A fan made a common suggestion about lowering the number of items required to equip at once from a set, and got a Blue reply. Fewer Set Items Required for Bonuses = More Gear Variety?
Sets have 6 parts but you get bonuses for using 2, 3, and 4 parts instead of the full 6. This means that you have a much larger degree of control over which items you use. Now if you find a sweet pair of Frostburns or Andariel’s Visage you can easily use it if you wish, even better, you can use both!
Tyvalir: Thanks for this bit of feedback, Silentstar.
One of our ongoing goals is to ensure that there are a variety of items which are valuable for each gear slot, and we have been adding new Legendary and Set item affixes to the game over time to this effect. Aside from making more items competitive for each gear slot, this process will also naturally result in players having to make more difficult choices about which items to equip as time goes on.
Nevalistis explained this philosophy a bit further in a previous post:
We decided against adding shoulders as one of the new pieces while expanding the older sets to 7 pieces. One of the reasons is because many builds do not currently have a game-changing legendary in their shoulder slot. Of course, this is exactly why people want the new set to be a shoulder item – it would make for a very easy choice. However, we want there to be some contention between your gear choices, which is why we’re looking more at slots like gloves, rings, and bracers. We are deliberately trying to create more difficult item choices while leaving some flexibility during the gear-up process.
Does this sight still get your hopes up?
The unbalance wouldn’t be so bad for players who just switched one of the set items out for a different legendary, and that would allow a lot more variety. But you know the strongest builds would become those that could use two different six piece bonuses at the same time. It wouldn’t work for every class, but those that could do it would be awesome.
Then again, is that a bad thing? Most of us really enjoy making/finding very powerful builds, and you certainly don’t hear complaints from the Spin2Win Barbs who have overrun the leaderboards this season using the 6p WW set AND 4p IK set at the same time. Why not lower set item reqs and let every class in on that fun? Power Creep for everyone!
It’s OK with me if they lower the bonus and the number of pieces required. They could also grant all bonus and make it scale with the number of pieces you wear. This would a more reasonable trade-off. E.g. for the 6 pieces bonus of Tal Rasha set, the % dmg per stack would increase from 50% for two pieces to 150% for the six (and why not 180 for seven).
I’d never considered scaling bonuses…but that’s a pretty neat idea. It would seem like it gives you more flexibility since you would be able to make decisions about how MUCH a bonus was worth to you versus other competing bonuses. I think it’s at least worth some exploration by Blizz.
Good idea, but never going to happen because it would be too hard to understand for casual gamers, let alone the amount of text they would have to add to each set item explaining the scaling effects etc. 😛
And it wouldn’t work for a lot of sets where the 4p or 6p bonus is some discrete thing, not just a % increase. Monk gets all 4 auras at once from Inna’s, or he doesn’t. What would scale; you get 2 auras, then 3, then 4? Or you get all 4 but they’re only 50% effective?
It’s doable, but not elegant, and it would turn everything into a big math problem, with a lot of values to weigh that would be totally off-putting to casuals. (Of course we’ve got that anyway with no in-game method to compare DPS via +skills vs. +elemental, +LGem effects, etc…)
I’d absolutely settle for a decrease in power to have more build flexibility/diversity. In fact, there’s nothing to ‘settle’ for; it’s just a win-win on every front since ‘power’ is completely relative in these games anyway. All it would do is increase options for players. In theory.
Also what’s the deal with our avatar pics not showing up on the site anymore? Has Blizz demanded you remove them so as to not compete with their official forums???!! :O
Is this problem on my end or? I haven’t been on the site for a while.
Not just you…they aren’t showing for me anymore either. I think they recently migrated the site to a new server…I imagine it broke during the transition.
It’s an issue with different scripts. The forums run on a forum script and main page comments are via modded WordPress, and it’s tough to kludge the databases together. That said, avatar pics worked before some recent script changes, so hopefully we can get them working again.
A nice idea, but of course it wouldn’t really solve anything. Everyone would still need the 6 pieces to get the full bonus.
The best solution imho is to remove the 6 piece sets altogether and allow for real flexible and fun builds based solely on legendaries.
I think sets are fun and big sets should definitely have a place in the game, but atm it feels very formulaic and mmo-ish. Many of the class sets are just ridiculously overpowered to the point that it’s useless playing without one. I’d really like to see more set variety i.e. more viable smaller sets, make the crafted sets better, make crafted gear in general better I mean most of them are just rares with slightly better stats…
This game still has a loooong way to go and I keep thinking to myself, maybe I should have never bought it and just waited until a couple patches after the last expansion to start playing 😉
*I* want them to make a passive skill that is available to all classes which acts like RoRG; that would reduce the pain of choosing RoRG vs. F/R (but not remove it, since you now have to remove a passive skill), and allow more creative builds at the price of needing both a ring slot and a passive skill for it (-2 to set piece requirements, minimum 2 items).