Community Q&A with Chris

Crafting:
Are you happy with the current difficulty in crafting, especially socket colours, numbers and links? What plans, if any are there to improve or enhance crafting?


Set Items:
Any plans to introduce set items?


Uniques:
Are you happy with the current drop rate of uniques? Right now it seems almost impossible to try to farm for a particular unique and the best option seems to be crafting, which has its own issues.

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Any plans to add a lowered spell detail option to make the game more playable for your players with budget or lower-end PCs? My framerate is smooth as butter in pure physical combat but shit hits the fan when a lot of spell effects start to happen. All elements seem to cause this; ice, fire and lightning (especially lightning). I understand the game is still in beta but it seems poorly optimized when I consider the other games with similar graphics that I can run with no hiccups. These days a lot of people have beastly gaming machines, but there is still a large chunk of the community that does not.

If you're reading this I just want to let you know how much I appreciate this game. Easily my favorite PC game of all time and without a doubt the best and most innovative ARPG ever made :) You guys really do amazing work. Thank you so much Chris.

Looting options:
There is a 600 page thread on this but we are still very much in the dark about what your plans are for loot options in groups.

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Are the 3 hybrid chest armor types getting a special variant with different inherent properties like the Astral Plate (STR), Occultist Garb(INT), and Assassins Garb(DEX). and if so when?

Party difficulty

How do you feel about the difficulty when in a party?
As it is, there is almost no downside to partying as it gives you much more protection and mobs only scale in their health, which, to be honest, is pretty negligible.
Many people feel like monsters need to get buffed in other ways as well to scale with parties. For example they could get abilities that are more dangerous to parties, making both solo and parties equally viable.

What is your stance on this?

I know this question has been asked before but I just wanted to explain the reasoning behind it.

Do you plan on adding a /players x feature? I think this would help balance the solo vs party play issue as well as give those who don't have a good enough PC (to run 6 clients) a chance to farm better solo. Currently, those who can run multiple clients smoothly have a huge advantage over those who can't. This is very much like pay 2 win, since those with money to buy a good PC have a pretty considerable advantage over those without it.

Forgot to mention: For the record, I'm not the only one wanting this, as there have been multiple threads with many pages about this issue, but no reply ever from a GGG dev as far as I'm aware.


Thanks for creating this awesome game.

How do you guys feel about the current state of Energy Shield (and Chaos Inoculation) in comparison to the other defensive options? This has some overlap with questions in regard to the need to stack health nodes/gear, since CI uses the health you WOULD have without CI to calculate stuns and status ailments currently- e.g., perma-stun and never ending freeze on you all day every day.

How do you feel about the current meta in character-building being mostly hp-dominated in regards to selections in the passive tree? Do you think this is a problem, and are there any plans to address it if so? I don't mean this to be leading -- if you disagree that this is the case feel free to say so!


Thanks for all your hard work. I really appreciate the constant communication from GGG and especially you, Chris. You really do work your ass off for us. I want you to know that some of us realize that and appreciate it.

Will the Increased Duration/Qualty bug with Blood Rage be fixed soon? I'm losing out on a good 5-6% life steal from the 20% Blood Rage I paid a good exalted for because of it, and I rely heavily on the leech to live.

What are your thoughts on an in-game market/auction.

What do you think of the current loot-drop system?