Tur­bine posted the sec­ond part of their Devel­oper Diary series in forg­ing Leg­endary Items today. You can also check out the first part here if you’re so inclined. Both include a huge amount of infor­ma­tion on the sys­tem, its ben­e­fits and how it works.

It’s almost too much to cover here and I sug­gest you check out the orig­i­nal arti­cles … I’ll cer­tainly be talk­ing more about the sys­tem when I can actu­ally use it, but that’ll be a few weeks yet. I have writ­ten a bit of a sum­mary below, however.

The post cov­ers Leg­endary Weapon sets, class-based Leg­endary Items (and what types each class has access to), iden­ti­fy­ing, equip­ping, decon­struct­ing and so forth. A good amount of time is spent on the new Relics sys­tem, which will include Set­tings, Runes and Gems that can be used to upgrade your Leg­endary equip­ment. You receive these by decon­struct­ing other Leg­endary Items. Set­tings are more com­mon than Gems, which are sig­nif­i­cantly more com­mon than Runes.

The arti­cle also makes men­tion of some­thing I hadn’t heard about yet: Tiers. Appar­ently Relic Forg­ing has 8 sep­a­rate lev­els, or Tiers. The higher the Tier, the might­ier the relic, but also the higher the cost of forg­ing it. Relics used on any given Leg­endary Item must be of the same Tier, but they do not have to be of the same type (mean­ing you can have Runes, Set­tings or Gems in any com­bi­na­tion). Work­ing on higher level Tiers requires a higher level char­ac­ter, so don’t expect a Tier 8 Relic for your Level 51 character.

Relics of the same Tier can be com­bined to form a new Relic of a higher Tier. So, for exam­ple, you could com­bine five Tier 1 Relics to receive a sin­gle Tier 2 relic. The result is slightly ran­dom­ized, but it might be worth the risk.

Sim­i­larly, the higher the level of the Leg­endary Item being decon­structed, the more Relics you will receive. A Level 1 Leg­endary Item might result in a sin­gle Relic (Iden­ti­fy­ing the Item first will be ben­e­fi­cial), while a Level 50 could result in dozens.

Be sure to read the full arti­cle because it con­tains a lot more infor­ma­tion than I’m giv­ing here. It also con­tains a large table full of exam­ples of Relics you’ll find in the game through Tier 4 as well as the sys­tem for apply­ing Relics to Leg­endary Items.

The whole thing sounds very inter­est­ing and I’m look­ing for­ward to finally get­ting to try it out. Hope­fully using it will clear up the things I’m still not 100% clear on.

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