Legendary Green Steel

[Vargouille]

Legendary Shroud and Legendary Green Steel (LGS) are coming! This post is about the broad, general structure of Legendary Green Steel crafting.

As many players know, Green Steel is a wide-reaching, complex crafting system. Some of these concepts here are fairly high level and abstract. This is not a post where every possible Green Steel effect is going to be listed. We're going to explain how it works on a high level, and a bit about how we're expecting it to be different from heroic (though you shouldn't need to know that process in detail to understand most of this post!)

Some of the design goals driving choices below include simplification and reducing error as much as possible, while some relate to technical challenges in such a large system where we are adding Augments.

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High Level Concepts
Legendary Green Steel is a crafting system by which you collect various ingredients, craft weapons of nearly any kind, or accessory/equipment slots (but not armor, and some equipment slots are missing), and can upgrade those items several times to make them stronger.

Here's what you do:

1. Play Update 29 quests & raids, collecting ingredients. This includes all 3 raids - yes, Legendary Hound of Xoriat and Legendary Tempest Spine provide indirect access to Legendary Green Steel ingredients. (There's some extra steps here because we don't want to simply drop Devil Scales for players who might not even own the Vale and aren't going to be crafting LGS.) We currently plan for Tier 1 and Tier 2 ingredients to be found in various quests. Tier 3 ingredients will only drop in the Shroud.
2. Craft "blank" weapons and equipment. This will use crafting materials primarily from Shroud end-chests.
3. Craft Legendary Green Steel Augments (LGSA).
   
   • Each blank LGS item has 4 Green Steel Augment Slots. These slots cannot hold any augments that exist in Update 28 or earlier, but instead hold various kinds of Legendary Green Steel augments crafted from LGS ingredients. (These slots only hold Green Steel Augments, and these Green Steel Augments only go in these slots, in other words.)
   • There will be hundreds of different possible augments. There's a few different ways to count them, and some are definitely similar to one another, but depending on how you count them there are between ~120 and ~600 augments (depending on what you consider "different" augments - the lower number is ).

From a high level, that's Legendary Green Steel.

Legendary Green Steel Augments?
These are a new type of Augments, which are not compatible nor interchangeable with existing Augments and slots.

Each LGS blank has 4 slots: Tiers 1,2,3, plus an "Active" slot. Each tiered slot can hold an augment of the appropriate tier (crafted from ingredients), and the active slot can hold one augment which adds a "clicky" active ability to the item.

You can create and slot your Augments in any order. If you want to start with Tier 3, or just put in a an Active, go for it.

Weapons and Equipment (sometimes called "Accessories") have different tiered Augment slots. When you craft an augment, you might be specifically making a Tier 2 Weapon Air Dominion Ethereal augment, for instance. There is a similar augment for Equipment, but which produces a different effect than the weapon version, much like Heroic Green Steel. However, the Active slot is the same for weapons and equipment. Any active can be slotted into either weapons or equipment.

These Green Steel Augments will fit into existing Augment bags.

We expect to offer an ‘extractor’ type option in the Store specifically for these Green Steel Augments in the event that you want to replace a slot but don’t want to lose the augment you made.

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Basic Information

• Minimum Level: All LGS items, weapons and equipment, are currently planned to be minimum level 26.
• Weapons have a base 5[W] damage.
• There is no 20th reward list for Legendary raids.
• You collect Codex Runes (name subject to change) by completing Legendary Shroud.
  
  • These are used to craft Blank weapons and equipment, and to deal with the Legendary Taint of Shavarath on Equipment.
  • You get more Codex Runes on Hard and even more on Elite.
  • These are BTA.
  • These might be used as turn-ins for other kinds of rewards (such as you might have found on a 20th reward list).
  
  
• You collect Legendary tiered ingredients that are highly analogous to the tiered ingredients in Heroic Green Steel.
  
  • By "tiered", we mean things like Legendary Small Devil Scales, Legendary Medium Gnawed Bones, and Legendary Large Length of Infernal Chains.
  • There are six different ingredients per tier (just like Heroic).
  • These ingredients are BTA.
  
  
• Blanks are the initial Weapons and Equipment with empty Augment slots.
  
  • These are created from Codex Runes at the Altar of Fecundity in Meridia. This is the exact same eldritch crafting device used for Heroic Green Steel. This one device has some of the recipes used for both Heroic and Legendary Green Steel.
  • Blanks are ML:26, and BTC. Legendary Green Steel items don't change minimum level nor binding status.
  
