Oops. Imbuing Warning!

[Harb]

Maybe I missed it in all the info flow preceding and following the SA release, but I was taken off guard last night when finishing my first piece of imbued armor. It was a gargoyle kilt, that originated from a 120 tailor/ 100 arms lore crafter. It began with resists only, 12/11/8/11/8. I put LMC 8, MR 2, LRC 20, Poison resist 15, and luck 90 on it for 500/500, in that order. What I failed to notice, until complete, was that the 15 poison resist only increased the resist to 21. I had expected 26. I'm not sure why it happened, but either the exceptional bonus, the arms lore bonus, or both, did not "count." It shows 500/500, so the calculator did include all 15 vested points. I'm tempted to go back and try reimbuing only 10 poison to reimbue luck to 100, but fear all that will happen is the item will loose points it once had. In theory I suppose what occured was that you can't can't imbue higher than armor base +15, with any other bonuses lost in the process, but really don't know. Just something to be aware of as you template your gear!

 

[Maplestone]

If you imbue a resist, it replaces rather than stacking with the free armslore/exceptional bonus.

 

[Harb]

So base + imbued resist overrides all else - tyvm again sir. Better to learn on item 1 than later I suppose It's back to the drawing board for me, in true anal fashion had 28 characters worth of gear templated and lying in wait. I hate repeditive drills!

 

[Thangorodrim]

If you imbue a resist, it replaces rather than stacking with the free armslore/exceptional bonus.

This is extremely lame. That means it requires nine more 'weighted slots' to get a full resist suit than if it stacked.

At the very least they need to significantly reduce the failure rate of enhancing.

 

[Gheed]

So base + imbued resist overrides all else - tyvm again sir. Better to learn on item 1 than later I suppose It's back to the drawing board for me, in true anal fashion had 28 characters worth of gear templated and lying in wait. I hate repeditive drills!

If you are looking to make 70's lrc suits for your mules (what I did). Just craft all the exceptional leather armor (free mage armor)... I used a bandana for the head.. nice to be able to imbue those too. Then equip the gear and raise resists one at a time.

If you are low on physical resist, pick a piece that didnt get an ex bonus to physical (or a very low bonus) and max it out. Try to stop at adding 3 resists to any piece of armor. This should get you to all 70's easily. Then you have two extra mods you can add to each piece. Some pieces you may even have three.

You can then add LRC to 100. I just put 15% lrc per piece and imbued another 10% on a jewel. I also put (+1) mana regen on all pieces and +MP/HP/nightsight on those that had the space.

 

[Silverbird]

This is extremely lame.

Actually it isnt. While I dont like how it works, it is reasonable. You are getting the resists bonus from exceptional/armslore for fully free. Which means that they dont count against the 5 property limit and they also dont count against the 500% weighted property intensity limit.
If you want to imbue resists onto a piece/a suit, try to craft an exceptional one with posssibly lowest bonus to one resist. By enhancing that one, you are going to loose less bonus resists.

 

[Maplestone]

That means it requires nine more 'weighted slots' to get a full resist suit than if it stacked.

It's no where near as much of a limitation as you think. With a little careful planning (don't lump all your resists on one piece) and a little extra work crafting the right starting pieces (you want a start with *low* score in the resist you intend to raise), in the end it makes almost no difference in the potential power of a constructed suit.

 

[Thangorodrim]

An exceptional leather suit should have a total of 30 'weighted slots.' Since you cannot (as far as I know) successfully imbue five properties at 100% it would make more sense to consider it as 24 - 27 weighted slots ( based on total intensity of 400% - 450%).

Props then can be counted the same way so, from all sources, 100% LRC = 5.0 weighted slots, 40 LMC = 5.5 weighted slots, etc.

If exceptional and arms lore bonus don't stack imbued leather seems to be essentially low end.

6 x 15 = 90 total resists out of 350 = 260 /15 means 17.3 weighted slots for an exceptional all 70s suit. That does not leave too much.

Really it will always relegate imbuing to an adjunct of the extant high end gear.

assuming 450% total intensity as reasonable:
Armor - 27 slots
Jewlery - 9 slots
One handed weapon + shield = 9 slots

Only 45 slots to play with even if you are able to use weapon + shield combo.

