by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 10 years ago     show comments

Following up from our earlier write-up on the crafting changes in Reaper of Souls, we’re now taking a look at the Mystic and Enchanting.

Enchanting

The biggest draw of the Mystic is her ability to reroll a single stat on an item, turning so-so items into trifecta masterpieces.  The only thing hold you back will be the costs associated with enchanting.

The process of enchanting is very simple and doesn’t require much of an in-depth explanation.  Just take your item to the Mystic, throw it into the enchanting slot, pick an unsavory stat you want replaced, pay your fee and pick a new stat!  From that point on you can only reroll that stat, so choose which stat you want to replace wisely since you can never undo that decision.  The only thing that isn’t so easy is being at the mercy of the RNG of which stats you get presented with to reroll on your item and that can get expensive.  Really expensive, but I’ll touch on that later.

The base gold cost of enchanting varies with the item slot, item level and rarity.  At lvl 70 most rare armor pieces start around 30k gold, weapons cost 60k and jewelry around 1mil while legenadries cost around 200k for every piece of gear. I’m not sure if the disproportionate costs between rare jewelry and legendaries is intended or not, we’ll have to see as the numbers get tweaked in future patches.  In addition to the gold costs, all rares require one blue and one yellow crafting mat (Exquisite Essence/Iridescent Tear for lvl 60 and lower, Arcane Dust/Veiled Crystal for lvl 61+) and legendaries require one legendary craft mat (Fiery Brimstone or Forgotten Soul.)

Don’t let the initial low cost of enchanting stats on lull you into thinking it’s going to be cheap to deck yourself out in full crushing blows or trifecta gear, every time you reroll the cost of enchanting increases by 15k-30k.  You can easily sink a few million gold into an item trying to get just a single stat if you’re unlucky with the rolls you’re given.  To complicate this, some stats just seem to be weighted higher than others, making them appear more often and getting the same list of two stats over and over again is the norm here.  It gets pretty annoying when you see armor/armor rolls seven times in a row when trying to get crit chance or crushing blows on a set of gloves.  While the gold cost are the biggest limiter for rares the material cost will limit enchanting for legendaries.

Every time you want to reroll a stat on a legendary item it requires a Forgotten Soul, which are acquired by salvaging legendaries.  Even with the increased drop chances in the beta they aren’t exactly raining from the sky to allow you to reroll to your hearts content and that’s not even factoring in any Souls you may want to use towards crafting some of the new legendary or set patterns.  If you only play one class this cost won’t be that bad since you can funnel all your extra legendaries into bettering your current gear, but if you like play a bunch of different classes it may take you while to stock on enough spare crafting mats before you can actually start perfecting your gear.

Transmog

Transmog works much like enchanting.  Just put the item into the window and it will display a selection of unlocked models you can choose from to change your look.  All non-legendary models are unlocked by leveling the Mystic up and the legendary models are unlocked by the act of identifying them.  The costs are minimal with non-legendary models costing only 500g and legendaries costing 500k.  If transmog becomes popular Blizzard may pursue the feature more in the future, there have already been hints datamined from the game files of special armor and weapon models to be included in the yet to be announced collector’s edition.

Final Thoughts

I think Enchanting is going to be a great gold sink for the game, but the numbers still need a bit of tuning.  I’ve spent around 40mil gold on enchanting alone and most of it was spent on only a few pieces of gear that rolled near perfect but was missing just one stat.  One stat that took dozens of rerolls to finally come across.  In future balance tuning for the beta I’d like to see it so that the same stat can’t roll twice and I would love it if we got more than two options to choose from but since this is supposed to act a gold sink I can understand if Blizzard doesn’t want to make it too easy to create perfect items.  I think Blizzard could also do more with the Mystic such as giving her the ability to add unique properties to gear or the ability to craft consumable potions and elixirs.  As with the rest of the crafting system, we’ll keep you updated on any new changes that come during the course of the beta.