Developer Insight: The Divination Card Creation Process

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OniAsura wrote:

1 socket Shavronne's Wrappings
Corrupted

Someone should do it or coil

Unfortunately Nickk wasn't quiet as specific as he could be in terms of restrictions for divination cards - the tl;dr is if you choose a Magic/Rare/Unique you cannot choose socket numbers along with various other restrictions.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Feel free to explain why 'Rain of Chaos' gives only one chaos orb then. Fairly sure you guys know what 'rain' means.

Did Jozen specifically request just one orb for 8 cards, and insist it be called 'rain'? Really curious about that one.

Considering I typically get 4-6 of those cards per Village Ruin run, certainly feels like it's raining Divination Cards at least, if not chaos orbs.

Fits with the drop rate discussion as well; as we well know, you can easily go 10 maps without dropping a single chaos orb. Two to three VR map runs = 1 chaos = fitting enough to me.

Fits well with the flavour text also: Where the shards fell, all was destroyed. Seems like a village got ruined by a rain (or perhaps reign) of chaos.

As for the name, and amount required per stack:

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Once we've mutually decided a name, flavour text and reward item, we take over the process. We'll create art for your card, balance its rarity, determine how many you'll need to complete a stack, and assign it to drop in specific locations.

-- From "How Divination Card Submissions Will Work"

So, stands to reason that Jozen decided the 1 chaos orb, GGG decided the cards per stack, and the name was mutually agreed on.

I think the idea of the cards is nice. But in reality the implementation right now is somewhat lackluster for the casual player (= me at the moment). Every once a while a card drops, but always either with super trash reward (like 40 scrolls of wisdom - wow, if you farm that card, you easily get 500 just from farming) or it's like super rare and you have 1/12. Leading to the cards being put into stash and then just being forgotten.

So this is once again a hard core-player-only feature. But this contradicts with many cards just being trash and not worth farming. Good players will farm for a very limited amount of cards, while the weak/medium cards - clearly designed for casual players - are not used at all.

All in all not a very satisfactory feature in my opinion. One option to fix it would be to massively increase card drops for weak/medium cards, and to make it much more transparent what cards can drop in which areas.

I was very pleased with the whole process, and can't wait to see how the art turns out! Will definitely do a similar level of backing if another version is offered in the future :).

You guys are doing a great job with these. I especially like rain of chaos and the pack leader

I'm pretty sure the Rain of Chaos card is a reference to Warcraft 3(yeah, I know it was 'Reign', not 'Rain').

Interesting insight.

I think more complex cards should be possible, however.

Something like this:

"Map, level 75-80, rare, corrupted into an 8-mod map"

or

"Flaring 5-link Maraketh weapon, ilvl 77"

or

"Shavronne's Wrappings, 5-link, Corrupted to have 2 white sockets"

or

"Map - level 76, rare, has Beyond and Twinned affixes plus some additional random mods".

Just to let you know:

The Carrion Crow is not even worth picking up. Not sure what is design goal behind these.
The Hermit - 9 cards, which only drop from cruel onwards... what was the DESIGN goal with this again?
The Scholar - do I have to say anything? :(

While most of the cards feel rewarding and cool to find, these feel GREATLY underwhelming. Some other 1c unique cards may seem like it too, but I can take into the consideration that there are some self-found players that find them useful - oh, well. But even with self-found in mind, The Carrion Crow, The Hermit and The Scholar have no use.

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CharanJaydemyr wrote:

Anyway, good job sucking a lot of money out of folks for *far* less dev work than required for the cheaper (and now obviously defunct, at least openly) custom unique design pack. Better than the farce that was Grandmasters, at least.

I believe that was the direct intention of this pack, yes. They are STILL, years later, under a pretty big backlog of custom uniques (as I understand it). I think the Hall of Grandmasters proved that they just cannot dedicate a huge chunk of developer hours to the supporters, and I believe that, even with the copypasta item they gave everyone, it still ended up being far more work than they anticipated to balance the AI (and framerate) and create the map. The goal with div cards, to me, seems to have been to create the coolest possible supporter item while also keeping the effort on GGG's part to a bare minimum.

It's a pretty good compromise, I think. They can pump these cards out by the dozens without too much hassle and get the content in the game. It's still unique enough with name and flavor text that you can add a bit of yourself into the game if you really want to. While you can only use items that exist, and therefore cannot really impact actual gameplay much (if any), it's still up to you to buy it or not. Personally, I think the price tag is a little steep, I would have dropped 500 in a heartbeat if it were priced similarly as the last pack. However, considering they sold hundreds of them, apparently it was a well thought out price tag after all.

But I agree most with what everyone already knows : the biggest problem with the cards is that there are cards for items worth 1c or less that take hours upon hours to farm. Rise of the Phoenix is worth like 5c tops, and each card is so rare that they are worth more than the whole item.

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Perq wrote:

The Carrion Crow is not even worth picking up. Not sure what is design goal behind these.
The Scholar - do I have to say anything? :(

Carrion Crow can result in a 6S chest.

Scholar's a godsend for MFers. I do Archives runs now just to restock quickly.