BIG Disclaimer: this is not completely serious, I'm not actually suggesting a crafting system be added to the game (as in I'm not sure CH would benefit from such a feature). Still, if CH ever added a craftying system, this is how I would implement it. I.e. this is mainly just for fun. Each crafting process consumes 3 other items as reagents. Also a gold cost will need to be paid All reagents must be of the same type (i.e. same slot), the crafted item will also be of the same type. The cards on the resulting (crafted) item are picked at random from the items used as reagents. For items holding 3 cards (boots, shields, etc.) 1 card is picked randomly from each reaging item For items holding 6 cards (weapons, staves, etc.) 2 cards are picked randomly from each reaging item. Note: the same card can be randomly picked twice. The gold fee for crafting varies with the rarity of the reagents used in the process (1g per common reagent, 2g per uncommon reagent, up to 100g per legendary reagents). The level/rarity/token cost of the final item is automatically determined by the cards on it and their item Since the process is probably hard to visualize when you list the rules out like that, I'll expose a couple examples: - Crafting a new Shield - Reagents required: 3x Shields - Selected Reagents: Aegis Of The Defender, Aegis Of The Defender, Parrying Buckler - Cost to Craft: 42 gold (20 + 20 + 2) - Possible outcomes of the crafting process: 2x Defender's Block, Parry - Epic Lvl 21 Shield Defender's Block, Weak Chop, Parry - Rare Lvl 12 Shield Weak Chop, Defender's Block, Parry - Rare Lvl 12 Shield (i.e. same as above, the order in which cards are picked doesn't matter) Weak Chop, Weak Chop, Parry - Common Lvl 3 Shield Ofc, you can see using an item with multiple copies of a single card (Parry, in the case above) results in that card being granted to appear on the crafted item. This is useful, as excess items with multiple copies of a valuable card now become something to actually seek and hold on to (rather than just trash loot to be sold for a few pieces of gold). Suppose I wanted to craft (for whatever reason) a Divine Item with the following cards on it: Cleansing Ray, 2x Team Heal. If I wanted to be assured to get such an item out of the crafting process, I would use the following formula - Reagents: Fulg's Cleansing Pot, Ring Of Majestic Healing, Ring of Majestic Healing - Cost to Craft: 300 - Possible outcomes: Cleansing Ray, 2x Team Heal - Legendary Lvl 15 Divine Item The same result item could be obtained by using some other (more readily available and less expensive) items as reagents, but ofc then you need to cope with the randomness inherent to the crafting process (i.e. you are likely to have to try the process several times before you get exactly what you're looking for). Say, for example, I wanted to craft myself a Vibrant Pain. Using only Lochaber Axes as reagents grants a higher chance of obtaining the desired outcome. At the same time, Excellent Rapiers are much cheaper and more readily available, though your chances of scorying 6x Nimble Strike this way are much tinier. Thoughts?
Need something to limit the number of copies of a card on the result, else you'll get ridiculously OP items like 3x Resistant Hide or 3x All Out Attack. If it was me, I'd limit the results to existing items. Or have it fail if the rarity of the result is greater than the rarity of any of the reagents.
I wasn't originally planning on talking balance (not this early in the discussion, at least), but alas. Given how CH design works, there's nothing inherently wrong with an item holding multiple copies of a given card. Think VP, Heartripper, Blue Destruction, etc. Remember, any combination of cards is theoretically balanced (as the tokens cost is calculated depending on the cards qualities), as long as the cards themselves are properly valued ofc. Because of that, I'm more leaning towards thinking that whenever a card falls under the "It is balanced b/c you can have only so many in your deck, but if you had an item with lots of it then it would be totally OP", it means the card isn't really balanced at all. A 3x Resistant Hide item would be Level 18 and cost a major token. Would that be OP? I'm not that sure: Resistant Hide shuts all fire attacks off, but it's otherwise inferior to Reliable Hide vs any non-fire attack. A 3x All Out Attack item would be Level 27 and cost a whatever-comes-after-major token. Would that be OP? I think it would, but then you need to start questioning if the card isn't undervalued to begin with, and nerf it accordingly. Now, if this silly thread of mine helped with making the devs finally nerf AoA, that would really be much more than what I originally intended
I agree with Kalin about the limit it to existing items. So I think that it should remove the possibility of items that don't exist and if there are none then it makes items with cards from 2 of the items used and 1 random card of the same rarity as a random card of the third(or 2 if 6 card item) if still none exist then it says it fails and refunds the gold but not the items.
Not true... cards aren't the same effective quality at different densities. Quality is only one factor in balance—seeing how many of a card can be in a team is another. This is a big reason I'm doing my darnedest to make sure we never print another Blue Destruction.