  
• Crafting Legendary Green Steel Augments
  
  • These are created at three different tiers of new legendary altars within the Shroud, similar to Heroic Green Steel.
  • First you construct Focuses, Essences, and Gems at these altars, then combine those to create Augments. (This process is very similar to crafting Heroic Green Steel Shards.)
  • Legendary Green Steel Focuses, Essences, Gems, and Augments are BTA.
  • These Augments use a new custom UI. They don't behave exactly like existing (u28 and earlier) Augments!
  
  
• Handwraps are not included in Legendary Green Steel in Update 29. We wanted to get the revamp of handwrap technology in for Update 29, but that's a fairly massive task and just couldn't be done. We understand this is quite frustrating for some players.

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Deeper Details & Similarities and Difference from Heroic
The general structure is broadly similar to Heroic Green Steel.

Many Legendary Augments are similar to Heroic Shards

Our current plan is to that most of the tiered effects of Legendary Augments be similar in nature to the effects found in Heroic Shards, scaled up to Legendary potency. Bonuses here include things like spell powers, Wizardry, hitpoints, Exceptional bonuses to ability scores, saving throws, and bonuses to "Charisma" skills (for example), Insightful ability scores, Inherent elemental resist, etc. These are all kinds of bonuses currently accessible Heroic Green Steel tiered shards.

Barter Shop style UI
Like most modern crafting systems, you can see all the recipes. Just like Heroic Green Steel is like now, since my first task years ago converting the old mystery system to the new system.

Weapon & Equipment Augments
In Heroic, you make a single shard and apply it to either a weapon or equipment (aka: accessory), getting a different effect depending on which you put it in. Due to the use of Augments here, and lacking a desire to be highly mysterious, there are separate Augments for Weapons vs. Accessories. When you make a Tier 1 Fire Dominion Ethereal augment, you also choose if you are making a weapon or equipment augment, which can tell you exactly what it's going to do, unlike Heroic Green Steel (since the Shard could have been put into either a Weapon or Equipment.)

Tier 2 Active / Clicky / "Bonus" effects
Tier 1,2,3 Augments are very similar to Heroic shards of the same tiers. Instead of crafting a tier 3 Magma shard and applying it to your tier 2 weapon, you just craft a tier 3 Magma Weapon Augment and slot it into your weapon (possibly crushing the existing augment to bits). You don't have to go through the tiers in ascending order.

Those familiar with Heroic GS and paying close attention may notice the Active slot - in Heroic, this was generally granted by a "tier 2 Bonus Effect" (as it was sometimes known), which you got by choosing the appropriate Tier 1 and Tier 2 focuses - such as tier 1 Fire and tier 2 Positive (Radiance), or Fire and Earth (Magma), or even Fire and Fire (Aspect of Fire). For both design and technical reasons, we're removing the tier 2 Bonus Effects per se. There's no special bonus for what you put into the tier 1 and tier 2 slots (not public, not secret).

However, we're adding the "Active" augment slot so you can still put a clicky in your Green Steel. It will be another option and axis - the choice is independent of all tiered abilities. You pick one clicky no matter what other choices you make - it's not inherently tied to the Focuses you put into tier. These clickies will generally be for new abilities; they won't just be Heroic Green Steel effects (scaled up or otherwise), though we're still considering if some of the Heroic active abilities are so desirable that we should replicate them in Legendary.

Active slots will be identical between weapons and equipment. Whatever Active Augment you make, it can be slotted into either weapon or equipment.

We realize some items are likely to end up with nothing but a clicky on them. That's OK. We'll try to be careful with the cost of clickies with this in mind.

Tier 3 Augments
This may make more sense for those familiar with Heroic Green Steel.

• Tier 3 Augments are always created with two Focuses, a Primary and Secondary (in addition to an Essence and Gem, like Heroic Green Steel). So you might make a tier 3 Fire earth Dominion Material Augment, for instance (aka: Magma).
• There are no single-focus tier 3 Augments. You can make a Fire Fire tier 3 augment, however.
• Unlike Heroic Green Steel, you can pick any Focus to be the Primary. This Primary Focus determines which tier 3 effect the augment provides - it doesn't provide both bonuses, only the one from the Primary Focus. (In heroic, there was always a "dominant" Focus. This was fairly restrictive, as it meant you couldn't actually get tier 3 Negative effects except by making a Triple Negative item, because negative was always the 'secondary' Focus - and some elements were similarly over-represented while others were difficult to get.) This increases the number of options by 6x - so the 36 tier 1 & 2 shards becomes 216 tier 3 Augments (for each of Weapons and Equipment).
• To re-iterate, there's nothing in Legendary like a "single affinity shard". Everything is a Dual Shard. The heroic method of creating Dual Shards (which were most player's goal!) were a frequent source of confusion, error, and frustration. While having 216 Weapon and 216 Equipment tier 3 Shards is still complex, we hope that this method helps make the complexity both more obvious (so you know what to watch for!) and a bit more comprehensible, and most of all far less error prone. (The common, and costly, mistake of applying one tier 3 heroic shard before trying to add a second tier 3 heroic shard is impossible in Legendary.)

