There’s a bit of an oddity that I’ve noticed regarding the ability to upgrade your equipment that I’ve noticed. While I do love the idea of being able to upgrade early-game equipment to keep it competitive all game, it does lead to a rather noticeable issue, which is that there’s often absolutely no reason to actually use new gear when it drops.
To give a concrete example, I was in the sewers recently when a shiny new shield dropped. Initially I was excited, and hauled it off to market for upgrades/infusions- only to notice that it would have exactly the same stats as my current shield that I’d been upgrading since near the beginning of the game.
So even though the one shield required 10 dexterity and the other 22, there’s no difference in performance. Which means I’d have to go through the RNG of infusing gems or enchanting the shield again, to get a piece of gear with higher stat requirements, but no actual improvement.
So the end result is this system seems to encourage players to pick a single set of armour/shield relatively early in the game, and never use anything else, because new gear isn’t actually any better. That seems like it’s going to render an awful lot of the gear that drops over the course of the game pretty well meaningless.
Not sure what the solution to this would be, but it does seem likely to cause problems in the long run.
You mentioned upgrading your shield - but are you fully upgrading ALL of your gear? I have been upgrading my weapon and I’m in a similar situation with it, but I change gear for everything else when something new comes along.
To look at it through another lens, you spend significant resources upgrading your shield just to find a drop of a shield that’s just as good. Wouldn’t this be a good reason NOT to upgrade gear? (and hoard materials))
I don’t think it is a good reason not to upgrade, no.
I know I can make my current shield better.
I don’t have a clue when RNGsus will be kind enough to bless me with a better shield.
Seeing as I very much want a better shield ASAP, there’s every reason to upgrade instead of waiting and hoping for better gear that might eventually drop.
And yes, I’m keeping any gear that’s had good luck with enchantments/infusions upgraded. Again, I know I have a shield with a good roll on the +armour gem. Who knows how long it’ll take to get that again, but upgrading always works.
So is ALL of your gear upgraded from level 1 to level 3? The amount of resources required just seem crazy to me.
I agree with requirements for gear not increasing with level possibly being an issue - this should make it very easy to cruise through with additional characters as they could be using level 3 gear right from the get-go.
The game definitely encourages players to ‘pick a lane’ in terms of playstyle. This greatly reduces the gear which would use. But I think the intent from the developers is that you’ll save the gear you can’t use for other characters.
Character is level 21.
Pretty much all my gear is upgraded until it started needing Silver (which is too rare right now for me to bother with, and I don’t feel weak without it in the current content).
Not all of it was upgraded from tier 1, but pretty much all of it was upgraded from the point I managed to get a good piece of gear for that slot that got good enchantment/infusion rolls.
If you have access to 2-3 realms with access to the Nameless Quarry, it really doesn’t take that long, and it takes way less time than rolling over and over for good enchantments does.
Gotcha - the multiple realm part is where your and my experiences have differed. There seem to be quite a few exploits from using additional realms - something Moon Studios should consider, but I’m not sure how they’d fix it without taking away exploits players have liked using.
So i guess it comes down to farming for gear vs farming for resources.
That new weapon will have a different moveset or a new rune though and unlike your current gear you don’t need to spend resources to it up to par. Like Tier 1 weapon runes are weaker in many ways than T2 or T3 ones meaning you basically have 1 rune slot that is always weaker. On the weapon front I don’t think this is a problem but I agree with you on this for things such as armor that I do wish it could be slightly weaker.
I honestly don’t find most of the tier 1 weapon runes especially weak- Flaming Throw is found on basic tier 1 weapons and IMO it’s one of the best runes, for instance- but the point about new move sets is a good one.
The more I play, the more I’m coming to think this is actually less of a problem with the loot and upgrade systems as such, though, and more a problem with the enchantment and infusion systems- the fact that there’s so much variability in enchantments means it can take a frustratingly long time to get a piece of gear in a specific slot that has good bonuses from gems or enchantments, and no -30% health curses or anything equally bad. That in turn means there’s a strong incentive to just keep the gear with good enchantments and upgrade it once you do find a good item for a given slot.
Upgrading gear, instead of getting higher tiers, is a valid option to keep good gear longer - if you can afford it.
It’s basically a bad luck protection, if you only drop bad gear. For lower tier gear this should be reasonably easy to do, as it is right now.
Keep in mind, that we are currently stuck at T3 but we know that at least T6 exists. Refining T3 materials already takes 15 minutes each and you have to farm for them.
All of our gems are “chipped” right now. Unless you don’t infuse your gear at lower tiers, you’ll want to get new gear at some point just for the better gems.
When Act 2 starts right after the twins (I assume), most players won’t go farming and crafting for hours before moving on. Soon T4 gear drops and so on.
Once the full story is released and the real endgame, we will see how valid it will be to keep upgrading gear. I don’t see anyone at lvl 50+ still using upgraded T1 or T2 gear from Act 1, even if it has the same base stats. The investment is just too high until you hit endgame, where farming better gear or upgrade materials is the only thing you do.