A fair number of the XRs were designed with a very long view in mind, which means that some of their props will likely be undervalued until there are areas suited to them. That said, if there's other issues, post a suggested reasonable revision to the item.
XR items are, for the most part, fine. When limbo runners bitch about them it's mostly because they come at a damn slow rate and are supposed to be an upgrade to BUR, but for the most part cannot compete with 10 years of randomized BURs, or come with race restriction/removed properties but I am positive you're going to let Ixion fix all broken properties (and not just ac) with crafting consumables soon™.
That being said, the base properties on most XRs are a little better than BUR ones so with time and more runs we could get some worthwile gear. With the exception of THE TRAPS. Those are items that even with 'everything upped' or a ego slapped over them, I'll have hard time fit on any setup. Looking through the XR list (at least, the list of the in-game ones
on wiki and not the
big sheet one (fwiw, should those other items ever get into game, they'd work better as set drops), it's easy to notice a pattern.
Every item category has 5+1 items. That's five items with very similar properties (physical, elemental, exotic, esoteric reductions and physical immunity) and for each category a jolly, actually quite interesting XRs. Those are items that deserve to stay as they are. Then we have a big issue with Tower shields, Cloaks and Boots. Those categories are bigger than others and, along the usual 5+1, hide the traps.
A Cold Fever,
Freezing Darkness,
Never Burned,
Poisonous Whispers,
Scream So Loud. Compare them with the 'classic' BUR versions
Pyroclastic Flow and
Wings of the Storm, the difference is way less what you expect from a bur->xr transition. Heck the bur ones even have discipline on top. Also worth note that with randomization in place, most of the BUR tower shields deemed usable are already in the 2x 70-80% immunity range, while it's easier for the XR versions to downgrade.
Remove them, refund players. Put those shields as set loot. They're not even that good to be Limbo loot if you ask me, so you can utilize them for Abyss or some other future run for which you lack loot ideas.
I wanted to come up with different suggestions but we don't need 11 different XR tower shields (there're just 2 'tank' BUR ones, and 2 'caster' BUR ones) because they are already underused due to many builds going for lighter/no armor. Too specific of a slot to have such variety, they're not rings.
A Stinking Trail,
Cast into Space,
Energy is Anethema,
Personifies the Void,
Up from the Depths. Upgrade to the almost-never-worn
Snowshoes of Stygia or
The Walking Dead just to ramble about the last (cold) version. Do we really need yet more elemental immunity boots? No. Especially considered that 1) nobody uses the already existing versions when they have a decent choice available 2) end-game areas you want to cover all resistances anyway, so devoting a whole item slot to go overkill on one is counter productive 3) they're really weak, not adding anything unique.
Suggestion 1: Remove them, refund players. Put those
shields boots as set loot. And even then they'd suck. I think nobody ever used the Abyss ones, and they have breach imm that is pretty much mandatory everywhere, wonder why? Because immunity to one single element is not what is needed in end game. I always take 5-10% to all physicals or 15-20% to all elementals over 100% to one single element, balanced gear for balanced areas.
Suggestion 2: Should you really be in love with this elemental nemesis craploot, they need MORE. 5 elements, give each one of the 4 survival abilities and the leftover (sonic?) gets evasion or anything else fancy. Make the player ignore the relevant elemental infliction. Better generic immunities, we're talking XR loot here: Stun/Daze/Confusion/FleshToStone/AbilityDrain, not the lame poison/fear that are everywhere.
A Blanket of Bones,
A Twilight Pall,
Mottled Horror,
Shelter from the Horrific,
Unfurling of Wings. Somebody here is really in love with anti-elemental stuff. This somebody forgot that all monsters deal physical damage, and on a GODLY geared toon, as the toons delving into PL areas are supposed to do, physical is by far the highest source of damage taken, no question here. Between inflictions and no way to easily improve physical immunity (there's bard abj epic and that's it, nothing like the many elemental buffs/shunt), I know that if there's a think killing me is having low physical immunity on a tank. And you want me to wear 0% cloaks, when even UR ones have 10%. Nope, not gonna happen.
A rule of thumb that I use to decide if a item is worthy nowadays is: 5% elem imm = 1% exotic = 1% phys = 1 Rajpoint™ (RP). It sort of reflects the available gear and augmentors. I'm not sure how to rate esoteric damage yet but even in Limbo where Anarchic and Psionic attacks are nasty, they aren't that scary as some good ole crit in the face, overall they probably place right there at 1 RP as well. Looking at those XR cloaks they give up on 36 RP other XR cloaks have (minimum 8-12-16% phys imm) to gain 30 RP out of misc imms. So they're already worse in practice, and we're not even considering all the other immunities/resistances on XR (or UR/BUR) cloaks. Because they offer nothing else. 60/ to two elements and 30/ to one exotic only works if you cover the other resistances with some other item, but you can cover them all with a single item or play gear tetris trying to match crap items. Satisfactory when it happens but quite rare in practice. There're good chances you wear a "generic" ele/exo dr item and the "specific" ele+exo dr cloak bumps those dr up 5-10 points but nothing impressive.
