3.19.0d Patch Notes (restartless)

harvest costs are a huge step in the right direction guys, keep it up

After the patch my mate decided to run one of his Kalandra tablets with me. It was actually not bad. I think some of the really difficult stuff could have their loot increased a bit more (or maybe we weren't lucky). We then ended up running 6 tablets we'd saved up.

Difficulty ranged from 4 to 9. We were getting a lot of gear (was using gold flask on chests with an initial base of 30% rarity bonus, so 60% bonus).
- Chests for gems we managed to get a lv21 corrupted and another 19% quality, but usually around 6-14% quality gems. Something like 6 per chest.
- Currency chests were often dropping blessed orbs, alchs, chaos, horizon, etc.
- Some chests would drop a lot of jewellery which was good for chaos recipes.
- Unique chests dropped 4 uniques.

For Archnemesis (my primary issue with 3.18/3.19), we found white maps pretty much only has 2 AN mod mobs. Early yellow had 2-3 AN mod mobs. Some of the 3 AN mod rares we killed had something like loot explosions, dropping currency, rares, fractured, corrupted, uniques. 2 mod AN seemed exactly same as before, 3 mod dropped a lot more, it felt good.

Overall I think the loot is in a much better spot then it was after playing 6 tablets and 6 maps (white and yellow). We had fun, we enjoyed the loot. Many AN mobs and beyond/scourge mobs are deadly AF randomly killing one or both of us (my mate is an RF tank).

This is an anchoring patch, as many have pointed out.


That isn't necessarily a bad thing on its own. Everything had gotten too fast in 3.18. Recombinators combined with the other stuff available made deterministic crafting too easy, and I think most folks who are honest about the state of the game can see that.

Having said that...

A game like this cannot survive without some viable path to making very high tier gear. The Archnemesis mobs underscore the NECESSITY of having it because they wildly exacerbate degree of difficulty in endgame content to the point that it is unplayable without significant investment. It is debatable that some combinations of AN mods would still kill a number of otherwise viable builds in full mirror tier gear in the current state of the game. This is not a viable approach.

Content creators, who are essentially the best marketing that GGG has for this game are fleeing in droves. Something more needs to be done and titrating tiny bits of more RNG loot is not going to get it done fellas.

My suggestion is that there need to be some real fixes applied to the top tier craft and/or drop systems of the game that will enable more deterministic crafting or looting. Without it, 100000% more drops will not fix the problem.
Having 5-6 mod all T1 or T0 rares withing a couple days of league start was over the top. It is ok to say that. Making it mathematically implausible for any player outside the top 0.01% to get more than a couple pieces with 5 top tier mods in the whole season while simultaneously releasing the AN craken and nerfing defenses was just a silly idea.

At a minimum, I think the following need to be done if there is any hope of saving the league and retaining what player base hasn't already bailed.

1) Temporarily restrict to 1 AN mod at a time on rares. The stacking of them in juiced maps is just too much. When guys in legitimate endgame gear get 1-shotted with the mob not on screen it is no good. You can tinker with them in the background and re-release later, but they are not in a good place to set loose at this point.

2) Have to have Reroll Keeping Pre/Suff in Harvest. This was not a "filler" craft as you implied in the patch notes. Its absence makes gear acquisition more challenging in all cases, and so improbable as to be impossible in others. Socket coloring was also nice, but there are at least workarounds for it. I'd be inclined to say put it back, but the Pre/Suff is an absolute must have.

3) The Exalt/Divine swap was poorly executed. Own it and fix it. It is ok to want a new lead dog in terms of the currency market, but there needs to be some kind of means of getting them. If you aren't reverting this, then you need to add shards, div cards (besides just Sephirot) and some other mechanic that will create them. Without a faucet you suffocate the economy in the trade leagues and make endgame virtually impossible for the vast majority of SSF players that NEED them to get geared for the endgame push.

4) You need to add some kind of statistical failsafe to drops that justifies juicing maps at all tiers. Someone that has more time than me and some mathematical skill can figure details out, but there has got to be some kind of significantly higher probability of profit to juiced maps, or there will be no reason to do them and no reason to push for progression. The idea that guys are running 6+ mod T16's and getting a few chaos worth of drops is just not gonna get it done. You've gotta look at average investment on those and make it at least possible to turn a profit on them and not just another currency sink. God knows you've done enough at this point to make crafting an absolutely intolerable currency sink, so why turn the actual endgame content into another?

There is other stuff that should be addressed too, but I think this would be a more "impactful" step than what you are doing now.

Where we at now boys, leg ded or copium patch worth a weekend of play now?

"

Eumaeos_Romanus wrote:

This is an anchoring patch, as many have pointed out.