Of course, crimson, quiver, totem, etc reduce the total slots needed, but you would still need artifacts for most suits.

I would have to play with it but I don't think my wraith champ spawn suit could ever be work without many tens of millions of artifacts at its core.


Its something like:

70/70/70/70/70 (17.5)
HPR 12 (6)
DCI 45 (3)
SDI 30
LRC 105 (5.0)
LMC 38 (5.5)
FC 3
FCR 3
MR 9 (4.5)

I cant remember all the weighting, but that suit could never be imbued and its not all that awesome of a suit to begin with.

It just seems overly nerfed to me.

 

[Maplestone]

Don't forget that each piece of armor has 15 base plus at least some of the 20 bonus points (because you're not going to replace them all - in the ideal case, you don't have to replace any points, but that's exceedingly hard to achieve) plus for an ultra-high end suit, you can attempt enhancing pieces. You can create room for another 5-10 properties depending on how much effort and risk you're willing to put into the suit.

Also, imbuing is not intended to replace an all-artifact suit. It's giving you control over the mods - the ultra-highest-power items will still come from other sources.

 

[Harb]

Thang, as Silverbird mentioned, I really don't like it much either, but also as Maplestone indicated, it's really no more than a now known limiting factor preceding the imbuing process that can be worked around via selected items and the proverbial stubby pencil drill. My frustration was I didn't know sooner, which likely is my fault as I probably just missed something - thus the intent of the post to forewarn others who may also been in the dark on this one. In this specific case, the suit I was beginning w/ jewelry would have ended up 75/73/71/70/70, 740 luck, 100 LRC, 40 LMC, MR 12, MI 8, DCI 30, FC 2, FCR 6 for a gargoyle tamer. Even with the lost 5 points of resist (assuming I keep the piece I screwed up), it will be a great task oriented suit at the end of the day, and it's early enough in the process I won't make the same mistake twice. Honestly my only "beef" with imbuing as implemented, an extraordinay dev feat in itself (I can usually find something not to embrace), is that items aren't equally weighted for unravelling. So OK, I don't like it, but can live with it without further whinning!

 

[jfkeach]

Also, imbuing is not intended to replace an all-artifact suit. It's giving you control over the mods - the ultra-highest-power items will still come from other sources.

I guess the several hundred million (closer to a billion) I have spent in the last year on arties and runic hammers and kits paid off. I am not imbuing anything for my chars. Already have chests filled and all chars dressed out with the uber stuff. And I have three chests of PoF and will gladly use it.

I have imbuing on a char, but decided to not train it. Marking it down. I have one piece of imbued jewelry, and I bought it. A bracelet with 13 Taming, Lore, Vet, LMC 5 and 18 LRC. Its going on my disco bard just to give me enough taming to control pets while training them for my other tamers.

 

[Thangorodrim]

Don't forget that each piece of armor has 15 base plus at least some of the 20 bonus points (because you're not going to replace them all - in the ideal case, you don't have to replace any points, but that's exceedingly hard to achieve) plus for an ultra-high end suit, you can attempt enhancing pieces. You can create room for another 5-10 properties depending on how much effort and risk you're willing to put into the suit.

Ah, I overlooked that. I haven't imbued anything yet.

So, if the exceptional / arms lore bonus were, by chance, distributed only among physical and fire I could raise poison and still keep the 'free' resist property bonus derived from exceptional / arms lore. Correct?

If so, that dulls the pain quite a bit.

Also, imbuing is not intended to replace an all-artifact suit. It's giving you control over the mods - the ultra-highest-power items will still come from other sources.

Well, have the devs ever explicitly stated what the goal is for imbuing?

Personally I would like to see the power of imbuing such that it can create suits just as powerful as the current high end. My reasoning is that over time this ability would allow us to return to somewhat fungible suits, like back in the pre AOS days, but with much more interesting customization capabilities.

Of course, what I want means nothing. Others feel differently.