Tier 3 "Bonus" Effects etc.
This flavor & to an extent "mystery" is retained. This is what the Primary & Secondary focuses in tier 3 are about - the secondary focus only really matters for this. Based on your slotted Augments, you receive a bonus effect. The bonus effect is only shows up after putting the augments in, since it depends on combinations of all three tiers of augments.

Tier 3 Bonus Effects may or may not be similar to Heroic versions (scaled up to higher numbers if so). Some of this may depend on time, but we'd like to be more creative here - rather than in the normal Tiered effects, which are mostly well suited for simply coming up into Legendary with higher value numbers.

Legendary Taint of Shavarath
It's real, and painful if you equip multiple pieces of Legendary Green Steel Equipment. Exact methods for dealing with it will be somewhat analogous to heroic. Details to come later.

Other Heroic Ingredients
Many ingredients from Heroic are not making the transition to Legendary. This includes most of the blank-creation ingredients such as Chipmunk Funk, Tapers, Shavarath Stones, and Signet Stones. They didn't really fit the model for Legendary as they did for heroic Vale, and in many ways were a source of confusion and unnecessary complexity.

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Thanks for reading!

We're happy to hear your feedback on anything here. Or really about a whole ton of things relating to Legendary Green Steel. It's a big complex system. We expect questions, comments, feedback, concerns, etc.

There will be some more details upcoming, including what you can expect to see on Lamannia soon (which is not everything!)

[Vargouille]

What will be in upcoming Lamannia:

The system is not fully ready for preview, with all details, and there's a lot of elements we're happier to get some feedback with now rather than later. However, we wanted to get a large chunk available for players to examine and work with, sort of as a large scale prototype and preview of what we're actually going for.

What's Ready?

• The Legendary Green Steel Augment system is mostly ready. This includes a new UI!
• Weapons and Tiered augments, for all of tiers 1,2,3, are ready for preview.
• You can also create Equipment blanks.

What's Not Ready?

• Active Augments are not available.
• Tier 3 bonus effects remain mysterious and unavailable.
• Equipment augments for all tiers are generally unavailable. (Some might do some things, but they are all a work in progress and not representative of ... things that are working right.)
• The base items (blanks) do not yet have upgraded tooltips that show the fact that these items have Augment slots at all, or what Augments are slotted in them. The only way to look at the Legendary Green Steel Augments right now is to actually open the new Legendary Green Steel Augment panel.
• Weapons have often incorrect critical profiles and base damage for this build.

Can I see this UI?
There's a new button in the Inventory panel:



You can either (1) just click on the new icon or (2) drag a blank item (with Augment slots) onto the new icon. This opens this panel:



At this point you can drag Augment items from your inventory into these slots to slot them. This will destroy any Augment already there.

[Flavilandile]

Hmm, Exquisite ?

You kept some of the old code for Epic Greensteel.

[Vargouille]

Hmm, Exquisite ?

You kept some of the old code for Epic Greensteel.

That name may still change.

[bls904c2]

What will be in upcoming Lamannia:

The system is not fully ready for preview, with all details, and there's a lot of elements we're happier to get some feedback with now rather than later. However, we wanted to get a large chunk available for players to examine and work with, sort of as a large scale prototype and preview of what we're actually going for.

What's Ready?

• The Legendary Green Steel Augment system is mostly ready. This includes a new UI!
• Weapons and Tiered augments, for all of tiers 1,2,3, are ready for preview.
• You can also create Equipment blanks.

What's Not Ready?

• Active Augments are not available.
• Tier 3 bonus effects remain mysterious and unavailable.
• Equipment augments for all tiers 1 are generally unavailable. (Some might do some things, but they are all a work in progress and not representative of ... things that are working right.)
• The base items (blanks) do not yet have upgraded tooltips that show the fact that these items have Augment slots at all, or what Augments are slotted in them. The only way to look at the Legendary Green Steel Augments right now is to actually open the new Legendary Green Steel Augment panel.

Can I see this UI?
There's a new button in the Inventory panel:



You can either (1) just click on the new icon or (2) drag a blank item (with Augment slots) onto the new icon. This opens this panel:



At this point you can drag Augment items from your inventory into these slots to slot them. This will destroy any Augment already there.

so no new jewelers tool kit to remove augment would have been very nice

[bls904c2]

so many choices wow

love it

[Seljuck]

Why ingredients are BTA? Economy already do not exist in this game and every update You kill it even more. it's like hitting someone lying on the ground.

