What do you guys think about Blood Shards?

[HardRock]

For those who don't know, Blood Shards are a new currency in Reaper of Souls. You can get them as rewards for doing Bounties and they may also drop when you open a Horadric Cache, which you also get as a reward for Bounties and for doing Nephalem Rift runs.

As far as I know at the moment Blood Shards can be spent only on Gambling, for which you get at least a Rare item with completely random stats.

My issue is this: It seems to me that the only long term gold sink in the game is Enchanting, so there are no trade-offs to made in deciding what to spend our gold on. Repair costs are practically non-existent. Crafting could be nice, but it requires tons of components, so unless you want to craft Legendaries you're probably better off just Gambling and preserving your gold for Enchanting, or in other words for tailoring the items you already have to your liking.

My proposition: Throw out Blood Shards completely. Gambling should once again cost gold and we should have a low chance to get Legendaries from it as well (if we don't already), even if just a subset of them. Gambling should also cost much more gold than Crafting, because the latter requires materials other than gold as well. The goal would be to give players a choice:

a) Salvage everything and craft things for cheaper, leaving more gold for Enchanting.

b) Sell things for Gambling, potentially getting cool Legendaries, while losing tons of money and having less to customize what you get.

This is just a general idea. The implementation would most likely require some balancing. Crafting should be improved and selling items should net us more gold.

In short, I think Blood Shards are completely unnecessary. They reduce the number of things we can spend gold on, reducing our choices and gold's value in the process. Since gold is account bound now there's no reason for them to be in the game as far as I can see.

I'm curious what do you guys think about this topic, especially testers who already played RoS extensively.

 

[yovargas]

But should they really be adding a "side" currency when they still need to get a handle on the main one? (Says a guy who hasn't played any of this.)

 

[ShadoutMapes]

But should they really be adding a "side" currency when they still need to get a handle on the main one? (Says a guy who hasn't played any of this.)

Arent they basically trying to kill off gold as a currency?
Maybe an exaggeration, but it seems like a clear move toward making gold have low impact.
Which is the right way to go if you want a game reset. Replace it with a new one.

Sure they could also just reset everyones gold, but damn would people complain about that.

 

[Tigerpaw]

That sounds like a pretty good idea, except I think it would give players who have huge gold reserves (from playing the AH game) a big advantage to make gambling worthwhile. Blizzard clearly wants acquisition of items/upgrades to involve killing monsters and since blood shards can only be gained through, well, killing monsters, this is in line with this philosophy.

Ultimately, I don't think blood shards should be a problem so long as: a) you don't ever gain too many relative to gambling costs and b) gambling is a viable way to get good gear. Perhaps if gambling costs slowly increased each time (akin to enchanting costs) it would help keep player reserves of blood shards low and give them good value, especially with good rewards from gambling.

 

[TheNix]

As someone who will rarely, if ever, leave the campaign mode it's just another piece of useless tat that I will not use.

 

[Disciple of Erebos]

I like the idea of blood shards, but I think that there should be something else that you can do with them other than just gambling. Specifically, it would be nice to have a shop that trades in shards rather than gold, to give players something to spend shards on rather than just gambling. I would say that for gambling, you should have a chance at getting a legendary instead of a rare from the roll; this makes gambling worthwhile as risk vs. reward. In terms of the shop I proposed, I think that it would be nice if they sold legendaries for blood shards at a very high price. I don't have RoS, so I don't know how quickly you get blood shards, but I would say that maybe 5000 shards for a guaranteed legendary seems fine. If that's too high or too low, the number could be changed, but the point is that you could save up blood shards for a guaranteed legendary, or you could use them sparingly to gamble and hope that you got something valuable. Additionally, I think that a blood shards shop should sell non-standard potions as more powerful consumables that you can only buy in limited quantities for blood shards. For example, you could have a full health potion that costs 50 blood shards, so you could save up a lot and buy better healing potions instead of a legendary, or you could have a couple supplementary full-heals in case you found a really difficult encounter and needed more than 60% healing. Likewise, potions that restored resource or partially reset cooldowns would be an interesting option to have. The devs could make all potions work on the same timer, so you couldn't pop a health potion and then pop a resource potion; this would make you really choose how you wanted to play the game. I think that this would be a good thing to do with blood shards; gold is what you use for normal stuff, while shards are what you use for curios and nonstandard item purchases.

 

[wardog]

Likes something like this^^^^.
Oh, but that might actually be fun!!!

 

[RazeBarb]

They shouldn't limit them to 500 like they did in the last patch.
If they remove the limit and enable GOD DAMNED TRADING FFS, then we'd have an actual currency.
Right now they feel unfinished.