So clearly the system needs be changed so that multiple copies of a same card also added to the item value (it's level, hence potentially its token's cost) in addition to the rarity?
IDK if "the system needs to be changed"—especially since we don't have a crafting system, and every item being made is being made manually by the devs, who are aware of the issue... remember, this stuff is just guidelines. Real balance can basically never be boiled down to 5 formulae.
I don't know either. This is theorycrafting, and ofc my own opinion only, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. It's just, if we have a points buy system, then anything which is possible under such constraints should be theoretically legal, by the rules. Anything breaking this core assumption must point to either 1) the system has a problem; or 2) Some specific cards are not valued according to their actual power (Hence those need be nerfed, or their value be adjusted accordingly. Though we know the latter is rarely a walkable path). By that reasoning, it's no wonder some very specific cards (the ones which are usually considered to be balanced, despite them being clearly undervalued, just because you can only have that many in a deck) can so easily make or break any given MP game. I.e. AoA, Sprint, Team! and several others lead to extremely swingy games. You draw them early, you gain an insane advantage over your opponent. I think artificially (i.e. in a non-systemic way) limiting the number of copies found on items, rather than actually fixing the cards themselves when they're clearly broken, is a way to side-step the true issue entirely. I could go on at lengths about this, mentioning how the number of cards you can pack in a deck can also be limited by restricting cards to fewer slots, how certain cards shouldn't be in the game to begin with, etc. But then those are topics for some other thread.
I disagree. I still think this is a primarily a problem with cards being undervalued. Copper Amulet is a joke because Maze is overvalued. Reliable Axe isn't a good as Hefty Chopper for the same token cost. The high density doesn't count for much in it's case. Copper Zapping Wand is good for what it is, but is not OP. (Farm it, though, don't buy it.) Deadly, Deadly Staff seems a bit pricey at . I don't know how good it is in MP, but there are much better choices in SP. Deadly Spark has gotten better, but I suspect it's still a tad overvalued. Perusing this list of high-density rares, it's notable that over half are not even particularly playable. Some are useful, but none seem OP. The problem with Blue Destruction is that Arcane Burst is undervalued. As are Firestorm, Flash Of Agony, and most vamp attacks. This can work if the devs keep the mix on items reasonable, but I think the disparity is glaringly obvious in several cases. Changing cards and items after release can cause bad feelings, so lets hope the new patches will work. And you're right, we don't need another Blue Destruction. We now return you to theoretical crafting, with Bandreus and friends!
I didn't say density increases strength. Sometimes it can decrease strength. And I really think it's not necessarily about over/under-valued, and more about which cards work really well in multiples (and create focused strategies). Take Blue Destruction, Million Embers, Searing Pain for example. If the burst cards only showed up as one-ofs on staves that otherwise had no AoE, you wouldn't see burfft the way you do with these items in the pool. You could make a staff with 1x Arcane Burst and 5x Short Perplexing Ray for the same token cost as Blue Destruction but it wouldn't be paired with Wellspring&Savage Curse the way Blue Destruction is. You can make endless arguments about whether or not one silver card is better or worse than another—and you'll be right a lot of the time, to some extent, because flat power curves are impossible, even within qualities—but ultimately the real strength of cards like burst and vamp attacks is the ability to get a lot of them and build a super-tuned engine with them.
If you didn't have items with lots of bursts on them, then you wouldn't see burfft to begin with, isn't that obvious? A burfft build simply wouldn't be possible, so I don't see that as a particularly meaningful point regarding balance or anything else really. Still, we have a points-buy system in place. Tackling balance via imposing arbitrary, non-systemic constraints to the itemization rather than by leveraging a system which was designed specifically to do that, well, it's like sweeping the dirt under the mat, I feel. I was gonna elaborate on this more, but I guess this is just an instance of having different opinions. I do understand, however, that the dev team simply can't afford to bring everything back to the drawing board, carefully rebalancing every card/item, so I'm not suggesting otherwise. This is also part of the reason why my crafting system idea trully is intended as a for-fun thing, as it'd need a perfectly balanced game (something which realistically isn't all that possible) for it to not be able to churn out potentially broken items.
I have to disagree that the 2nd, 3rd etc copy is going to add the same amount of power as the first. Having more AOAs might mean you get a 4x attack! Also cards affected by things like slicer, bruiser, talented healer and the like want to have a bunch of the mentioned cards. Also reliability is useful cause then you can plan on getting the cards.
I agree that ideally everything is balanced first at the card level, but part of the whole point of an item system, rather than just a card system, is that the item structure can be used as yet another level of balance. (And token value and quantity install yet another level.) Simply put, doesn't it make sense to take advantage of the balance capabilities of all the levels?
