Obviously the whole rolling properties approach to ‘crafting’ right now is a separate issue, but consider these on their own merit: Would you consider using them as alternatives over the existing meta?
Trinket Properties: (sticking with theme of utility)
Quick Block - Reduce weapon block delay by 33% (some heavier weapons would love this)
Quick Holster - Swap to/from range weapon 33% faster (would kill for this on bardin/sienna)
Deft - If weapon animation slows runspeed, reduce by 50% (eg if you slow down to swing - multiple weapons would consider)
Melee Weapon Traits: (offensive alternatives to swift slaying and reworks to bad ones)
Valor - Every 9th attack (swing) is an automatic critical hit including cleaved targets (with visible swing counter). Rivals swift slaying; gives the player skill-based control over damage spikes.
Finesse - 30% bonus damage on headshot (equivalent to 3 properties) - rivals swift slaying because it rewards precision over rampage.
Resourceful Combatant (rework) - Pushes, headshots, or critical strikes will reduce your ultimate cooldown by 2% once every 5 seconds. (more consistent, thematic, and skill-based)
Heroic Intervention (rework; Heroic Feint?) - Once every 45s ignore a hit from an elite overhead or from a monster melee attack, and also full-stagger the attacker. If you wanted to add a defensive trait, this is an option as it gives another route to boss-stagger or CW stagger and requires some skill to use to know when not to block (slash also is a save your life talent). Otherwise the defensive trait selection is good right now besides HI.
Offensive themes are meant to compete with swift slaying but with control in the players hands (eg rather than a random chance, reward specific behaviors). Resourceful combatant could use a rework. Defensively I think parry, opportunist, and off balance are a good selection set. Heroic intervention should be removed or reworked.
Ranged Weapon Traits: (reload should be addressed, resourceful reworked, add burst option)
Proficient - Reload 50% faster. (Would be in consideration on some slower reload weapons) Could also move this to a trinket utility property (at more like 30%).
Resourceful Sharpshooter (rework) - Ranged critical hits or headshots reduce the cooldown of your career skill by 4% every 12 seconds. (Theme: more control in players hands with headshots, less effective than melee version)
Heroic Stand - Using your ultimate immediately reloads your ranged weapon (a la hunter ult) and also vents your heat to empty. This basically gives you an option for more burst damage around your ult and/or insta-reload larger mag weapons. Could see BoP Saltzy considering 12 shots -> ult -> 12 shots instantly as an alternative to hunter/barrage, and Bardin/Sienna considering it over Thermal Equalizer in some instances.
Necklace Properties: *(sticking with theme of reducing damage received)
Poison Resist - 80% reduction to gas globe / buboe damage (would you trade 30% BCR for it?)
Dark Magic Resist - 80% reduction to blightstorm and leech damage (again, would you trade?)
Warpstone Resist - 50% reduction to gunrat, flamethrower, and assassin damage (see above)
These three are impactful/effective, valuable on harder difficulties, but are definitely very situational in their use cases. Why not have the option? *Other than of course adding more properties to the current RNG crafting, but that’s an issue with crafting not with trait/property balance.
Just brainstorming here as flipping back and forth between this and Warframe opened my eyes to a couple of possibilities as with WF you can mod most weapon aspects. Mostly in-passing musing, there’s a lot of useless properties and traits and plenty of alternatives that could be viable options.
Wrong theme.
Charm is all about offensive properties, Necklace is all about defensive properties.
This is why Charm has attack speed, power bonus vs various types and crit power, while necklace has stamina, health, damage reduction vs various types and block cost/angle.
This is probably sorta covered by the necklace’s 10% damage reduction vs AoE. It’s also an insanely high value imo, same for the other two, but I guess it’s really, really specific so who knows.
I like the trinket ideas, save for this
Since this would make QQ bardin slayer with 2h hammer broken again.
Like Kaelus said, the necklace is for the defensive properties. This said there are some issues for these traits in general. The first is that increasing the number of traits will make rerolling more annoying as there are even more combinations of stuff you don’t want if you are going for the one you want.
The second issue is that all damage reduction properties are currently at best 10 %. Which is completely overshadowed by the 20 % health increase which works “against” everything and is higher in value. This is especially bad for the AoE damage reduction which at 10 % is not tempting at all. With this in mind, the approach (as suggested here) of making quite a large damage reduction the more specific the effect is, is reasonable. So 80 % just against globadiers sounds fair. However, for broader effects like the current chaos damage reduction synergize to well with the 20 % Health increase if you increase them further.
So all in all the damage reduction traits are uninteresting against the currently near certain pick of health increase (I think only on Unchained I haven’t chosen it). With this in mind I would like to make an unpopular suggestion:
Remove the health increase trait completely as it is “too powerful”
Increase the damage reduction properties versus specific stuff with the baseline of 20 % health increase in mind meaning the more specific the reduction the higher it should be, for example
40 % Damage reduction against Skaven
30 % Damage reduction against Chaos
50 % Damage reduction against Specials (not elites though)
While these numbers appear very high in the first moment, you should consider that they have to buffer the loss of the 20 % health increase. So if you get equal damage from Chaos and Skaven you will get in “average” 20 % less damage leading to a similar effect. However, the system is more customizable and let’s you chose traits concerning your weak points. For example if you have no troubles with hordes but with Specials you get a bonus by this model. It makes for more interesting choices. But the system only works if you take the better choice away. I have doubts the community would like this. Plus the question how to fare with existing necklaces already.
Let’s be honest here. Hardly any of the existing traits and properties have a reason to exist.
The whole power vs. thing is absurd because you need to stack some amount of perfect rolls to hit some arbitrary “breakpoints” for less hits/shots, something hidden behind numbers that you can’t even properly test without mods. And the whole Skaven/Chaos thing was kept the same while the chance of “chaos” enemies was increased a lot by WoM.
Hardly anyone in their right mind picks the damage reduction traits because they’re so utterly weak and inferior to the alternatives. Forget 10%, even if you could take 50% reduction to all the area damage from specials, it would still be situational at best.
Attack speed and Swift Slaying are basically crutches for weapons that are too slow at the base level or are just a permanent increase for weapons that don’t need any “breakpoints”. You could fix that by making those weapons faster to begin with.
Using Heroic Intervention barely make any sense because the game is really stingy with triggering it.
All those “critical hit” related things require a lot of synergy and I’m not a fan of “critical hit builds” in any game. It’s a boring efficient numbers game, not something that really makes a playstyle difference.
Curse resistance’s existence is weird because it’s almost mandatory for the average player doing book runs for better loot, and you can drop it on higher difficulties (let alone weaves, where it’s extremely situational). Might as well just remove it and change the base curse effect.
Don’t even get me started on Revive/Respawn speed, or how important the +20% health thing is.
A lot of the ranged stuff is fine and I can understand the block related stuff for more defensive builds. But some of the ones I didn’t mention are basically just semi-mandatory picks for certain weapons, which means these buffs should just be put into those weapons to begin with.
Basically anything that is useless in most situations or practically mandatory for certain weapons should not exist in its current form. Change the values drastically, or remove them and come up with something more interesting.
That’s what makes pyro fun, building around crit, while also having the choice not to. Also i think blunderbuss Huntsman builds use scrounger to get some ammo back with the crit hs talent + ult.
Yes swift slaying is most picked, but if they decide to change traits there will prob be another ‘best overall’ trait and other ‘situational’ traits. I agree tho that ss is picked like too much and is a no brainer.
Power vs. Is cool. Yes it sucks if you have orange items, but you don’t really need alot of perfect rolls to get most bp’s in legend. I agree that more info should or testing possibilties should be more accesible.
