What Is Imbuement? - Developer Diary

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Legendary Item Imbuement Dev Diary - Thu, 04/30/2015 - 09:04

Introduced with Upate 16

By Frelorn

What Is Imbuement?

Imbuement is a new alternate advancement system for Legendary Items that is designed to expand from update to update. Imbuement is an opt-in process available at level 100 that permanently transforms a Legendary Item. Once Imbued, it never needs to be re-forged or reconfigured again. That means an item that feels more, well, legendary, and greatly reduces the grind-and-craft aspects of the old system.

Imbued Legendary Item UI

How does it work?

• You choose how many and which of your level 100 legendary items to imbue.

• Imbuement will convert your Legendary Items’ DPS and class-specific legacies into extendable legacies that will grow as you accrue IXP.
• Each update we will release a number of available tiers that can be gained for each legacy.
• With Update 16, there will be 35 available tiers for each class specific legacy and 25 DPS or Class Stat (Ex: Champion Rune’s Incoming Healing Rating) tiers.
• Upon imbuement, each legacy will have roughly 25 tiers unlocked that can be ranked up by IXP.

• The additional 10 tiers will be locked but can be unlocked by using existing items that can be found in-game, or via Mithril purchase.

• The age of the item and improvements you have already made to the item also provide some unlocks upon imbuement.

• With each future update we will release additional tiers, some of which are unlocked by default, and some that can be unlocked.

The Imbuement Process

Let’s walk through the imbuement process as a whole and what you should expect come Update 16.

How do I imbue my LI?

If you have reached level 100, all you need to do is speak to your friendly neighborhood  Forgemaster and you will see an imbue option in his menu. It’s important to note that a legendary item can be imbued regardless of how leveled up it is. Imbuing a fully leveled-up LI does have its advantages, as described below.

Note: This screen displays what your current legacies on your weapons will change into. You can cross compare what you have on your weapon by hovering over its icon above. While most legacies have become extendable for many ranks, some inevitably had to change.

What do I need to qualify?

All you need to qualify for imbuement is a level 100 Legendary Item (Bridles cannot be imbued for Update 16). It’s important to note that any age item can be used: if you are attached to your second or third aged weapon, feel free to bring it along for the ride (if you put the work in, you can make it just about as powerful as a First Age item). However, there are advantages to imbuing a higher age and leveled up LI. They are:

• Age Bonus – First and Second age items receive a number of tier unlocks across all legacies as well as additional tiers for their DPS or Class Stat Legacies.

• First Age - receives 3 unlocks for DPS / Main stat upon imbuement. The DPS / Main stat legacy also gains 6 tiers worth of IXP.
• Second Age – receives 1 unlock for DPS / Main stat upon imbuement. Their DPS / Main stat legacy also gains 2 tiers of IXP.

• DPS Legacy Rank

• For every rank applied to the items’ DPS or Class Stat legacy the item will receive a tier of IXP for that legacy.

• Legacy Slots

• Every legacy slot that is unlocked pre-imbuement, remains unlocked post imbuement. For those who imbue with a fresh legendary item, you can unlock extra legacies within the Legendary Item Manager or via Crystal of Remembrance until you have a total of 7 legacies (plus DPS / Main stat).

• Important to note: For imbued legendary items, Crystals of Remembrance can be used multiple times until you have all the legacy slots unlocked. Traditional LIs still only accept a single Crystal of Remembrance.

This newly imbued item did not have all its legacy slots unlocked pre-imbuement. With imbuement, a locked symbol displays next to the slot if it is indeed locked. The UI will show you all the slots available, Clicking on the locked symbol is a quick way to unlock the slot if you are in a rush to deck out your new imbued LI.

After it’s imbued, what’s next?

Once a Legendary Item is imbued, it’s time to just enjoy the game. All IXP you accrue from killing monsters, completing quests, or applying IXP runes to your weapon will automatically distribute through the weapon. No need to manually rank legacies up, the weapon takes care of all the work for you! The only thing you need to worry about is unlocking tiers once your legacies reach their current cap.

Next to each legacy on the UI, is an IXP bar. When these bars fill up, the legacy gains a tier and its bonus is increased. On the right of the bar, the legacies current tier is displayed over the current max tier you have unlocked. This box will remain as a button until you have unlocked all available tiers on a legacy for that update. When you do, the numbers will turn gold.

When a bar turns silver, it means that you have reached your current max tier, but there are more tiers available to unlock. A gold bar means that a legacy is at the max available tier for this update.