[TPICKRELL]

.
.
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Handwraps are not included in Legendary Green Steel in Update 29. We wanted to get the revamp of handwrap technology in for Update 29, but that's a fairly massive task and just couldn't be done. We understand this is quite frustrating for some players..
.
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This still stinks to high heaven for those of us who play unarmed.

We have been the weakest melee for quite a long time now, almost all monk "advantages" are now superceded by other classes, and even though weak, we were nerfed again relative to every other melee style in the last update with the loss of melee power.

And now this puts us even further behind... Especially in legendary content where mortal fear won't work now. I understand that there are technical difficulties. Honestly, I expected this until it was announced that handwraps would be included.

It appears that the handwrap re-write is 6-9 months away. That means that you are leaving the monk class in a very weak state and without access to reasonable end game weapons for another 9 months. And before any suggests it... no, farming out another set of tier 3 thunderforged wraps to replace the completely nerfed mortal fear wraps is not an acceptable alternative.

Enough complaining.

Assuming the details flesh out well, the system looks very interesting. Its impossible to say without seeing the actual effects, but the flexibility looks very good assuming that the augments are reasonable for legendary content.

I really like the approach to clickies, allowing any clicky augment on any item is a win.

[Qezuzu]

there are between ~120 and ~600 augments (depending on what you consider "different" augments - the lower number is ).

1. 
   

These Green Steel Augments will fit into existing Augment bags.

We expect to offer an ‘extractor’ type option in the Store specifically for these Green Steel Augments in the event that you want to replace a slot but don’t want to lose the augment you made.

Given the large number of augements, do you have plans to increase the size of augment bags?

Will this 'extractor' be available from in-game sources?

• You collect Codex Runes (name subject to change) by completing Legendary Shroud.
  
  • These are BTA.
  
  
• You collect Legendary tiered ingredients that are highly analogous to the tiered ingredients in Heroic Green Steel.
  
  • These ingredients are BTA.
  
  
• Blanks are the initial Weapons and Equipment with empty Augment slots.
  
  • Blanks are ML:26, and BTC. Legendary Green Steel items don't change minimum level nor binding status.

Why. Why would you do this.

Literally every worthwhile piece of named loot since, like, u22 has been bound. Is it simply your design goal for player trading to be roughly as useful as the Swim skill?

[Wipey]

Maybe you guys didn't notice but trade forums for every server have been kinda dead for a long time.
Why the heck are you making everything bta ?

[Trillea]

Why. Why would you do this.

Literally every worthwhile piece of named loot since, like, u22 has been bound. Is it simply your design goal for player trading to be roughly as useful as the Swim skill?

Because they do not want people with tons and tons of raid timers to be able to sell the ingredients on the ASAH and flood the game with the new weapons/accessories in the first month.

[Qhualor]

Where are those old players that figured out heroic greensteel? They have more work to do

[Qezuzu]

Because they do not want people with tons and tons of raid timers to be able to sell the ingredients on the ASAH and flood the game with the new weapons/accessories in the first month.

The stockpiles of RTBs won't work in new legendary raids, read the thread in this sub-forum.

[xTethx]

Where are those old players that figured out heroic greensteel? They have more work to do

Checking in for duty!

[RistoffDervish]

so no new jewelers tool kit to remove augment would have been very nice

He said there would be a way to get them out and preserve them from the DDO Store, just not with a standard jeweler's tool kit.

[Grailhawk]

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Basic Information

• You collect Legendary tiered ingredients that are highly analogous to the tiered ingredients in Heroic Green Steel.
  
  • These ingredients are BTA.

That's a shame shroud ingredients were the games economy for years you had a chance to recreate that economy and took a pass on it.

Rest of this sounds really good.

[Silverleafeon]

Pretty sure the answer is "no", but I will ask anyway:

"Does adding augments (or any other available upgrade known) change the min level 26 of legendary greensteel?"

[Silverleafeon]

Checking in for duty!

Salute!

[Thar]

Given the large number of augements, do you have plans to increase the size of augment bags?

Will this 'extractor' be available from in-game sources?

[/LIST][/LIST]

Why. Why would you do this.

Literally every worthwhile piece of named loot since, like, u22 has been bound. Is it simply your design goal for player trading to be roughly as useful as the Swim skill?

Agreed, some use for the AH would be appreciated. Having EVERYTHING bound to acct/character is annoying. AT least have something BTC/BTA on equip.

i understand the reluctance to do ingrediants due to illegal issues with prior systems. but then PLEASE have a swap mechanic ie 2 red for 1 blue or something like that to lessen the horrors of a random system.

[legendkilleroll]

Im fine with the bound status, you want your gear, you run the quest and raids

Too much skipping going on already, whether its levelling by buying stones or before when you could buy from AH without even owning the content