Heroes,
In our Early Access roadmap, we promised you crafting. This is now here for you to enjoy as of our latest update! Let’s dive right into how it all works, and in what way the systems support and improve itemization.
Crafting is one of the areas where we decided to hugely diverge from the first game. Finding good items that work for your build is always an amazing feeling, even if it takes some time and effort to get there. We definitely want to maintain this aspect, and make it so that players have to put in work to get the right kind of gear that fits them. At the same time, as you have seen with our respec and modifier features, we think highly of flexibility and customizability. This will be no different with itemization.
There will be several ways in which you can alter and improve the items you find. Repeated attempts will increase your material and gold costs, and will eventually become a barrier to further attempts. At that point, it may be best to look for another base item to craft on. You will not, however, be able to create items from scratch.
Select one of the affixes to re-roll. The possible range of values will be clearly displayed, so you will know when to take a win. It’s pretty cheap to start, so a few rolls on a fitting affix with poor values could be a very good idea even in the early game. You can only do this for one affix per item.
Have you found a great item that has this one property that really doesn’t do anything for you, but is otherwise great? You won’t just be able to select anything you like to replace it - there’s some limitations here. Depending what could roll as a prefix or suffix (as in what the item could have rolled as naturally), you will have a set of possible replacements. Like with the reforge action, you can do this to only one of the affixes, and each additional attempt increases costs.
Some items don’t have their maximum possible affix amount when you find them. If that’s the case with yours, you can get started with this.
Similarly, to replacing affixes, there are limitations to which affixes can be added. Given that this action isn’t ever going to make your item worse, we decided to start at a much higher cost, including the need for the drop-only “Vital Flame” material.
Finding a perfect item during levelling, then having to part ways with it as you progress, can be a difficult decision. What if you could delay this a bit though? While not cheap, and being a one-off move, upgrading your item’s level with raise the base properties and also the “tier” of the affixes - though the latter will have a ceiling, meaning that you can’t just turn an early game item into a perfect level 55 item (its affixes will be notably worse than finding it again). So basically using this sooner rather than later may be ideal - hoarding for aeons isn’t rewarded. Most importantly, this form of crafting actually works on epic items as well.
So how do you pay for all this in-game? We wanted to create a bit of tension between the gold and material economy. While enemies will drop some of the crafting resources needed, you will need to get the bulk of them from salvaging the items you don’t need. Once crafting gets expensive after a few rounds, you will have to make runs for salvaging as well as selling, if you are intensely engaged with this feature. The more crafting steps you have for your item, the more difficult to get materials will be required.
There are the following types of materials:
· Crude Fragments: dropped by enemies and salvaged from all items.
· Mystic Shards: dropped by enemies and salvaged from magic items
· Amplified Energy: dropped by enemies and salvaged from rare items
· Vital Flame: dropped by stronger, non-boss enemies
· Bound Essence: dropped by stronger, non-boss enemies and salvaged from infrequent items
· Golden Spark: salvaged from epic items
On our road to the full release, we will be busy with delivering epic armors for you alongside our final chapter - including new faction items.
While this is going on, we are actively planning additional features though, such as a crafting feature to turn your epic items into legendary ones, charm and relic upgrades, as well as artefacts. These are however going to be post-release additions, largely connected to our endgame. We’ll get back to you at a later date about exactly how these will work.