I'm going to make a post below 1000 words!
I can do it!
I've made it to level 50 twenty five hours before the game officially launches: during early access. Yeah I should chill out and stop being a crazy person. Maybe I'll burn out on this binge-playing soon. Hopefully! Crypto crypto crypto. WEB2 games are dumb, so on and so forth.
That being said today I'd like to focus on a topic that I think I can actually get through in a reasonable length of words, so this one will be all about the crafting mechanics within the game. Hitting this higher level has forced me to
Gems are a super basic gold-sink, which is somewhat redundant because gold already doesn't matter. When you find a gem (quality crude/chipped/normal) you can bring them to the gem NPC and combine 3 of them to upgrade to the next level. Very D2 vibes for sure.
Upgrades to the next level do not appear on the vendor until you level up a bit. The highest level I have access to is the normal version... If I recall correctly previous versions of the game had 5 qualities total, but the highest level that actually drops from mobs is the normal quality that then needs to be combined and leveled up.
The Gem NPC can also remove gems from an item when you're done using it for a gold fee (which basically rounds down to zero cost because gold is trivially easy to acquire). You can also add sockets like the screen shot above but it costs these "scattered prism" items which aren't particularly difficult to get but also you don't really farm enough of them to add a socket to everything you wear... which is fine because the added bonus you get from gems is pretty small anyway. Best to save up this asset until you actually need them in the mid to endgame.
We can see I went to the blacksmith and leveled up everything I was wearing to 3 (which is the max for rare items anyway). Each upgrade adds +5 item levels, which again isn't a huge upgrade but the first 3 levels are extremely cheap (only cost gold and disenchanting materials that you never run out of). Again, if you disenchant all rare items instead of selling them (sell "magic" items for gold)... you'll basically never run out of the materials you need like iron/silver/leather/etc.
These more rare salvage materials are what you need to worry about when crafting the good stuff. Veiled crystals are super easy to get because rare items drop like candy, but the wards come from legendary armor, the sigils come from legendary jewelry, and the fragments come from legendary weapons. I constantly have to upgrade my weapons with the codex to make frost shards to pierce enemies and create line damage or my frost build gets completely broken... which is why I only have 1 left as I just found a good weapon that cost 4 of them to upgrade.
Speaking of the frost build I tried to switch to fire and it was completely worthless. In fact I don't think I've seen a single mage go fire at this point. Everyone is frost and lightning, so fire may need a buff of some sort. Basically I haven't been saving up gear for an alternate build so I'm still quite locked in to what I've got going.
I was using this makeshift dagger before I found a superior staff to replace it. I was going to salvage the dagger but then I realized this thing would be crazy good on a rogue if I ever make one. Seeing as I hit a wall at level 40 I've been saving a few of the items that require level 40 just in case trading becomes a thing or if I create alts.
It's pretty rare that you'll find something where all 3 affixes work together.
In this case Incinerate is a fire spell and this item gives 2 ranks of the "best" core fire skill and fire damage and int which is the main stat for sorceress. Because this item is rare and hasn't been upgrade or modified at all it can be traded to another player and doesn't inform me that it's "bound to account". Thus far it seems like most (if not all) legendary items can't be traded to other accounts, which isn't as bad as it sounds because a good rare item like this could be upgraded into a legendary using a codex upgrade after the fact.
This is another example of an item that I kept out of hundreds of item drops that I salvaged and destroyed. This wand would be quite good for another ice mage, as the affixes increase damage to frozen enemies, slow enemies, and distant enemies. All of those affixes can proc at the same time with an ice mage, so again this wand is pretty rare and good for a level 42 frost sorc. Of course it needs to be upgraded with the ice shard codex for the piercing effect after it gets transferred.
Here's an example of one of the hundreds of items that just gets salvaged and destroyed or sold to the NPC for gold. It gives bonuses to fire and ice... so pretty worthless synergy. Also crit builds are very difficult to achieve and often reserved for end-game strategy. It also looks like a crit build would be better for lightning spec... which also makes this item bad.
