Sets in Last Epoch

[Ayranjie]

Hey guys! I felt like brainstorming about how and what role sets could play in LE to be meaningful and diverse.

I feel crafting is great and adds a lot of freedom and choice when making or defining your build. I imagine legendaries will add a fresh flavor to this overall and I’m looking forward to these!

Now I experienced sets always as a very, very interesting design, but I’ve rarely felt or seen an implementation that I thought was good, interesting, or in a good place in regards to all the other systems in place.

I think a good way of implementing the idea of sets could be in adding a variety of choices among sets, specifically:

• Different set numbers: 2-piece sets, 4 piece-sets, 3- piece sets, 6-piece sets - heck, even a 8-piece-set!
• different combinations of body parts: 2 ring set, weapon/shield set, armory set (gloves, head, torso, boots), a set with a shield, 2 ring and an Amulett, a set with a 2hand weapon and a helmet only!

I think this would add much more diversity, possibilities and choice when it comes to asking oneself: what kind of choices does this set add to the way we build our character and play the game? What role does it put your decision-making into, that seems vivid and interesting?

I’d brainstorm some ideas off my head to maybe translate this and see what that would mean:

Let’s say there is a jewelery set. An Amulett, two rings. So I’m using 3 spots for specifics that I would have chosen for legendary items or crafted ones otherwise, so using these 3 set items means that they’ll have to compete with potential 3 other endgame items for these spots.

They have a higher potential to make possible certain playstyle, because they can add significant bonuses without becoming Bis, because these significant bonuses can be balanced around “being as powerful as x other items together”. So that’s why using smaller sets, 2-5 items in particular, is a very good design choice as a main focus.

I could also combine 2 sets together, eventually, or combine freely with crafted gear or legendaries, or all of them, or none.

Here some ideas

3-piece-set: Amulett/2 rings

The Amulett could give +30 base mana, add medium benefits to minions offense and survival
Ring 1 could give high benefits to minions, and add significant health when it comes to being a ring
Ring 2 could give special bonuses to minions (attack/cast and movement speed) and add protection higher than a ring would normally give.

Set-bonus 2 creates a blood bond which transfers 10% of the total damage you take equally onto your minions instead
Set-bonus 3 would create a further bond between you and your minions. Any added offensive minion boni from gear and passives is granted to you at 10% effectiveness and vice versa. So a 500% in minion dmg from gear gives you 50% buff to source damage (physical, elemental, void, etc.) - and your highest source damage bonus (e.g. 250% to necrotic damage) would add 25% to minion dmg (maybe this is multiplicative).

This adds nice bonuses to a minion build, being generally unspecific yet powerful to use, but in no way mandatory for a certain build or even for being minion/companion based

Another example:

3 set piece: belt, shoes, shield

The belt grants 15% movement speed, high chance to dodge, some protection
Shoes grant 25% movement speed, good dodge chance, good armor
Shield Grant 10% movement speed, good dodge, high armor, instead of block chance you get additional armor = more physical resist

Set bonus 2: x% of your armor is added to your dodge chance
Set bonus 3: for each attack dodged recently you gain x% more dmg for 4 seconds

This promotes agile builds, thst rely on dodge, and benefit being in melee/hit, still being quite build unspecific but potentially strong and viable

2 set piece (Specificall bound to the acolyte class - can’t be used by eg. shaman) - 2hand sword and relic

2hand sword: grants good dmg and minion dmg
Relic: significantly raises minion melee dmg, significantly raises distance/caster minions survivability, adds good player attack speed

2 set bonus: For each melee attack you have used recently, minions gain x% more dmg for 4 seconds

For now my brainstorming

[Irrelevant]

All games that come to my mind that involved sets were bad in my experience. Sets are to restrictive and outside of maybe a level set I don’t think it would make the game any better and it shrinks the spectrum of possible viable builds even more.

I’m all against sets and think more legendary interactions would be funto have options to make the skills you mainly want to use viable instead of leading to a: “You want good numbers? Play set x and use skills Y skilled in order Z or go home!”. Look at Diablo 3 for an example. I like ww barb and it took them ages to make the set for the build worthwhile. I think there was a similar discussion with the same topic arround so maybe you get some inspiration there as well if the search function finds it ^^.

[boardman21]

Lots of brainstorming there!

