The devs could’ve delivered a different system for upgrades entirely, and maybe this was even considered in some of the brainstorming sessions: Give the players a list of affixes when upgrading each weapon.
It doesn’t need a lot of extra affixes, but as weapons can go up to +10 they could give us a total of 15 possible affixes to choose, the color and weapon type would certainly play a major role on the options and the rarity would play a role on the kind of buffs/bonuses.
Also, if you opted out for an affix that explodes gems and didn’t liked it, you should be able to spend Ingots again and change it, this would work to put some sink into the Ingots Endplayers get at Delves and also allow people to experiment and people who like random aspects like explosions could use these affixes even if they make little sense depending of the weapon’s main role/use.
Now, would it be a more complex interface to be implemented? Certainly. And that’s probably the reason the devs didn’t went with this idea if it was brought up at some point.
Take the two doomed weapons. They are converters. The idea on casting them is to align colour with skulls and resume your turn, just like any other converter. With ‘watery’ and ‘carved’ affixes, the gem regularly lands in that alignment, breaking the conversion.
Those higher echelon upgrades cost a lot of time and effort in TOD and 100s of gems. You can choose not to upgrade until they become relevant to progress, but it’s not the point. Imagine xx% of the time you cast a spell it decides to miss.
I don’t know how often they do this, but I write this after it did it 3 times in a row in one game. The issues with these weapons are leaving skull matches on the board after your turn, when you played your game/turn to match them.
It should be a simple fix to remove that affix and swap for + something - magic maybe (tier 6 upgrades).
everyone, wants these perks or affixes to be individually designed and crafted for individual class and weapon.
but apparently this is not the case. what dev come up with is a copypasta thing.
even that dwaven affix is ok on mountain crusher, it is still replaced since affixes change was global. no one is exceptional.
even if i want to talk about them individually, which i did for darkshot, when change does come, it will still be global.
so, in the end, we’d better just discuss them in a overall manner. with this idea in mind, my conclusion is simply “gem creating/destroying rarely does something good, get rid of it totally is the best solution at the moment.”
While some may prefer the old, explosion affixes, I don’t think we’ll ever hear someone complaining that one or more of their troops gaining 2 mana had a negative impact on their match .
About that i must be lucky, am using dooms (both of them) to explore and farm traits and even at x4 speed can see clearly the spawned gem appear after the skulls matches, at least at start, after 1 or more hour of spamming things get more confused but may be just memory issues (like after several hours you dont restart when casting a skill freeze the game few secs) and just some kind of visual lag.
Fire magic damage
Align skulls
Insert ‘watery’
Match skulls
There is a pause before the skulls match, the pause inserts 1 blue gem anywhere on the board. Therefore there are occasions when watery ‘overwrites’ a skull and breaks the match you cast the weapon to do.
Try it on 1x speed, although painful to watch (how did we ever play it!) it clearly shows this.
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