Please do a Codex for affix/essences (Inventory Feedback)

Wicked Feedback
1

The more I play, the more obvious the issues with inventory and chest flooding in houses become apparent.

Some headway had been made with material stacks and then inventory management took a turn for the far worse with all these new ember types.

But by far the biggest culprit is the essence embers.

Each essence you extract from a gear piece takes an individual inventory slot – they do not stack. This means chests and personal inventory fill up super quickly now because you need about 4 of each affix for 5 gear pieces (weapon, helm, chest, gloves, pants).

That’s 20 essence embers for just ONE build, and if you want to have a back up for another build of a similar element, this is where inventory explosion happens. Because each extracted essence has a different value, they do not stack.

Now multiply this by the physical, fire, lightning, ice, and plague elements for build crafting.

We’re talking about 20*5 = 100 essences for just ONE set of elemental builds, and this is not even considering the combinatorial nature of the different weapon and armor types that also need their own set of 100 essences for just a single build.

Then there’s the horrible change to exalting and void embers. If you feel you wanna change your build, you could not just reroll an affix and re-exalt it like before.

Now you gotta either void the item (only worth it for keeping a gear with a particular facet), which strips every thing away, and re-slot in 20 affixes and THEN re-exalt EVERYTHING 4 times again. The obvious alternative if you are not married to a facet is that you will just craft it from scratch, still requiring the same amount of essences.

And then come the radiant embers to re-max the stats on a piece of item if you want to change up builds.

It’s absolutely dreadful hoarding nightmare, and I hope these exalt changes get reverted and some control over facets is implemented.

The game creates a massive inventory flooding with the recent changes. Testing out builds has gotten significantly grindier and worse.

I don’t think most people who play this game want to jump through these many hoops to have a functional build come online to go out and do content. I find it really tedious and unnecessary to go and adopt a diablo style gear slot machine treadmill and to actively make it worse than how it is in Diablo since diablo has an affix codex and target farming.

2 Likes
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As much as I agree with you that there should be some sort of essence storage system, I still have to ask one question.

Why would you have all the essences for multiple builds in a chest? Why are they not being put onto your gear so you can actually use the build? Your math suggests that you are holding 100 essences for four builds in a chest somewhere, but that means you are not using any of those four builds at all? Or were you just using the worst case scenario for your math?

I am currently using one chest for filled essences I will likely use, two chests for loot that has enchantments I might use later, and a fourth chest for base items with facets I want. Yes, I am using four large chests for the very problem you are describing, but I also have three fully crafted sets of gear that I used close to 100 essences on to make. I never had more than three of those essences off an item at once, since I was actively building the items. I used those essences right away.

If you are storing a bunch of essence embers with enchantments in them, I think you are making things unnecessarily difficult on yourself. Not to mention the fact that those essence embers are very rare, so you don’t want to use them on the wrong enchants.

As for voiding a finished item to save a facet, just don’t. Craft a few of the item until you get another of the facet you like, and sell the rest. Now you have two of the same item with the same facet. That way you can put four of those 100 extra essences you have in a chest into the item they were meant for in the first place. Do this a few more times and suddenly 100 item slots worth of filled essence embers becomes 20 inventory slots worth of finished gear.

I’m not saying inventory management is not an issue in this game, I’m only saying it’s not as bad as you are making it out to be. Honestly, the friction surrounding inventory management might be a good thing, since solving that friction becomes something the player has to actively do. I don’t know about you, but when I play a game I want to actually be doing something, rather than just auto pilot filling a codex with everything I see.

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Because you don’t need them for just one build.

There are multiple weapons and multiple armor sets.

If I want to play a monk and have a lightning and physical variant, and then have a reaper with plague and cold variants, and a mage with all elemental variants using different armors and weapons, the essences pile up.

And you may acquire the essences, but those may need to wait to have the proper armor and weapon pieces with the right facets acquired.

It’s a lot of hoops to jump through.

1 Like
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The essences only pile up if you pile them up yourself. I have three characters each with multiple builds and I don’t let my essences pile up. I let my items pile up, and only rip enchants with essences when I have the item I need to put those enchants on. Technically, I am still using 100 inventory slots for 100 items, because I can only rip one enchant off of an item. Let me clarify.

So when when I am playing my monk (which is not my lightning char, but let’s assume I will do that for the sake of the argument) and I find an enchant that boosts the damage type I want, I keep the item. The essence ember is too valuable to burn on the enchant right away, since I might find a better version of the same enchant or another copy of the cloth I want that already has the enchant I am looking for.

Let’s say I find a plate with a 10% lightning damage enchant and I have the cloth with the right facet I want already. I rip the 10% enchant from the plate, and immediately put it on my cloth so I can benefit from the enchant while I look for more. If I was not going to put it on my current gear right away, I would not use the essence ember in the first place. I would just store the plate with the good enchant in a chest in my second house in town, along with the 30 other items with good enchants that I may or may not use someday.

Alternatively, let’s say I find a different weapon, maybe a scythe (that’s what you meant by reaper right?) with a good facet while I’m playing my monk. I sell it. It doesn’t matter that I may want to use the scythe on another build, since I can just craft another one. You only need to farm with one build, so building two at once is a waste of space. The only way I keep a base item with a good facet for another character is if it also happens to have an enchant I wanted as well, and one at a high level at that. Facets are not something worth fretting over until you are ready to craft. In that case, finding the item with the good facet means turning those four items with enchants I wanted into one finished item.

If you are acquiring essences and waiting for a good facet, you are wasting the embers. Just keep the item with the good enchant on it and use the essence when you’re ready to apply them to an item.

Yes, you are jumping through hoops. Let’s list them for clarity.

  1. Find an item with a good enchant. This item will rot in a chest for now.
  2. Find the other three enchants you need for the finished item. They are rotting in the same chest. (This is just the first hoop again.)
  3. Get the base item with the right facet. You don’t need to do this until you are ready to craft.
  4. Actually craft the item. This means using the essence embers to rip the enchants and immediately putting those essences into the faceted item.

In step four, the final hoop, you are actually using essences to reduce the inventory space you need for the build in progress. If you are using essences before that step, I’m sorry and I can’t help you. I did that myself for a while before realizing I was the reason my inventory problems existed in the first place. It’s something you have to learn yourself.

Once you have one finished build, finding the enchants you sold before again becomes trivial. The real problem is that you are trying to build four sets at once for builds you aren’t even using right away. You are just hoarding stuff.

5

If there was a sort of ‘deep storage’ for essences that lets you put a variety of filled essence embers in a condensed space, then you would find yourself with nowhere near enough essence embers to turn all of your loot into essences. It would not solve your problem, it would only make your self-inflicted frustration redirect towards the ember drop rates.

The only way to solve this issue that I have found is to shift my own loot hoarding paradigm. I went from trying to store a ton of essences to just storing the items with the best enchants on them and being more liberal with what I sell. Finding more loot is always an option.

6

Many of us are hoarders indeed :rofl:

Yes that is true.. i can relate to some extent.

I agree with everything :grin:

1 Like
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Just so you know, I am guilty of it too.

20E2C3~1
20E2C3~11920×1080 300 KB

20646A~1
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1 Like
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I agree that what you describe is a real problem. I actually posted an idea recently to rework the enchantment process and avoid hoarding every item or charged Essence Embers in chests: Revamping Enchantments to reduce hoarding (Codex/Scribe Table system) - #4 by Nexom
Feel free to vote for that topic as well to increase the visibility of this issue.