Edit:
I just got an idea. How about we could also trade bloodshards in for gold? Let's say 1 shard = 50k gold?
What do you guys think about that?

 

[ShadoutMapes]

They shouldn't limit them to 500 like they did in the last patch.
If they remove the limit and enable GOD DAMNED TRADING FFS, then we'd have an actual currency.
Right now they feel unfinished.

Edit:
I just got an idea. How about we could also trade bloodshards in for gold? Let's say 1 shard = 50k gold?
What do you guys think about that?

Then it might as well just be gold.

I do agree that Blood shards should be useful for more than gambling.
Unless there are choices, unless there are trade-offs, when you spend something, it becomes rather meaningless.

 

[clueso]

I think we should have both: gambling just with gold & gambling with gold & blood shards - gambling with additional blood shards could have an increased chance of getting legendarys

 

[Flux]

Currently blood shards are stupid and underutilized, but I have hopes for their improvement. I like a currency that you can't just pick up off the ground, though it's so easy to earn them from bounties now that it's sort of pointless. More pointless is the fact that you can only gamble rares, which are plentiful anyway, so everyone just ends up using some BS to get better rares at 70, and then ever after they're just gambled on rings/amulets, which have virtually no chance of being better than whatever legendary ring/amulet you find.

Previously you could buy Horadric goodie bags for 100 shards, which was fun. Usually you got nothing, but some chance of a legendary or recipe in the bag. They need to add that back in, maybe up the price to 200 or 250 shards. Especially now that bags hardly ever drop legs. There should be some tiny % chance of gambling a leg, and they should have some gamble for materials also; 99% chance of regular ones, but 1% chance of leg mats. Gambling was fun but faded from use end game in D2; D3 it could be better, with some tweaks.

 

[ShadoutMapes]

More pointless is the fact that you can only gamble rares

Wow, okay that is ridiculous. Sometimes Blizzard are wrong, and then sometimes they are just outright stupid in the decisions.

 

[HardRock]

I think after what happened with the AH the devs really want us to feel that we earned those Legendaries. What they don't seem to realize is now that both our currencies are account bound we have to earn every item ourselves, no matter what source they come from. Crafting and gambling doesn't short circuit the item game the AH did, they merely provide fixed milestones where we get an item. This is why I hope crafted Legendaries will eventually have unique stats like dropped ones do. With how the game is set up they are essentially drops as well, but without anything unique about them. Similarly, you have to slay monsters to gamble, because that's the only source of Blood Shards.

When the best Legendaries can only come from drops then the other item sources have no place in the endgame and they will be ignored by everyone eventually, leaving us with only one gold or currency sink: Enchanting.

 

[Flux]

Wow, okay that is ridiculous. Sometimes Blizzard are wrong, and then sometimes they are just outright stupid in the decisions.

I think once the devs are back from xmas break we'll see some big tweaks to the econ and item stuff in a patch. The shift of shards in the last patch seemed an overreaction, like they were testing one extreme and then the other, and now most players just ignore shards untll they hit the 500 cap (which is really dumb to exist at all) at which point they dump 400 or so on gambling jewelry, just to clear out some space below the cap.

Prior to the patch you got about 40/60 blue/yellow from gambling. since the patch you get about 1/99 blue/yellow, and I think the blue are just bugs.

I haven't given the whole system any real consideration, but some quick ideas:

1) shards should be harder to get; fewer from bounties but more random drops,
2) improve gambling high end with potential for legs, but add a low end back in also with blues,
3) return goodie bag gambling, maybe as a totally random mystery object that might grant you a goodie bag, a huge fountain of gold or mats, a leg item, a single potion, etc. If that last one cost 500 to gamble it could be really fun; store up the whole cap, then blow it on one single roll of the dice.

 

[shoko]

What i don't like about Blood Shards:

• capped at 500 (would only make sense if you can use them for a weekly quest or something, otherwise remove it)
• sound like legendary on drop
• no real use of it, never seen a legendary "drop" - They are completely useless after getting legendary gear

What i would like to see:

• transmog gear/sets for bloodshards
• crafting material for transmog gear/sets
• enhanced gambling (about 1% chance to get legendary - they are soulbound - WHY THE HELL NOT?)

Greets
shoko

 

[noticks]

I have found that you can actually get a blue item once in a while. The chance does seem low, but it has happened to me in the current patch.

 

[Steven Hazani]

Makes me wonder if it's reversed. Instead of being usually rares, small chance of higher quality (legendary/set), it's small chance of lower quality (magic).