Welcome to Day 2 of Hype Week for Season 5: Rage of the Frostborn! After yesterday’s reveal of the seasonal mechanic, Rage of Morditas, we have some very exciting updates to Merchant’s Guild and Circle of Fortune to share with you. We’ve been listening to your feedback, spotting the wins, and finding even more ways to make Item Factions shine. Whether you are a solo or co-op player, there's something for you. Expect some surprises, possible shake-ups, and plenty of reasons to try something new. Grab your shopping bags or telescopes and buckle up! Hype Week Day 2 starts now!
Merchant’s Guild
UI & Stall Updates
The Bazaar UI has been updated to help you navigate more easily between listings of different items. These adjustments will improve your experience as you search for the exact item you want.
First, we've combined searching and listing items into a single UI. When you select an item to list, it will automatically apply quick filters to show other similar items. We've also adjusted the filter UI to better group similar filters and place the most used filters at the top.
Affix filtering has also leveled up. The # of T7s filter now ignores sealed affixes, making it better suited for finding Rune of Havoc and Redemption crafting bases, and the new # of T6s filters makes it easier to find those stepping stone exalts.
After hearing input from the community, the team wanted to update affix picker options. In Season 5, the updated affix picker has multiple groups, each with optional inputs to choose how many affixes must match in that category. You can pick from all, any, prefixes, suffixes, non-sealed, and sealed categories to better find the exact item you need for your build.
Item Pricing
A feature we’re very excited to introduce in Season 5 is pricing suggestions! When listing an item at a stall, there will now be a suggested price based on actual sales of items that share similar key attributes, such as Legendary Potential or exalted affixes. While this is meant to help players quickly list items, you can still enter your own gold value for items.
Are you tired of relisting your items every few days for a slightly lower price, just to see where they will finally sell? Worried about not getting full value for your stuff but also not wanting them to sit on the market forever? Well, step right up and look no further because we’ve got the solution for you. Automatic Price Lowering! Starting with Season 5, you can choose to have each item you list automatically lower its price by a value you select!
Hourly, daily, or weekly, until it reaches a set floor price. This way, you can spend more time slaying monsters and less time relisting items that haven't sold yet.
Another hotly requested feature is the ability to search for and purchase items from any stall. In Season 5, you’ll have the option to swap the stall you’re looking at directly from the UI. This will remove the need to run to various stalls yourself; however, you can still run to your favorite vendor to say hi!
Black Market Tokens
Before we move on, we’d like to announce that, due to overwhelming feedback regarding the overabundance of Black Market tokens in Season 4, come Season 5, the Merchant’s Guild will no longer gate item purchases behind ranks. That’s right! The days of ranking up to purchase different kinds of items have come to an end.
When you rank up with the Merchant’s Guild in Season 5, you unlock the ability to purchase bags of items with your excess favor and gold. These bags include keys, shards, glyphs, and runes of various rarities. These have escalating gold and favor costs as the rarity of their contents increases, giving savvy crafters an extra use for their piles of gold.
Circle of Fortune
The Observatory has undergone a massive reconstruction project and has new systems that you'll need to familiarize yourself with. Once you become experts in using this delicate equipment, you’ll become the masters of your own destiny. The future holds countless possibilities, and Prophecies will let you choose which ones to pursue.
Prophecies
First, we’ve completely removed Prophecy rerolling. Instead, you simply select the exact reward you want, and it will automatically charge and repeatedly fulfill as you gain favor.
Rewards can also be modified by Lenses, which are now unlocked for your entire stash once purchased. Lenses can affect charge rate, items dropped, or even details of the rewards, such as affixes or Legendary Potential.
Each telescope corresponds to a Prophecy slot, which is unlocked as you rank up. In each Prophecy slot, you can select one reward and one lens. All of your Prophecies now automatically charge up as you gain favor, meaning you can target four different rewards at once instead of needing to forgo certain categories in order to maximize others.
When you've earned enough favor to fully charge up a Prophecy, it will bank a charge. Anytime you complete the target objective for a Prophecy, it will consume charges to drop that slot's chosen rewards. As you gain more charges, a single target objective will consume multiple charges to drop the reward extra times, so you can quickly collect your loot!
The four Prophecy slots are:
Rank 1 - Mesembria - Defeat a Rift Beast or activate a Shrine to fulfill
Rank 3 - Dysis - Defeat a Nemesis or open a Lost Cache to fulfill
Rank 6 - Eos - Defeat an Exiled Mage or a Timeline Boss to fulfill
Rank 9 - Arctus - Defeat an Omen or a Fateweaver to fulfill
Rewards
The Prophecy rewards you know and love have been brought forward in this new system, with charge rates tuned to be similar to the favor cost of the old system, so you'll be getting a similar number of items at a more consistent pace. Some reward types will now also automatically upgrade into better variants as you rank up, such as rare rewards being replaced by exalted rewards.
We've also taken this opportunity to add a few new reward types, such as Rune of Havoc, Rune of Redemption, Experimental items, Harbinger bases, and Champion items to help with farming for items that have been a struggle to find as Circle of Fortune.
Lenses
But how do Lenses work now that rerolling has been removed? In Season 5, each Prophecy slot can have a Lens equipped to modify the charge rate or item drops. Let's take a look at a few examples!
The first Lens you unlock will be the Lens of Tyranny, which doubles the charge rate by consuming excess favor. This is a great option for farming crafting materials where quantity is key.
Lenses can also affect specific aspects of equipment rewards, such as the Lens of Origin and Lens of Finality, which significantly increase the tier of a prefix or suffix, respectively.
And for you Red Ring enjoyers, might we suggest the Lens of Curiosity, which compresses the weighting of Unique item rewards, making common Uniques less likely to drop while increasing the chance to find rare Uniques.
Outro
With that, we wrap up Day 2 of Hype Week!
Maybe you’d like to visit Sandrak at the Circle of Fortune and peruse the latest Prophecy changes? With a little luck and perhaps a willingness to tempt fate, you might coax the rolls you seek into dropping the targeted item types you desire.
If reading the stars isn’t quite your style, why not pay a visit to the Merchant’s Guild? Seek out Nama and browse wares from fellow Travelers, hoping to turn your coin into the missing piece of equipment you’ve been after. A little less fate, a little more commerce, and perhaps a better chance of getting exactly what you need.
Regardless of your choice, we’re eager to have you experience a refreshed item faction experience on October 1st.
If you missed our Rage of Morditas post yesterday, be sure to check it out. Tomorrow, we’ll showcase three brand new skills coming in Season 5. May fortune favor the bold and clever merchants, and may they line their pockets with profit. We’ll see you tomorrow!