We have this crafting profession called jeweller. It uses this resource called gemstones and makes low level trinkets, earrings and rings. I remind you of this simple fact because the jeweller craft doesn’t just serve no purpose but acts as an inferior equipment provider to generic vendors – as for some reason, the natural extension of crafting ascended jewellery was denied to jewellers to create an easy source of content reward throughout the game.
Even without being able to craft ascended jewellery, getting hold of ascended jewellery isn’t just easy, it practically happens by accident these days – and if RNGsus somehow fails to throw you a set, you can buy most of them for laurels which accumulate automatically.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this situation. Its just irritating when a new source of rare reward is added to the game which not only suites the jeweller craft to the letter but also seems to be completely supported by existing in game systems.
During Halloween and now Christmas, 2 extremely rare infusions were released. The last turned made your entire character glow green and the current turns the skin of your character an extremely icy hue, gives you deep blue eyes and a slight frigid aura effect. Nice infusions but why, oh why, not just implement them as legendary trinkets?
Take note of these 2 points:
1) The infusion slots on ascended amulets were recently changed to a new sort of upgrade called “enrichments”. This shows that it is not difficult to make new upgrades which can only be inserted into specific items.
2) The various effects of new infusions (be they ghostly, Halloween or Christmas) can be applied to any equipment piece.
Add these two together and you get a simple way to implement legendary trinkets which have the same effect as these current rare infusions. First make a new tier of legendary trinkets which allow stat changing and have a new socket slot called a “legendary socket” – note that by point 1 above this requires no new systems to be coded, just a repeat of the “enrichment” treatment. Second, make a new sort of crafted jewel for jewellers called “legendary jewels” – these would literally just be renamed infusions with no stats which could be inserted into legendary trinkets in their spare “legendary socket”. And that’s it. You get an interactive system and something to do with all those gems which keep overflowing into your inventory.
The flashy effects of infusions are extremely cheap to make. We’ve seen that they can solely affect armor, skin, can provide minor special effects or change eye colour and from things like the flame legion vestments or zodiac sets, we know it is possible to replace your default skin colour with a different colour, graphic or animated mesh. Given how easy these are to produce as opposed to armors, we could literally be churning out legendary jewels to socket into legendary trinkets on a release to release basis. Take the kodan warmth enrichment. Some people liked, others thought it was too small. If it was a jeweller system the devs could have just implemented 3 sizes of burning sparkle jewels at zero extra production cost and called it “added content”.
We keep getting currencies which overflow due to lack of uses. Instead of creating a shadow raven which costs 120000 candy corns, we could have just added some legendary effects jewels which ate away at that currency. Same as wintersday snowflakes, same as venom sacks. It just seems such an easy way to influence resource overflow – especially if one or two new legendary gem effects are released every update.
The final point being that a legendary jewel system would be a much finer grained way to control which particle effects you want. The Wintersday infusion features 3 separate effects and the Halloween infusion 2 effects. They all pretty cool but if they were legendary gems, one could make an art out of combining different gems to get the exact effects you want. Instead of an infusion with 2 effects and another with 3, create 5 separate baseline legendary jewels each with a separate effect and add crafting recipes to combine separate legendary jewels into more elaborate jewels with multiple particle effects – you don’t need every single combination imaginable obviously, but devs can easily add more legendary jeweller recipes with each content update to give people something new to play with.
But no, these are instead relegated to uber rare festive drops – because the dream of looting something cool is more valuable then month long quests to sink redundant resources into -.-