Here’s the problem i see with sets (or what problems they could cause in LE)

1)Set items/Uniques are not enchantable so this actually either makes or breaks a set item right off the bat and can break the game like it did in D3. Since players cant enchant you gotta ask yourself does it give better stats than you can get on a good self crafted item? doing this makes it OP from the get go and everyone would want to wear it especially since atm you break everything you enchant before getting below 90% chance threshold. Or does it give good stats but crafting any item with at lest 1 t5 and some t4 is actually better? This makes the set/unique on good until you craft better, which means there not needed for the build and arnt going to be used in end game.
Which leads to trying to find a balance by putting stats on them you cant normally have in that slot which is what there currently implementing in LE and i think its the best way for them to go.

So i vote for them to leave sets as they are and just to continue to add more. Some uniques are really useful, some just get you by while you level until u craft better, and some are useless.

Overall it feels like there right where they need to be, useful but not required and i hope thats where they stay.

2. You could make sets have set affixes but be enchant-able like a normal item making them more viable end game but thats the only change i could see at this point making. This could make them OP and required so i hope it doesnt get implemented, but it would make the useless uniqes viable.

[Wcooper007]

How about set items that are for all intensive purposes “blank” and then you have the ability to enhance them to your liking. possibly having special enhancement’s that are only able to be used on set items.
say the three items have a base bonus they provide based on the number of set items that you have of the specific set but the affixes are basically blank or can be randomly rolled at time of drop. me personally i like the idea of them being truly blank. i mean this could potentially add a whole other level to the game. you could get a drop from a boss. then you would have to go on different quests to get the enchants you want to put on this item or the enchants could be random drops that could be saved over time but would be “relic” class enchants.
if you choose to use a standard enchant on a set item it gets a lower fracture chance based on the stability of the item itself. if you use a relic enchant on the item it has a standard chance of fracture.
This would allow for set items to really be sought after in the game because when you get that one item you really need and it rolls with minion damage on it and it basically ruins the item for you it wont create that rage that makes you wanna throw your mouse thru the screen LoL…
anyways just some thought i always wanted to see in a game.
why is it that legendaries and or set items couldn’t be re-enchanted to better serve their owner?

[Ayranjie]

This is actually a pretty interesting idea! I can imagine that this way you could enhance certain playstyles (just like legendäres do), just that you need 2, 3 or 4 items of said set to gain that bonus–the bonus could be balanced around how many pieces of gear (and therefor other possibilities) it robs you off.

And with it being blank, it makes it actually really difficult to get to t5 and t4’s (or the overall chance could be a little lower to balance it to rares)

E.g a 3 piece set - 1hand scepter, shield and helmet that grants 0,5% (random number taken) of damage dealt as mana as a full set bonus.

It could also spawn blank but with one or two rolls, that are specific for the set - and the rest is craft able. So you could integrate a turn-down to the item already e.g the sword in the example above could roll with +mana suffix and give 40 mana or something (not increaseable) and have the other 3 affixes blank. The shield could roll with a fixed +15 to melee physical damage (not increase-able), and 3 blank affixes.

On another note, I find the current sets in the game wildly underwhelming, also if solely for the purpose of leveling, and I’d as well have them not in the game. I’ hardly use them for leveling at all, while I use lots of the legendaries for leveling. This is also because you need mostly at least 3 of them to get the full bonus, and they each are on their own kind of weak and uninteresting, hardly making them an interesting choice by themselves, and the set bonus doesn’t really compensate for that (whilst compensation shouldn’t be needed imo)

I think they could add a tick more viability and be a bit more intrusive in how you play (or can play) your character. They should definetly be wildly less power and impactful as they are in Diablo 3; but Diablo 3’s overall implementation of sets is deeply flawed - because itemization itself is deeply flawed, and the choices you can make outside of gear are kind of obsolete anyways. In Last epoch, it would be kind of hard to grant that level of power through sets, or in contrast - It may be much easier to balance them around a certain power-threshold (potentially close to or a viable alternative to rares and legendaries).

I also think that “full gear sets” have more cons than pros, and making “2-5 piece sets” is a much more interesting way to go overall, because it doesn’t force you down a too narrow path, and it doesn’t account for all the power you get through itemization, leaving still a lot more room for how the set is used.

E.g. With the 3 set piece example above, with the scepter, shield and helm - it is specific in its set bonus that it grants mana leech, but easily combineable with a wide range of affixes and other legendary items/bonuses. So you could still choose to play in many different ways and experiment