Diablo IV, Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 Forums - Diabloii.Net
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.
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.