Not trusting the RP system? Check logs after any run. You always take phys damage.
Suggestion 1: Remove them, refund players. Put those
shields boots junk as set
loot traps.
Suggestion 2: Give them 10% phys imm. Still less than what other XR provides but enough to not end with worse imms than you had when you were wearing BURs. All the elemental/exotic/esoteric imms/dr are to be considered the 'stuff on top' of a wereable item, because taken on their own they are just cosmetic fluff.
Bracers and GauntlesLet run out of cool names and icons to make exact duplicates of the same item, brilliant! All the other rarity categories have just the Deflection (Gauntlet) option, and nobody ever complained: they work for robed characters too, no need to be pnp nazis here. I suppose there could be a small chance for a Bracer to get AC upgraded to +16 and give some advantage to a guy wearing a +15 robe that is not a wizard/pm with set gloves, not a fist monk, not able to cast mage armor for +20, not owning a +16 robe. Duh.
I have nothing against any of the gloves but having duplicates is quite dull, possibly counterproductive if you're gambling hoping for other items or just confusing.
Opening a parenthesis about Ixion and redeeming canopics. It's been almost 2 years now and (
rant: as suspected since day 1) nobody picked an option that was not "50 canos for a total random item" or "250 for a racebook". In order to avoid missclics (they happened) the safest and laziest course of action would be to just have those 2 options available but let look at why this is happening, and how to give meaningful choices to players.
Possible options:
50c : 1 random item, randomized. It could even be a book, 2% of time if I read correctly a function you posted some time ago
here, and so far it looks like a realistic expectation.
200c: 1 random item, unrandomized.
250c: 1 item of a category of choice, randomized.
1000c: 1 item of a category of choice, unrandomized.
Given the same chances of getting the same crap/godlike BASE XR item, is the unrandomized version better than (at least one among) 4 randomized ones will ever be? Heck no, good chances randomized is better, for a end game player. Add to that the possibility to apply an augmentor, we're looking at at least 20-30% elemental immunity added on top for a cheap (for XR owners) price. What do people do with unrandomized burs the Penguins gift them: !randomize. If your gear is not total crap, you always look for randomization to improve it a bit, and in some cases you must wear randomized gear to get +16 stats or make room for a esf: listen augmentor, or that immunity you couldn't cover elsewhere.
If we want to find an excuse to wear unrandomized gear, is for newbies to not risk have unbalanced immunities/resistances, but look at the XRs, they are all unbalanced. They don't have 10/10/10% imm, they have 8/12/16% or 12/15/9%... somebody here confused xr=limbo=chaos and went nuts trying to make those items feel special while in fact it doesn't matter with randomization in place, but that's another rant.
Long story short, 200c and 1000c options are troll ones. Saving for 1000 for a unrandomized (but still semi-random) xr when you could roll 20 times at the gambler table is poorly thought, and asking for people to do 50-100 runs before getting ONE item is plain evil. The bad evil. The "I quit" sort of evil.
250c option: so far, nobody saved for 250 and picked anything different than a subrace. In practice, even if you aim at some other item slot, rolling 5 times the dice has good chances of netting you one of such items (7-10% chance each for no-book stuff or something like that, if you're not into torches or motes), and end with a good amount of "spare" XRs anyway.
250c option has been the subrace book option for 2 years, and I can't think of anybody sane/math savvy saving that many canopics to pick anything else.
Suggested options:
1) 50c total gamble and 250c subrace book options only. Just to avoid missclics. Boring.
2)
- 50c, as of now. It proved to be the favorite option. It caused an unhealthy amount of rages, hope my above fixes are taken in consideration to lessen the pain. Lower %/remove altogether the torches from the loot poll (seriously, nobody wants a torch) and we're golden.
- 100c, select an item category (no books, no weapons) and get a randomized one from that pool. 1 at price of 2. I have hard time thinking if any item category is worth the chance of not rolling twice at the (improved/fixed) gambler table so guts feeling says it can be a popular option, while not making the 50c one obsolete.
- 200c, weapon of semi-choice, to be randomized. Pick from: tiny/small/medium/large/double(exotic), same as when you talk with the test chamber guy. That way you can get a weapon for your planned/favorite style of fighter, but at the same time we don't end all with the same weapon types.
- 250c, random subrace book. I find it a bit pricy, still I used it about 20 times by now. Mostly due to TRAP items in the 50x pool tho. Leave as of now, or give a choice of "random subrace, but you get to pick elf/gnome/human etc base race" option, so that your next toon is going to be cute/ugly as much as you like.