The Essence and Lujo Grand Item Rebalance Discussion Thread. Bergstrom!

Yeah, it's worth noting that Perception's droplist was put together before Wandcrafting was even a thing, so there should probably be some changes made to it so that some basic Wandcrafting ingredients drop occasionally.

 

True, but the high dependency on gems for many of the wands in wandcrafting, makes either perception, alchemy, or piracy necessary or you don't really make that many wands, and even if you do, having to use 3-4 charges of an 8 charge wand seem kind of well... ridiculous. And that is at a comparable level of sinking tons of points into the wand tree early.

Here are two 'radical' ideas that I am gonna add to the post:
-Moving the +1 , +2 , +3 to the first three skills instead of the last three
And
-Adding wand recipes that you can only get from putting points into the tree itself that don't drop, and are much more easily crafted than what is currently available.

 

Well, the way I see it wands were designed to do two things.

1: Provide minor assistance to Warrios and Rogues

2: Fill holes in a Wizard's line up

Right now, out side of a few key wands, Wands does not really accomplish these two tasks. At the end of a run warriors and rogues have barely used wands and since they don't seem to scale (or if they do scale scale really really badly), Wizards have no desire to use them. We need wands to either have more useful applications in general, to scale much better with spellpower/sagacity/savvy, or some other thing I haven't considered. Besides each wand has an extravagant cost, it really should give you more bang for your buck.

 

Well, Wootah, there's no such thing as a recipe that can't drop, unfortunately.

Wrymcraft, check the Suggestions forum for a preexisting HUGE thread on wand rebalancing.

 

What if we moved Alchemy's gem transmutation skill to Wandcrafting? Or at least copied it onto an easily craftable wand. Would that help?

 

What if we back ended it then?
Make items that required some ingredient that was set as a floor 15 item (or higher if possible).
Then give wandcrafting the ability to drop the recipe on spell cast or on hit that created this item, similar to how Rogue scientists make the ooze and clockwork night makes scraps from constructs.

Then you could have recipes that only required this item (which only Wand crafters would see in any frequency), and they could get new recipes upon leveling, which would no longer matter if people discovered from bookshelves?

That may or may not help. The entire implementation of the transmutation is pretty flawed, and I have posted about that in other threads.
I think a better solution would be something similar to the wand of transmogrification, one which created gems instead of ores. and didn't require gems or ores to be created.

 

What's the practical difference between items only someone with Wandcrafting can craft and ones that require 3+ ? Getting more than 2 without taking Wandcrafting is nearly impossible anyways.

I like your wand of transmogrification idea though.

 

Two things.
A. Late game, nothing. Early game, nearly everything.
B. By controlling drop rates you can have more powerful wands that can't be spawned infinitely, but only for sticky situations (which is kind of how most wands are now.

Explanation of A
When you read guides or even tips people give in this forums, you often see them telling people to get 2 points in one skill, 3 points in another, and another 1 point across another two skills and then rush up X tree.

Without the crafting hat, ring, and diggle god, (or rogue scientist last point) nobody is going to be accessing level +3 easily.
But at the same time, the reason all these things work is that you get further and further in the game and the opportunity or utility in that gets diminished greatly. A random dropping reagent would allow the player more flexibility in build order, which in my mind is equivalent to more fun.

Explanation of B
In retrospect, the unique item that crafts great wands, has the added advantage of us setting the pacing and (then justifiably) making them more powerful than just giving them new recipes that required higher levels. I hadn't thought about this as much prior to your question, but I think it would fit if done right.

Lets say for pacing you started with 3 of these items. (Not sure what, lets just call them magical essence).
They have a drop rate of 0.5%, or 1 every 200 monsters killed.
They make awesome wands, with different Awesome wand recipes learned at every level. Now they don't have to wait till level 3. As the items occasionally drop they can be leaning more on wand crafting, or leaning on other skills to save the magical essences for later super wands.