 

[Thangorodrim]

Thang, as Silverbird mentioned, I really don't like it much either, but also as Maplestone indicated, it's really no more than a now known limiting factor preceding the imbuing process that can be worked around via selected items and the proverbial stubby pencil drill. My frustration was I didn't know sooner, which likely is my fault as I probably just missed something - thus the intent of the post to forewarn others who may also been in the dark on this one. In this specific case, the suit I was beginning w/ jewelry would have ended up 75/73/71/70/70, 740 luck, 100 LRC, 40 LMC, MR 12, MI 8, DCI 30, FC 2, FCR 6 for a gargoyle tamer. Even with the lost 5 points of resist (assuming I keep the piece I screwed up), it will be a great task oriented suit at the end of the day, and it's early enough in the process I won't make the same mistake twice. Honestly my only "beef" with imbuing as implemented, an extraordinay dev feat in itself (I can usually find something not to embrace), is that items aren't equally weighted for unravelling. So OK, I don't like it, but can live with it without further whinning!

There is power in the specificity, especially for the more pedestrian characters.

You still have at least 45 weighted slots to play with starting with exceptional equipment, which is quite a bit. I suppose if you created enough exceptional leather you could get all 70s with more like 13 - 15 weighted slots.

Personally, I am debating whether I want to even begin training imbuing. It sounds like a real grind that might not be worth my precious real world time given the return.

I would still lobby for a MASSIVE reduction in the failure rate of enhancing armor. Just enhancing excpetional crafted armor results in about 3/4 of the pieces being destroyed. I cannot imagine what the successful enhancement rate would be for a 400% intensity piece.

 

[Maplestone]

So, if the exceptional / arms lore bonus were, by chance, distributed only among physical and fire I could raise poison and still keep the 'free' resist property bonus derived from exceptional / arms lore. Correct?

Correct. In practice, such a perfect piece is rare (1% for one resist being bonus free, but the chance of crafting the perfect hypothetical piece you suggested above with bonus points in only physical and fire is about a 1-in-90 million).

There's never been an official mission statement for imbuing, but it has been stated that they didn't want it to obsolete top-of-the-line runics.

 

[Thangorodrim]

Sure, that was just an extreme example to make sure I grok it.

In practice, how many resist points, on a per piece basis, are you typically able to get for 'free?'

 

[Silverbird]

There is no simply math solution to this .....

You start with 15 base resists on plain leather items, add 24 for the head. (Cloth headwear starts with higher base resists course theres no special material to improve laters.) Each exceptional piece gets another 20 resists (15 for except + 5 for GM armslore) randomly distributed. So count on average +4 to each resist.
Now comes the point, where the maths stop working. Its up to your decision on how many imbue slots you want to fill with resists. if you go for lets say 2 imbued resists per piece, it should be easy, to pick items with only about 4 bonus resists in the two, that you want to imbue onto that particular item. (While it would be somewhat rare to craft items which are not getting any bonus from exceptional on two resists, it seems to be way more reasonable to get items with two resitss with only low bonus). This way you would end up with 31/40 (for head) free resists on your parts. 5 armour parts + head would give you a total of 195 resist + 6*2 imbued resists. Thats sounds enough to build an all 70's suit. (Actually it depends on resists distribution, if it is that simply to build.)

 

[aoLOLita]

I sure hope you PoF'd that piece of armor before sinking all those expensive ingredients into it!

I find myself forgetting to do so when imbuing weapons or making scribe suits, although the scribe suit don't really need durability if they are training at bank or home...

 

[Heimi]

This raises an interesting question: Is it better to craft items without Arms Lore so that when you go to imbue them you get an accurate picture of the resists you will end up with?

 

[Thangorodrim]

This raises an interesting question: Is it better to craft items without Arms Lore so that when you go to imbue them you get an accurate picture of the resists you will end up with?

Based on my understanding, no its not better.

The exceptional / arms lore bonus is free in that it does not count against total intensity when imbuing.

You lose it, on a per resist basis, if you imbue resist, however, careful planning and implementation will allow you to salvage a portion of the free bonus.

Incidentally, I cranked out several backpacks worth of exceptional leather last night and upon review found that while the bonus is spread out across the five resists, typically one or two resists received a significant portion of the bonus. Just eyeballing, in many cases it would be possible to imbue two resists and still receive approximately 1.0 weighted slots of total resist free.

I am probably going to try to find a reputable artificer on LS rather than train this skill myself. I have usually 30 - 60 minutes maximal free time per day and I don't want to burn two months of it doing a grind.