My suggestion is that there need to be some real fixes applied to the top tier craft and/or drop systems of the game that will enable more deterministic crafting or looting. Without it, 100000% more drops will not fix the problem.
Having 5-6 mod all T1 or T0 rares withing a couple days of league start was over the top. It is ok to say that. Making it mathematically implausible for any player outside the top 0.01% to get more than a couple pieces with 5 top tier mods in the whole season while simultaneously releasing the AN craken and nerfing defenses was just a silly idea.

At a minimum, I think the following need to be done if there is any hope of saving the league and retaining what player base hasn't already bailed.

1) Temporarily restrict to 1 AN mod at a time on rares. The stacking of them in juiced maps is just too much. When guys in legitimate endgame gear get 1-shotted with the mob not on screen it is no good. You can tinker with them in the background and re-release later, but they are not in a good place to set loose at this point.

2) Have to have Reroll Keeping Pre/Suff in Harvest. This was not a "filler" craft as you implied in the patch notes. Its absence makes gear acquisition more challenging in all cases, and so improbable as to be impossible in others. Socket coloring was also nice, but there are at least workarounds for it. I'd be inclined to say put it back, but the Pre/Suff is an absolute must have.

3) The Exalt/Divine swap was poorly executed. Own it and fix it. It is ok to want a new lead dog in terms of the currency market, but there needs to be some kind of means of getting them. If you aren't reverting this, then you need to add shards, div cards (besides just Sephirot) and some other mechanic that will create them. Without a faucet you suffocate the economy in the trade leagues and make endgame virtually impossible for the vast majority of SSF players that NEED them to get geared for the endgame push.

4) You need to add some kind of statistical failsafe to drops that justifies juicing maps at all tiers. Someone that has more time than me and some mathematical skill can figure details out, but there has got to be some kind of significantly higher probability of profit to juiced maps, or there will be no reason to do them and no reason to push for progression. The idea that guys are running 6+ mod T16's and getting a few chaos worth of drops is just not gonna get it done. You've gotta look at average investment on those and make it at least possible to turn a profit on them and not just another currency sink. God knows you've done enough at this point to make crafting an absolutely intolerable currency sink, so why turn the actual endgame content into another?

There is other stuff that should be addressed too, but I think this would be a more "impactful" step than what you are doing now.

No offense, but perhaps you should at the very least complete the campaign before giving suggestions. I don't think someone on act 6 can really say what needs to be changed since someone in the campaign has not come across any of the changes. This patch, while not perfect, helped a lot. People need to try the patch before giving suggestions.

So, first we get a nerf of drops by 90% on average.
And then we get that remaining 10% buffed by 25%. Interesting.
Players are getting pushed to doing mechanics such as Heist, Blight, Delve, which they disliked, where you don't rely on monsters for drops.
Exception being the Expedition, where you actually get Logbooks from monsters, and which you can do on maps.
Everything else, like killing monsters? Magic finding? Not worth doing anymore. You can't get back what you invest into maps, if it's anything else other than the mechanics i mentioned. Simply not possible anymore. Juicing maps? Funny. And Rare items dropped on the ground SHOULD NEVER, and can NEVER be better than the ones we craft. Uniques buff only matters for SSF. We need more items dropped. MUCH more. This is still nothing

Seems promising... Found a couple of exalts so far (I know they aren't as exciting as they once were) and definitely more little currency drops. I'd definitely like to see certain things tuned up more, Lake still seems very hit or miss as do some of the drop based league mechanics, but as a baseline it's a good patch and much more bearable to play now. Thanks for the quick (partial) fix!

Never mind, misread.

I just want to remind that
"Change a Divination Card into another random Divination Card now has a cost of 75 (previously 1000)."
the initial number was 13(!) times higher. I don't know who proposed/set those values and on what basis, but that was so out of touch from the actual game that it's actually scary. Anyone who knows what divination cards are and how they work would instantly reject this change and say that this is crazy.
And the most scary thing is that similar levels of changes are happening in other game parts also, done by this someone who doesn't even know the game. If harvest prices were overestimated in 10s of times, I fear that the whole game is pretty much falling apart like a sand castle on a beach.
Don't you guys play your own game?
I am a developer myself and in my company any code review requires 2 other developers to review and approve the code before it goes anywhere - automated testing or whatever. And for major changes it may require even more people form different teams. Harvest change looks to me as a big change from the game PoV, so it's a mystery to me how it could pass all these reviews and after that - testing, unless it skipped all those steps and was done by outsourced developer who just converted previous values of Harverst craft occurence chance to Lifeforce prices.

How could you be so off with the costs of the harvest crafts. Some reductions are insane. And they are still very expensive. We still need reroll keep prefix / reroll keep suffix.

And I didn't notice anything from your loot buff. I can't even properly sustain my maps.I feel like I am forced to do all other content that is offered to me now, like Alva temple or Safehouses, so that I somehow manage to break even or make a profit. It was optional before to do those. The game just feels bad.

Also I did a one tablet to try it out and at the end was a Legion encounter and the Legion Boss just refused to despawn after I killed it resulting in no loot from that Boss. So big F on that one.