The difference here is that unlike allowing these great wands to only be crafted once they hit level 3 or 4 or 6 is that the tree is immediately useful and the wands can be extra powerful because the pacing is set. If the crafting is associated with any item in the dungeon it is either too hard or to easy to mass produce.

Look at these two wands
Wand of grated Cheese
Requires Level 8 To craft
Requires 1 Burnt Wand, 1 Grated Cheese.
3-5 Charges.
Hits for 50,50, 50

Wand of Power
Uncraftable
1 Wand given every level put into wandcrafting skill
5 Charges.
Hits for 15+10,15+10,15+10

Giving an essence with 0.5% Is kind of the middle ground. It works well for tuning and allows spanning simultaneously.

 

Just a minor note -- you can get two of the ring and one of the hat, so you can get 3 wandcrafting even if you're playing without RotG and YHTNTEP. Not that that invalidates anything Wootah said, just wanted to point it out.

 

I might post more in the wand rebalance thread but something was said I wanted to comment on.

I don't like the idea of an uncraftable wand being given per skill increase, it feels...weird. Maybe I'm alone on this, but I think it would be better to generate some kind of "wand recharge" item, either with no recipe or a very very high leveled one (5,6,7 wandcrafting?like say endgame), perhaps even out of those randomly dropped charges. It would encourage people to consider whether they really want to burn out their wand or not in a given situation, is it better to try to muscle your way through it and level up or build a recharge stone or should you just zap it and build it again from scratch?

It would also make wandcrafting more viable without support skills, for example without mandatory alchemy for the gem transmutation. That way you could build one copy of an advanced wand and then just recharge it with some kind of combination of say steel, one of those magical essences, and some other regent; instead of having to rebuild the wand from scratch each time and rely on one of the like 9 gems to spawn when you need it.

Of course it might not restore all charges, after all an item that restores 80% of the wand if you hold on to just 20% of it seems a little unbalanced, maybe it restores and equal number of charges as what are left on the wand? That way it can only ever restore 50% of a wand, 40% on anything with just 5 charges.

Meh, just my two cents.

 

Well I wasn't actually proposing giving a wand out per level.
That would be kind of well.. not fun at all.

What I was going for is that the design space is wide open if we implement some very specific requirements and something in the middle of those two examples would be best. I was trying to point out that just because you put level requirements on a craft simply doesn't necessarily fix the problem in a fun way, but push it into different categories for balance. I was also trying to emphasize that a powerful wand that is hard to craft is no better for fun gameplay over a powerful wand that is easily crafted at the end of the game.

Here is my Mega Wand Post:

I have been playing a lot of Wand Crafting lately. This thread and others have addressed some of the Major shortcomings of Wands.

Some of the Pro's of Wandcrafting
Zodiacal wands are the ultimate in Decursing, they are super easy to make.
Sonic Wand Debuffs are AMAZING. The Dazed Debuff is Massive and works well with melee builds as well as Caster Builds.

-Unfortunately for Zodiacal wand, the purity potion is readily available through alchemy AND perception.
-Unfortunately for Sonic wand, the clockwork blade is enough for melee builds to overlook the Dazed Debuff.

The next big Downfall of the tree is giving all the at the end.
This needs to be rethought. On a caster, this damage is mostly meaningless (and wandcrafting is a wizard skill).
On a melee, it is too little too late, unless you are rushing wandcrafting and in almost all cases you are better off NOT rushing Wand Crafting.

Some Cons of the Passives of Wandcrafting
The damage bonuses of +1, +2, +3 in wandcrafting should be moved to the first three levels of the tree. Instantly rewarding melee builds. This will have NO effect on lategame.

The Design problems of Wandcrafting
Been covered before, but I am gonna summarize them here.

• A wand that is too easy to craft will either have to suck or break the game.
• A wand that is too hard to craft means you never see the materials or make it only once or twice in a playthrough. Since materials are ties the wand to certain dungeon levels, the wand needs to at least be functional by that dungeon level, or having access to the skill is meaningless.
• Adding high level requirements is not a good solution. Either you get access to wands that outrange your level and the item availability, or you make a character that has wands that easily outclass the current level, but don't have the charges other than sparing wand usage.
• Wands need Scaling that works outside of level.
• Wand design needs to function with multiple builds.
• Many wands Require gems which in turn require a few select skills or high dependency on luck.

