level 5 Feywild named item rather than on one of your legendary raid items. Big whoop, the impact is negligible. It'll be replaced in a few levels by something else.

I mean I often still have 2-3 Feywild pieces equipped at level 29 when I swap to actual gear. I rarely don't have the 7-piece set still when I hit level 15?

+2 stat & +1 DC is a pretty big bump for landing off-focus stuff, even if it doesn't matter for your no-fail main-stat stuff. But like using GCS on a Paladin or something? Pretty nice

As far as longevity of use, 5-29 is like 3 weeks for me; not everyone gets it done in only a few hours

Personally now that there's cleansers I'll probably load up endgame gear first, but then probably like SoS and Feywild gear

 

[VinoeWhines]

Hello, everyone!

In this Preview, we're introducing a new item related to the Deck of Many Curses we previewed in Preview 1: The Card of Curse Cleansing!

This consumable item removes a Curse from the Deck of Many Curses from an item, which allows a Deck of Many Curses to be used on it again. With the launch of the Deck of Many Curses, this item will appear very rarely in any chest throughout the game.

In this Preview, Cards of Curse Cleansing can be found in the cabinet in the Test Dojo where you obtain the other Cards.

Please use this thread to discuss the Card of Curse Cleansing! (and if you'd like to talk about the Deck itself, check out that thread here.)

Can the Curse of Being a Rogue be removed from Tier V of Shadow Dancer so Rogues can pick from their own Tree and select Weird as every other class can select EVERY OTHER TREES TIER V regardless of class. Rogues can use Greater Ruin Intensified and Dragon Breath and TIME STOP, with no prejudice toward class, type. I thought the Epic Destinies were suppose to be inclusive(Macrotechnic allows the use of a Rune Arm, even as a Druid).

Give Two Weapon Fighting Strikethrough since you removed(cursed) doublestrike proc of Assassinate and Melee offhand doublestrike, so to fix this have it give Strikethrough, just like Improved Precise Shot gives Multi Target Strikethrough for Ranged attacks.

 

[Vorph]

Before the cleansing curse "Oh cool, a one and done system that might make some of my items more powerful"
After the cleansing curse "Oh great, another grind system that will become the new forced meta in six months"

 

[Shear-buckler]

It's better to make the availability of the cleanser too low at first and increase it later than to make it too easily available and nerf it later.

 

[Guntango]

It's better to just sell it from the beginning and offer sales throughout the year. Make money, cleanse curses, be happy.

 

[CBDunk]

Before the cleansing curse "Oh cool, a one and done system that might make some of my items more powerful"
After the cleansing curse "Oh great, another grind system that will become the new forced meta in six months"

Logically inconsistent.

The original design without cleansing was ALSO a "grind system"... you would just have to get multiple copies of each item and curse them until you got the curse you wanted for that item.

Adding the cleansing curse thus simply REDUCES the amount of grind required... allowing you to occasionally re-curse an item rather than having to farm another copy of it.

That said, I doubt this system is going to be meta EVER... let alone in six months. Even with the reduction, the grind is just TOO massive. Unless they significantly increase the drop rates of both curse and cleansing cards it would take YEARS to optimize a full set of end game gear. By which time that gear will no longer be end game.

From what they've said, it seems like the cleansing cards are going to be rare enough that they represent only a minor improvement on the existing system... as in, if you work at it you'll eventually be able to replace completely useless curses (e.g. increased melee power on a longbow).