Hyborian Codex

Ilaliya, Mr Craft, is an extremely kind person. When I translated the article on the new gem system I had some questions that could be seen as obvious or dummy but still, I wanted to know more. That’s why I simply asked to Ilaliya to throw the light on them. I apologize for my wonderful frenglish, but I’m trying to do my best, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you spot one (or more) mistake.

Enjoy !

Do you know if the blue recipes will be world-drop or raid/dungeon loots ? How many will be available?

So in terms of the new dropped recipes associated with the gem revamp, there are 10 blue recipes available for gem-cutters. They may be found dropping off specific bosses in the commons district, a new playfield we’re introducing for the patch. Also supporting the gem revamp, there are 6 blue alchemy recipes that will allow players to transform uncut gems of a tier to uncut gems of a different tier. These recipes drop from a combination of outdoor and dungeon bosses.

For the raiders out there, we are finishing up an epic crafted event for 1.05 that should spice up Wing 3 of Black Ring Citadel. This raid event will produce an epic crafted item, but will involve additional goals for an existing encounter. The raid guys have really managed to make crafting an epic… well, an epic experience. So this is a pretty exciting development. I’ll leave the details of the item for players to discover.

The colors that are left over will be turned into which color? (I know that the current orange gems will be turned into red ones).

Since we reduced 8 gem colors to 6, there were two colors no longer used in the gem system – orange and purple. If players had any uncut gems in their inventory of an unused color, they will be automatically converted over to the used colors. Orange maps to red uncut gems. Purple maps to black uncut gems.

Inventory Stacking: will the uncut gems still be stacked by 100 ? What will be the stacking limit for cut gems (100, 20, 50) ?

In 1.05, uncut gems now have a stack limit of 500, and cut gems have a stack limit of 100.

What will happen if a player does not have any more room in his inventory when the patch will hit the live, especially for the 1:3 ratio? (Lost gems? Sent by in game mail?) I mean, if you have 100 flawless gems, they would be converted in 300 gems. If the stacking pile is still 100, there will be a problem.

The old stack sizes for uncut gems are 100. So if someone has a full stack of 100 flawless, they’ll still be under the 500 stack size give the conversion ratio. So we expect gem hoarders to have a lot more free bag space after 1.05!

Socket Color on crafted items: will it be random (totally/partially)? Sometimes a crafted item could be used for different classes. For instance, if I craft a dagger? Will a recipe give various models of dagger (assassin, caster…)?

The socket colors are not random at all. They are each deliberately chosen given the material type and intended purpose of the item. Most gem colors have multiple options available to most classes, but every gem color has at least one choice for every class. For example, even though blue is more magic themed than other colors, it has Combat Rating (cold) which can be used by all physical damage do-ers as well as elemental protections that mitigate magic damage, which can be useful to any class.

That’s basically the same for « generic » items: weapons, necklace, rings, cloaks… I saw that you made 3 versions of a ring (tank, phy dps and magic dps) but will it be 3 different recipes to get?

We organized the new recipes for the 6 new City Crafted accessories (necklace, rings) so into two recipes — one recipe with the 3 rings, and one recipe with the 3 necklaces. These recipes drop off a boss in the Tarantia Commons District.

When you’re saying that there is currently 70 gem effects (for 36 uncut gems), does it mean that we can control (and choose?) the final product? Or does it mean that you count all the « base mods » for the lowest tiers and also the « unique mods » for the blue gems and T10?

There are 36 uncut gems. This comes from 6 colors and 6 tiers – so one uncut gem per color per tier. We get 70 cut gems (It’s 71 now, as a gem got added during the testlive cycle) because many tiers have multiple recipes per color. So each recipe can convert the same uncut gem into a different cut gems. There is no random element. The player merely chooses to use recipe A or recipe B.

Will the alchemist get automatically the recipe to « lower » a gem? Or will he have to get it (instance? raid? world drop? vendor? quest?)

These recipes drop somewhere in the Commons District. The NPCs which drop the recipes are involved in the Riot Event, which is the central conflict taking place in the area.

Will crafted weapons also get some innate mods? (As for crafter gears)

Yes, all crafted weapons and armors have innate mods. The crafted items which did not have innate mods before 1.05 were given them.

Concerning this: « For any cases that crop up where 3 old gems are better than 1 new gem, you may find the old gems reduced a little in power so they do not surpass the power of the new gems. » What does it mean? In 99% of times, there won’t be any problem (i.e. the new gems are definitely better) but for the last %, you will find all the possible combination and check if they could be better than the new gems and then nerf them?

You have to remember that the old cut gems were generated by the game system. When we sat down and compiled the exhaustive list, we found the number of unique cut gems was exactly 1,380. That’s a lot of gems! Now with the revamp we had several goals for the new system, and one goal was reducing the number (it’s currently 71). This should greatly improve the gem-cutting experience from an inventory management perspective.

As you may recall, the original crafted gear had 3 gem slots per piece. This totals to 36 gem slots across the entire character. Player feedback regarding the old system indicated that values on the cut gems felt diluted. And this is because we had to balance for the extreme case where a player wore gems with the same effect 36 times. In the new system, for the vast majority of gear, we reduced the number of gem slots to 1 per piece. This means, other changes aside, a new gem could be worth about 3 times what an old gem was worth.

Let me talk about how we approached things. Instead of basing our calculations directly off the old gems, we looked at relative power of the gem socket to the crafted power tiers. This is a good indicator of how crafted gear feels overall to the player. For example, a gem slot on a piece of Crafted Culture bracers is (in 1.05) worth about 16% of the item’s total power. However, a gem slot on a piece of Crafted City bracers is worth about 18% of the item’s total power. This is because Crafted Culture items are slightly more powerful than Crafted City items. We deliberately picked the numbers so that the new gems ended up being worth at least 3 times the old gems. During the revamp, we also normalized a lot of effect values. By this I mean all gems at a given tier (and power-level) are worth the same in balance terms. So for some effects the new gems ended up slightly over 3 times more powerful than the old gems and for other effects the new gems were 4 or 5 times more powerful.

However, we also a lot of other changes to the underlying combat system. Some stats were completely deprecated, while other stats got converted over to a rating. These changes had to be applied to existing (old cut) gems as much as possible. The changes to the existing gems of course had to reflect changes to the characters themselves and the RPG system.

Now we get back to the 1,380 number. Given all above, we identified the subset of that number to evaluate all the changes against. Kind of like a benchmark or a test. This included the gems that were previously melee damage, which has now become Combat Rating, and other gems we knew were popular with the player-base. But players are very clever and they do all sorts of things that we as designers can never predict. That’s a fact of the industry. So we’re aware there might be some old gems that need tweaking. A good indicator might be if we see a trend of players on the live servers, prior to 1.05 being patched, socketing their gear with a handful of gems in anticipation of the changes. Indicators such as this will tell us where to look when doing our final evaluation of the gem numbers before the patch goes live.