 

Replacing a legacy Post Imbuement

Replacing a legacy on your imbued legendary item is a streamlined process. You no longer need to collect individual scrolls for each legacy. Instead, any time you want to replace an imbued legacy, you can select from a list of all the legacies appropriate to your item using an Imbued Legacy Replacement Scroll or directly through the Legendary Items UI by using the Replace Legacy button.

This image shows you the display for replacing a legacy. Note that hovering over the legacies on the right will give you a breakdown of not only what bonus the legacy has, but what those numbers will look like at max tier.

Will all current legacies become extendable?

• While many legacies in-game will become extendable, some are just not extendable and will be replaced by new legacies.

• This conversion will happen upon imbuement and will not affect legacy functionality pre-imbuement.

• Legacies that cannot be extended generally affect a property with an obvious limit. Mechanics that do not scale well include:

• Maximum number of targets of a skill
• Power cost modifiers, which will eventually reach 100% reduction

• Conversely, properties like % damage increases can be extended forever.
• When you imbue, no legacy will just vanish from an item. If a legacy changes, upon imbuement your item will immediately receive the new imbued legacy.

How do the old LI items fit into this new system?

Many of the items that players have familiarity with using on their LIs will continue to work within the new system, while some will have some additional functionality that they previously did not have:

Scroll of Empowerment

• Unlocks and completes an additional tier of their DPS / Main stat legacy.
• For players who want a quick option, this functionality can be purchased directly from the Legendary Items UI for Mithril Coins.

Star-lit Crystal

• Unlock and gain an additional tier of their DPS / Main stat legacy.

Example: if the items DPS has progressed to 8/15 tiers, using a crystal will increase that progress to 9/16.

• There will no longer be a restriction of 3 star-lit crystals that can be applied to an Imbued item. The only restriction in imbuement is that a star-lit crystal can only be applied if there is a tier to unlock for the item.

• You cannot use these as a means to power level your weapon up to max.

• Crystals that are applied pre-imbuement will work the exact same way as they do post-imbuement.

Scroll of Delving

• Unlocks an additional tier of ALL legacies on an item.
• This can only be used once, either pre or post-imbuement.

Title Scrolls

• These items will not receive any change in their functionality and will continue to work as they currently do in the system.

IXP Runes

• These items will not receive any change in their functionality and will continue to work as they currently do in the system. Per-item IXP is distributed evenly across all Legacies, even those that have reached their current Tier cap.

Replacement Scrolls

• Replacement scrolls will no longer apply to an imbued item. As mentioned above, their functionality has been superseded by new options for replacing a legacy.

Crystal of Remembrance

• Unlock an additional legacy slot (up to the cap of 7) on an item. The restriction of one per item is lifted for Imbued LIs.
• Additionally, on using this item, you will be prompted with a UI to choose the legacy you would like to place in this newly unlocked slot.

• No more blank legacies, no more random legacies. You unlocked it, you choose what goes in it.

FAQ section

• Why only level 100, couldn’t this system completely replace the current LI system?

• We originally set out with the intention to do a complete replacement of the legendary item system, but the sheer volume of implementation and testing required to make this happen was a little more than we could handle in a single Update cycle.
• That doesn’t mean that this won’t happen one day, we would just prefer to get it right at level 100, then decide whether this system should completely replace the older system.

• In your legacy section, you outline basically all my favorite legacies that are not being brought forward into imbuement (cooldown reduction, effect pulse counts, max targets, etc.). These bonuses have become staples for some classes and now they are going away, will they be re-incorporated into the game somehow?

• We spent a good amount of the Beta listening to feedback and adding back in bonuses that were very important to specific classes, but we don’t expect this work to end here at Update 16.We do understand that a lot of design decisions in the past have been based around these legacies being available to classes. Here is how we brought back some bonuses during Beta and how we would continue this process if need be:

• Re-incorporate them into the trait trees.=
• Convert them into high level set bonuses in future itemization plans=
• Create new title scrolls, settings, etc. for imbued only items that have these bonuses attached to them<

• Can I deconstruct an imbued item?

• Imbued items cannot be deconstructed. Imbued Legendary Items are meant to stick around, grow with you, and become your friend. You wouldn’t deconstruct a good friend, would you?
• You can however, destroy the item out of your inventory if you prefer to erase your friends from existence.

Source

https://www.lotro.com/en/game/articles/legendary-item-imbuement-dev-diary - Posted Thu, 04/30/2015