Proposed Fix for Wandcrafting - Doing something new.
The lead up to my suggestion of special drops, which i called magical essences (or wyrmcraft referred to recharge stones) is that it avoids almost all the above problems and opens up a new design space. Granted it doesn't fix Scalability, but that can be addressed much easier, if we have a set of wands that we have now, which add to the game and a set of more powerful wands that add fun, and flavor, that can't easily be pumped out and yet are available as a choice at earlier levels than Level 7

Whatever the item is called, it needs to be a component that drops randomly, preferrably from any taxa at very low frequency. The frequency needs to be balanced so that the Wand crafter wont just waste these items, nor hoard them, but require some thought in to how they will use them. Here is an Example of what we could do With these things. I am gonna call them Charged Essence here in honor of Essence and using Wyrmcraft's Idea of charges.

The Charged Essence would be set at a very deep dungeon level so to as to prevent it from showing up very often or at all earlier on.

Level 1 of Wandcrafting:
Rod Charge
Passive: 1. 1
Monsters have a VERY low chance of Dropping Charged Essence.(0.5%). These can be used to craft powerful wands.
Starts with 2 Charged Essences

Two non-secret recipes are also added to the Wand Crafter Book.
Rainbow Wand

Spoiler

1 Burnt Wand + 1 Charged Essence
3-5 Charges.
Shoots a missile that does 1
Damage scales for each type of exotic damage to 0.5*

Wand of Gemification

Spoiler

1 Burnt Wand + 1 Charged Essence
9-14 Charges.
Deals 2 4.5* creates a random gem from the target.

Then the player is given 1-2 hidden recipes every level up so that they have additional options, although when using scaling, not necessarily more powerful.

These should include wands that are useful for rogues and warriors as well as wizards.
Examples are examples. Subject obviously to balance. I am just trying to show you where Wandcrafting could potentially be.

Wand of Obliteration

Spoiler

1 Burnt Wand + 1 Charged Essence. Level 3
18-25 Charges
Gives the Player a buff that can stack up to 3 times granting. Lasting 9 Turns
Buff: 333

Wand of Impenetrable Fortitude

Spoiler

1 Burnt Wand + 1 Charged Essence. Level 3
6-9 Charges
Gives the player a brittle buff that lasts 3
Buff: 10 ,15,20, 35

And to add that we could include Charged Essences into Encrusts, replacing some of the more difficult recipes or adding others. I wont post any changes other than suggest switching out a wand of laser for an essence, but the possibilities are quite huge for new crusts, many of which could be hidden recipes.

We could do something like:
Encrust of Trappiness

Spoiler

Helm Crust. Requires level 2
1 Charged Essence
Add to a Helm +2, +1, 15

And may I even go so far as to suggest
Encrust of Ultimate Crafting

Spoiler

Ring Crust. Requires level 7
5 (or 10) Charged Essences
Add to a ring 1 (or, or ). 100

Edit: Already fixed a ridiculous amount of grammar and spelling (and explanation) errors. I am sure I will find more. Just ignore them, and they will get ironed out.

 

I don't know about your other issues, but we've solved this one. As soon as Essence gets around to coding it, wands will all scale primarily to . They'll be balanced to rogue and wizard builds with only that scaling, and no . On top of that, each point of adds an additional couple of points of damage. The scale we're working with is that for every 1 damage you deal based per , you'll deal 8 per , but that can change once we actually play with the new wands.

 

I am cool with that. I think certain wands should continue to only scale with , a few continue to scale with (gelatinous for example) and maybe a few have multiple scaling parameters (transmogrification working with ,,). But overall I look forward to the rebalance with Savvy Which should come before any drastic changes are made to how it works.