Behind the design of The Cloak of Tawm'r Isley

Behind the design of The Cloak of Tawm’r Isley.

In 2007, I started playing in a White Wolf Larp called One World By Night, a monthly Vampire: The Masquerade larp, that had chronicles in the US, Brazil, Israel, and New Zealand at the time. It was a campaign that has been running for over 20 years now, and after my first character died in late 2008, I created a Nosferatu named Tom O’Reilly.

I started playing and alpha-testing Path of Exile in mid 2010, and really enjoyed the game, seeing that the game had a significant amount of scope for diversity and replayability. At the end of 2010, our chronicle of OWBN left the global chronicle, and we converted to the New World of Darkness system, however at the time, my character was kidnapped and held hostage in Antarctica
During closed beta I purchased a Diamond Pack, but didn’t particularly care for what unique I was going to create. After Tom got rescued from Antarctica, and gradually became more playable, I decided that I wanted my unique to be based on the character that I had played for over 5 years by then.

In August 2014, I contacted the design team about the item I wanted – the signature item for my character was my cloak, so it seemed a fitting choice to design my unique around this.
Tom had mastered his in-clan disciplines of Vigour (Supernatural Strength), Animalism, and Obfuscate (a supernatural ability to hide), as well as having significant levels of Auspex (supernatural perception). He is also a lot closer to humanity than most vampires in the setting, and had many influences over the mortals within the city.

He’s also rather rich and maintains a network of underground safehouses scattered throughout the city in the sewers.

My first idea involved having a Cloak that would allow me to remain undetected by enemies until I started attacking, but there were issues with this. My design parameters were that I wanted it to be inspired by the character, and the ggg team suggested the ways to represent the various aspects of him.

At the beginning of this year, we sorted some actual stat ideas into the item. I was going to have +strength to represent the vigour, but that dropped off at some point. The original plan to represent animalism was animal minions have a chance to blind on hit, and the immune to blind was a representation of Auspex, while the blind would represent the Obfsucate. Minions having life leech just plays into the vampire theme.

Late in the design process, Nick asked me how I felt about Auspex being represented by the Items dropped identified, and I thought that would be a very cool idea, however Chris altered it to Magic Items only, and I was very happy with the change. Chris’ reasoning was that should there be any future identify the uniques challenges, it would prevent players using the Cloak from completing these, while to me, it also represents the fact that he hasn’t yet mastered Auspex.

I like the fact that with it only hitting the magic items, it gives an incentive to run it on high level maps, for blue items, and may even help restore some value to regal orbs. I also like the way they’ve managed to incorporate having high levels of influence into the item, as the character likes to have all the information that he can obtain available, so as not to leave things to chance.
The name and flavour text had to be changed to be slightly more Wraeclastian, and this was done with the help of Nick, Tom, and the art team.

It’s been a long process, primarily because I wasn’t determined to have the item out when there were many other supporters that had much stronger ideas on what they wanted.

My recommendation for anyone else that’s bought a unique design or wants to buy one is work out the theme for the item, don’t obsess over the stats or a specific thing you want the item to do, as what you want may not be technically possible, or may not end up with a balanced item, but if you go, “hey, I’ve got this theme”, the design team will be happy to bring out your concept in more interesting ways than you may have, and have a much better idea of what is or isn’t possible, as well as what else is in the process of being designed.

- Picture Taken by Ant Vaughn at Chimera 2013.

Cool! Thanks for sharing!

I like your unique, but I think it is very wrong of GGG to put the "magic items drop identified" on such a class specific item. I would really like to see a more general purpose item with that mod in the future.

Thanks for contributing your item and sharing the design story. It is definitely a cool idea and whenever one of my characters finds and equips the item, this background will make it more enjoyable.

Thanks!

The art for the item looks really amazing can't wait to see what it looks like on each class.

I know a lot of people will want that item mod.

What a really cool item!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for designing it and i totally look forward to making a Necromancer with animate weapon - it is just so much to look forward to!!!!! <3 <3 :) :)

That's a great backstory thanks for the post

This is a lot more flavor than GGG can cram into 4 lines of text. On first glance of the 4 uniques in the news post, this one caught my eye the least. But now after reading this I want to use it -_-

I like it

But does the Item Filter have functionality to look for specific mods on identified magic items though, that would make this more useful.

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cryptc wrote:

I like it

But does the Item Filter have functionality to look for specific mods on identified magic items though, that would make this more useful.

This is a tailor-made animate weapon chest. It is useful.