You kidding me or what? I learn your goddamned forgotten ritual just to have you dump curses on me every time I use your anvils? Fucking gods.
I never get why people like Anvil so much. To me they are unnecessary risk and I almost never touch them.
I may attempt them once on each item, but avoid them otherwise. I seem to get as many or more curses as bonuses. Never was terribly lucky. Guess it shows.
I mean, it's supposed to be RANDOM, not SEVEN CURSES IN A ROW 5 in 7 chances of artifacting? SHENANIGANS.
7 curse in a row is more common than you think. (2/7)^7 = 0.0155%, that's 1 in 6452. While this is quite rare for any 1 attempt, when you consider anvil use is being repeated over and over by the entire forum, someone must get it eventually.
I do use basically all of them, myself. I'm just careful about WHAT I stick into the anvil. With the way I play, I can usually afford a curse or three on my items without it really dragging me down much; I tend to get more than enough benefits from the anvils to outweigh that problem.
This was something I remember studying years ago (I'm an old-timer). Lucky and unlucky streaks happen FAR more frequently than most people expect. Streaks turn out to be very common -- Casinos actually rely on that fact. In just about every game that I've played over the years, whenever there's a patch, there's always some guy claiming that the RNG was broken because they got X misses/losses/whatever in a row. That's what you call 'anecdotal evidence' and it's equivalent to one data point in the big picture. You can't actually tell what's going on without looking at ALL the data, not just the incidents that pop out at you because they seem wrong. That's called "Confirmation Bias", and is one of many examples of ways that people end up coming to incorrect conclusions.
Hey, I wasn't thinking that the RNG was broken, I was thinking more of some anti-abuse mechanic, or chances dropping when you re-activate anvils... but I guess there's no need for any of these! %D
If you can reactivate anvils, you can reroll the artifact's attributes. I've successfully used "This Translation is All Wrong!" to de-curse items, but I'm not certain what bonus-to-curse math is used, as it takes a few tries usually to get all positive stats on a given item. If I have Archaeology, I plonk my fedora down on the first anvil I see. At first level there really aren't any useless stats, and down the line I can always re-roll them.
Well let's look at anvil more mathematically. (assuming no Archaeology) If all the bonus are spend on the same piece of armor. 1. Assume 18 usable anvils in the game (the 2 in dungeon 10 are ignored because you should be fully prepared prior to that). 2. Assume 1/2 the stats in the game are actually relevant to your build (already a very liberal overestimate). 3. Chance of positive = 5/7, chance of negative = 2/7, expected payoff per anvil is therefore 3/7. Total expected payoff of relevant stats = 18*(1/2)*(3/7) = 3.86 I find that too low a payoff for all the risk/backtracking/searching involved. Now for weapons (which implies a melee character), you get chances of "trigger effect" which can out weight the risk/hassle. However, one primary problem with artifact weapon is that they are prone to corruption monsters, which make them a lot more troublesome to use. It doesn't help that corruption blobs are all over dungeon 10. Prior to Beta another option is the crossbow, crossbow was a great choice as they can roll trigger effect and crossover to melee, and also not prone to corruption. I have not test this myself in Beta but I have been told this is fixed. Even so, stack crossbow/amulet/ring remain the best option because they are disposable. Or you may skip anvils entirely instead.
I love anvils, but they do sometimes cause more trouble than they are worth. They are too tempting to pass, though. Usually, I'll wait until I get a weapon I want to use, then I'll backtrack and hit all the anvils. If I'm not using Archaeology, then I'll just throw random things on it.
It's my understanding that "This Translation is Wrong" is not actually supposed to remove curses, just change them to different curses, and change enhancements to different enhancements. That's one of the reasons why it's being 'fixed' in 1.04. The purpose was to, for example, change a ring that you don't like with caster buffs to one with melee buffs, and so on.
I noticed early on that one of my items that got cursed once kept getting curses. After about 4 times I just sold the thing and started wearing a Kanada Toque
