A fan brings up one of the obvious problems with the Reaper of Souls economy at this point; the imbalances of crafting mats and costs, and the fact that all current Diablo 3 materials are without value in Reaper of Souls. (You find Demonic Essences and Tomes of Secret frequently at low levels, Fiery Brimstone comes from low level legendaries you salvage, and none of them are required for high level crafting in RoS.)
[blue]I hope for a blue to answer this. From the streams it seems only brimstone is used of those mats we have now. My question is if we can upgrade 10 to 1 our current materials into ROS materials? Otherwise there is absolutely no reason to play anymore. You can farm exp, but it doesnt seem to yield many paragon levels account wide unless you farm several para100s. And if gold, current items AND mats dont matter in ROS, why play (other than to kill time)?
Vaneras: That is actually a hard question to answer at this moment in time OioxFûl, because crafting in Reaper of Souls is still under development and as such is subject to change.
One of the big goals with Loot 2.0 is to make items more exiting and feel more rewarding, and we would also very much like to reduce the “meh” factor as much as we can. So what we are aiming for is to make item upgrades, whether they come from monsters or crafting, feel like they are earned though rewarding gameplay.
In that regards, we have some concerns about what might happen if people could hoard vanilla materials now for later conversion into RoS materials—If people could do such a conversion from old to new materials, then we think there would be a very real risk that people would near instantly craft their way to potential BiS gear shortly after the expansion is out, and thus if you could craft your way to the top right from the get go, then that would bypass or severely diminish the sense of progression and reward you would otherwise get from hunting for gear upgrades and crafting mats.
When Reaper of Soul goes live, the current plan is to convert your existing original crafting materials into what is currently the Inferno crafting tier, which will let people continue to craft all the items that they have access to now. Then once people start seeing new item tiers past level 61, those items will then be salvageable into new crafting materials that can be used to craft level 61 to 70 items.
I’m surprised to hear this and it’s good news for players who haven’t already cashed out by selling everything of any value immediately upon seeing the new crafting mats and recipes in Reaper of Souls. *cough*
In the current RoS economy (which is very subject to change before release) none of the mats from D3V are of much use. That said, being able to upgrade them 10-to-1 would be useful, at least for Tomes of Secret, since their higher level RoS model is the Scholarly Writings, they’re used in most crafting and Artisan training, and I’m m always short on those.
That’s far from the main issue with crafting and materials at this point in the Reaper of Souls beta. We talked about this (and everything else) on the podcast last night, but currently there are way too many different mats, many of them overlapping, and their quantity is not well balanced to the crafting recipes. High end stuff isn’t bad, but lower level crafting requires a ton of white mats, and those are very scarce. Some drop from each of the Bounty reward bags, but otherwise you’ve got to pick up white items and salvage them, and not only does that seem unnatural, white items hardly ever drop in Reaper of souls.
Let me stress that these issues aren’t a surprise or a big worry. It’s early in the beta test and during development I’m sure they’ve changed the mats, recipe costs, drop rates, and salvage results many times, and have not made final organizing balancing passes yet. Of course things are out of synch at this point.