Our view on map drop rates

Ill remove all the IIR i can and run only IQ and post the results after 10-15 runs or so

Please keep the discussion about minions and their relation to loot to another thread

many of us don't even use minions and the map issue is far deeper than just how many white vs magic vs rare items you get

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Chris wrote:

Remember, if you get a bunch of people in a room to flip coins and count how many heads they get, a whole bunch of people are going to not get as many heads as they should on average and will feel that the system is unfair. For every person who has a bad experience with a string of eight maps, someone else is basking in riches. This same principle applies to everything else in this type of Action RPG that uses extreme randomness for its item system.

We'll continue to monitor feedback and statistics. Thanks again for the testing.

While completely true, this is only okay in situations where players aren't denied gameplay because of these random factors.

I mean sure, some people will roll well and get heaps and rares and uniques and end up rich. Some people will end up super poor. But that doesn't deny anyone gameplay it just means some people have to work harder to get what they want because of rolls.

In the case of maps though, being unlucky means you -don't get to play end game-. You are denied end game gameplay when you run out of maps.

And lets be realistic here, while there may be plans for future endgame content... what we have right now in maps is all there is for end game.

I would highly recommend providing a method by which one can will always be able to participate in end game.

Here are a few ideas:
1 - Each map comes with a chest that -must- drop at least 1 white level 60 map.
2 - There is a recipe that realiably allows the creation of white level 60 maps.
3 - When using the laboratory WITHOUT a map, it takes you to a specific low yield endgame map.


Edit:

4 - Replace the map input section with a 2x3 input section that allows you to put any 1 item in that section. When you put the item in that section a little pop up will show up detailing the location and modifiers of the map (which are based off item type, level, stats, and maybe some seed value). This way you'll always have items to get into maps with, but the best maps will require high end items, but be very difficult due to the stats on the item.

My suggestions, don't mess with drop rates directly, but make hard mods more common, so it doesn't take a chaos+ to roll a 60% map. Also, get rid of temporal chains as a map mod, that is SO boring. I refuse to play it, not because it's hard, but because it makes the game boring. It's not in your best interest to make a boring end game, even if it's avoidable with a reroll.

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Gelsamel wrote:

Here are a few ideas:
1 - Each map comes with a chest that -must- drop at least 1 white level 60 map.

This would be a fine way to tackle the problem.

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2 - There is a recipe that realiably allows the creation of white level 60 maps.

This also would be a fine solution, even better as you wouldn't be required to farm for a bloody map in pyramid/act II just to get to the end game.

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3 - When using the laboratory WITHOUT a map, it takes you to a specific low yield endgame map.

Best solution, in my opinion. Random level 60 map, random mods, perhaps without being able to reroll a new instance to get a new map (with this you'd possibly need to disable some of the game breaking mods like blood magic, no regen, etc).

Allowing a reroll wouldn't be bad, it would take a lot more effort to get the maps/mods you really, really want than in the past with Maelstrom of Chaos (ledge rerolls, ftw!). I can't see many people would bother rolling more than a map or two before they settled on one they liked, I'm not too picky, avoiding ele reflect and temporal chains makes me happy.

I was thinking as I identified a rare map that dropped earlier and it came up with 75% quantity how nice it was that I didn't have to spend currency to get it into that state. At the moment the chance of getting a rare map as opposed to a white one is tiny - maybe rare maps could drop more often, that way you don't feel like it's a waste of currency if you run it as it is and don't get any more maps out of it. But you could still scour/alch or chaos it to change to mods if you so desired.

Two problems with this approach though - chiselling your maps takes more currency as you would use more scourings & blue maps are virtually useless at the moment since you can never really get enough quantity on them so increasing the chance for it to be magic as well as rare would be more of a hindrance than a help.

Oh. What's differencies between low level maps and, for example, Vaal Runs. May be i'm kinda stupid, but only mods, no? So, my idea was about (when you creating new instances like ctrl+wp) allow players to choose difficulty (normal, hard, very hard), and, apply mods like "blue" map to "hard", and "yellow" map to "very hard". May be do this as end-game, i mean, possible only after beating last Vaal.

..oops, forgot about only 6 enters to a map.. but, may be it's possible to do limited number of enters to an act "map"?

All I will say is the 1.5 maps per map rate I guess is fairly accurate. Most of the time I get a map from a map. I won't pretend I know the math involved but I will note that earlier today I got 4 maps in 1 map I was running through. Though yesterday I ran Ancient Pyramid and level 2 of Waterfall 4 times in a row and never got a single map as well.

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Gelsamel wrote:

3 - When using the laboratory WITHOUT a map, it takes you to a specific low yield endgame map.

Er... Pyramids? There's a portal there and everything...

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arual wrote:

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Gelsamel wrote:

3 - When using the laboratory WITHOUT a map, it takes you to a specific low yield endgame map.

Er... Pyramids? There's a portal there and everything...

Pyramid is super annoying for ranged characters or those with low elemental resists. I can one hit virtually everything in there and have max resists, but I still hate it. Maps are creative and interesting, almost always different, like MoC used to be, I want access to that after I kill Vaal without having to luck into something or trade for something to get it. This is a great solution to this, although I added random mods to up the "yield" part.