Magic Items - Common, Uncommon, Rare

[Stormonu]

Very interesting change coming down the pipe with changing magic items to Common, Uncommon, Rare. From the Gencon comments, it appears most of the current magic item crop will be Uncommon items. Will Rare items simply be artifacts? Will potions most likely be "common" items?

Also, I've always associated this sort of distinction with card rarity, as in MtG. Since cards for powers seem very popular (though I'm not so sure how popular WotC's stab at the preprinted cards were), do you think we'll see them try and sell magic item cards - perhaps as randomized card packs?

 

[ArcaneSpringboard]

No announcement about magic item cards.

As for rare items, these are not going to be artifacts, but they will be items of higher power than the current crop. I'm thinking something on the order of the old Ring of Shooting Stars as an example.

Current speculation has the common items being things like potions, elixirs and other consumables, with permanent common items being things like +4 swords, but without any additional properties or abilities.

One additional consequence of this, is that I wonder if there will be an adjustment for the 'cost' of items, and a re-calculating of the value of treasure per level, so that it's a bit more reasonable.

 

[Scribble]

Interesting... I hadn't heard the "rare" items were going to be higher power level.

Wonder if any current items will be errata'd to make it into the rare category?

 

[Nichwee]

I'm hoping the Set Items are made Rare. We had a guy join our group at level 17, and he was told to gear up in the normal manner (Lvl+1,Lvl,Lvl-1,misc = Lvl-1 in cost). He had two items from a set that where both more powerful than normal and worked together really well (as a Set should).

This just felt odd, as well as being a bit "up-the-curve" compared to the rest of us who made our characters before Sets were released, and a fair few of us avoided cheery-picking our gear to all mesh perfectly for roll-play versus role-play.

I always saw Sets as "special attire" that either was made for very specific groups (like a uniform) or was a one-off that had been scattered to the winds over time - they just feel liek something that shouldn't just be sold at the corner store/made by anyone with Enchant Magic Item.

 

[doctorhook]

I hope there's some kind of reasonable limit on the number of "rare" items a character can have; the last thing I want is all my players wasting their time trying to get "purple loot".

 

[ferratus]

I want the 2e gauntlets of ogre power as a rare item!

 

[the Jester]

Remember that article WotC posted a while back about items "too cool to publish"?

Yeah, that's what I think we'll see for Rare items.

I do think they'll be more powerful than common items, but I don't know if they'll adjust the prices. That's a good question.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I would also imagine that they'll couple rarity with the elimination of the Daily Item Use rule. So in order to cut down on the number of Daily Power items a character can use, items with Dailies on them will mostly become Rare. Items that have just basic Properties will probably be Commons and/or Uncommons, ones with Encounter powers will be Uncommons, and ones with Dailies (and especially Properties *and* Dailies) will be Rare.

This way the DM knows not to hand out so many Rare items to his/her players, thereby reducing the number of Daily Item powers a player has at their disposal.

 

[ArcaneSpringboard]

I think the powers that be have already stated that almost all of the magic items currently in existence will be classified as uncommon. In addition, the suggestion will be that each player only have one rare item max.

Considering how dull most of the items are, I think all the rare items are going to be new.

 

[Aegeri]

With this system, they can go back and retroactively unnerf many items. For example, Veteran's armor can get its daily power back if its rare as you can assume that PCs won't be able to make 6 of them and recover hordes of dailies by epic.