Keeping track of all the garbage you pick up can be surprisingly tricky. I find it very annoying to wait until my inventory is full and then try to figure it out all at once. I much prefer to look at the item as soon as I pick it up to see if it's good or not. This way the game seems to clip along better and get broken up between upkeep and slaying demons.
You can press the spacebar when hovering over the tooltip of an item to make it junk. I make sure to mark all rare items as junk if I plan on salvaging them. I don't mark "magic" (blue) items as junk because when I try to sell them to a vendor it automatically sells all junk to the vendor, including the rare items that I wanted to salvage. It's easy enough to sell the magic items one at a time in town since they are always automatically hot garbage that gives us free gold.
Marking rare items as junk makes them quite easy to salvage all at once without accidentally salvaging something good. Clicking the ALL ITEMS button does not salvage legendary items, and all legendary items will trigger a warning that the item will be lost... which can be annoying unless you mark it as junk (then you only get one warning for all the junk in the inventory at the same time).
This is the best NPC in the game by far. This is the NPC that basically creates the fragmented economic system that allows us to create our own gear rather than trading with other players. Upgrading a good rare item with a CODEX or an ASPECT turns it into a legendary item, and legendary items can have their aspect overwritten as well.
Codex of Power upgrades are very expensive while Aspect upgrades are very cheap. This is because Codex of Power upgrades are always available to you but aspects are ripped from items you had previously. The cost to rip an aspect from a legendary item is gold (which again is a cost of basically zero). Thus far the salvage cost to transfer the aspect to a new item is veiled crystals, which aren't 100% free but still very easy to get.
Meanwhile if you use a Codex it's going to cost quite a bit of the harder to get materials. That being said, never salvage an item with a good Aspect even if you have a Codex that does the exact same thing. Doing so is an excellent way to waste resources, and I'm fairly certain I've done that several times by now without realizing the mistake I was making.
Enchanting an item in D4 means to replace one of the affixes with something else. Unfortunately this process is so expensive I still don't fully know what it takes. The material to do so is found "during a Helltide". Yeah no idea what that is. "Enchanting" is a thing that should only be reserved for the very best of items that would be perfect with the proper affix roll.
Even though I know I've never rerolled these affixes for some reason I think you get to choose the new affix out of a list of 3 random affixes to make the odds more in your favor. I'm not sure why I think it works that way and it must be a thing in some other iteration I've played (maybe D3?) That was a decade ago so who knows. I guess I'll find out when I actually have the resources to do it.
Completing world events gives you a resource called "Obols". Seeing as gold is completely worthless as a currency in this game (except with NPC interactions) Obols would be a much better currency between players. Of course I still don't even know how to or if trading is even possible, but still Obols are the only fungible asset that have any value in D4.
If one of your items is particularly bad or low level you can spend your Obols to receive a random item of your choice. My experience so far is that you have a greater than 20% chance of getting a legendary item on these rolls. Many of these legendary items will not be what you're looking for, but the salvage materials they grant are often good enough to upgrade a rare into a legendary.
The most annoying thing about Obols that makes them bad as a currency is that there is a hard-cap of being able to carry 500 at one time. I just checked to make sure and this limit is account-wide, which is both good and bad. Good because you can farm Obols on one character and spend them on another, and bad because the total is 500 across your main and any alts you control. I'd say the good outweighs the bad in that regard.
The items you get from this process are based on your character's level, so as you level up and are left with old gear it becomes more and more worth it to spend this currency for the chance of an upgrade.
It's also possible to find an upgrade from an NPC vendor. These items cost an arm and a leg (like a third of a million gold for me at my level) but again getting gold is pretty easy to get when you stop salvaging gear for a trip or two. I've never bought an upgrade from an NPC because I never look, but I remember in D3 sometimes you could find a killer ring or amulet for sale. Never a great item but often good for the required level and building out 'twink' characters.
Another post on a game... another 2000 words... I'm bad at this.