AoA is broken, probably among the most game-breaking cards in the whole game. I mean, c'mon, one-shotting dwarves (or dragons!) down from full health. What's ever gonna be broken if that isn't? This is exactly what I mean when I say "if an item with multiple copies of card X was gonna be totally OP, then the card X is likely undervalued". Traits are also somewhat of a separate issue, as even the devs stated that the correct quality for the average trait is about silver. But I see how that's probably a secondary issue, since traits are generally limited to very specific slots (traits on non-skill slots make for totally rad items though, which is slightly more problematic). Anyway, reliability certainly is an important factor, though I don't think the goal of a points-buy system is making all possible builds equally effective. I.e. you're always gonna get some builds which are very well put together/refined/effective, and other which are simply sub-par. What the system's rules should assure, on the other hand, is that overly broken decks shouldn't be possibly under its constraints. So if any configuration of cards leads to imbalanced possibilities, then you either have a cards-level problem (need to nerf cards or up their quality) or a system-level problem (items with several copies of a card should be more expensive on the tokens side). Yes, it does make sense. But (at least in the current implementation) the card system is the item system, as an item's level and tokens cost is solely determined by which cards appear on the item. As we know, rarity doesn't really affect balance at all, so it all boils down to the cards qualities. If we otherwise recognize the fact there's an intrinsic value in an item holding multiple copies of a same card, then the system should take that into account, so you would formalize that in a rule/set of rules, which would apply to all items equally, rather than on a case-by-case basis. Which is basically what I tried to imply in this post. Though I don't see the item formula changing anytime soon (if ever). Anyways, I still think the majority of the issues being mentioned in this thread can really be boiled down to the involved cards being undervalued.
Yes, but there's another layer that doesn't appear on the items/cards but is in the data files, and that is certain cards are only allowed to be on certain types of items. So if a card is tagged "Robes only" than the most a deck could ever have is 3 and only on a wizard. This is different than having any 36 cards in a deck as long as they total under a certain cost. There are restrictions that are made at the item level that are not/cannot be made at the card level.
Ofc! I don't think I ever stated it'd be totally legit to have 36x of a card in any given deck lol I'm taking the fact the availability of cards is limited by slot type as a given, almost not worth mentioning, since that's a core part of the itemization system which has always been in lace. So even if a card is cheap, there's gonna be a hard limit on the copies you can have given by which slots the card can be found in. All my reasoning was assuming that'll always hold true. In fact: To clarify further: I've always been talking "multiple copies of a card being fine, as long as the card is not undervalued and you can pay the tokens cost", but in the contest of a single item, not any number of cards across any number of slots
How about this rule: "The result cannot have more copies of a card than appear on any of the reagents." Which would mean that if all the reagents were the same item, then the result would also be that item. And you wouldn't be able to put 27 Firestorms into one deck.
Well, Firestorm is interesting. Even putting crafting shenanigans aside, you can pack an astonishing number already: a whooping 20 copies, with enough legendaries. In all seriousness, do you think 27x FS would make for a much more extreme build that 20x already provides? Not to mention, why wouldn't you devote your Robes slot to a nice 3x Resistant Hide instead? I'd probably still take Wym's Lavastaff over a 6x FS staff too, mainly because Volcano doesn't have a limited range. Interestingly enough, FS is also theoretically available in the Arcane Skill slot, although we don't currently have any Skill with FS on it I think. Meaning: the theoretical maximum could be as high as 30 copies of FS in a deck!!! That sounds a tad too much, probably... the rule you propose is interesting and certainly makes sense. I think that'd help preventing totally crazy results. But I'm pretty sure @Sir Veza would totally hate you if it was your fault that he won't get his hands on the end-all-be-all SP-farming set
Forever, and with extreme malice. But back to the original topic: I think I'd have a really good shot at crafting a 3x Maze item if I used 3 Copper Amulets as reagents. How much gold should this cost, and do you think the craftsman would take me seriously?
Here's my 2 cents, brace yourselves: I feel like this forum got respectfully heated fast and therefore very entertaining/informative/thought provoking to read... @Bandreus I think this is a fun/interesting idea provided you can only craft items that already exist. And, I think that the current itemized balancing makes "fun" "swingy" cards available at a reasonable cost. Plus most "swingy" cards are situational. And if everything is balanced at the card level the game is likely to end up with bland cards or a very cumbersome system to determine quality. For the crafting mechanic itself, I would really like to make a vibrant pain out of a couple Lochbar Ax, and think it would be cool if the number of cards you could randomly strip was determine by rarity. 1 for common, 2 for U, 3 for R, 4 E, 5 L. And then based on the cards stripped i can create an item. The gold cost could be applied for stripping the cards and for crafting an item allowing for a pool of cards with which you can eventually build items from. And of course the higher rarity item created the more it costs. That wasn't so bad, these are just opinions, please don't yell at me.
