I touched briefly in my previous article on my dissatisfaction with both the Hellfire Ring and Amulet and added a few simple ideas to enhance these items. For this article, I want to delve a little deeper into a few ideas I’ve been tossing around my head in improving these two items and changing their status from gratuitous achievements to must-have end game items.
The biggest challenge in making the Hellfire Ring and Amulet compelling is that at the moment they’re far too random in terms of attributes that get rolled. The Amulet has a slight advantage of the Ring just because the passive secondary is pretty cool and for some classes/builds a worthwhile stat. However, the Hellfire Ring is honestly better off used just for leveling. If you have a friend that can handle T6 though, the experience bonus secondary practically is useless as anyone can get power leveled within roughly two hours from level 1 to 70. That seems like a very poor design choice considering that it feels more worthy of an end game piece to really help you push through higher Greater Rift difficulties.
The main problem though with the Hellfire Ring in its current state is that it cannot compete against the Ring of Royal Grandeur, duo Unities (for solo play) and a perfectly rolled Stone of Jordon for really high end play. Since the drop chances for bounty cache legendaries have increased (with T6 being 100%), it won’t take long to obtain even a mediocre Ring of Royal Grandeur, whose secondary stat of eliminating a set bonus is pretty much a must have. And even a garbage Unity can be useful for solo play once you reroll a stat for a socket (or other useful attribute like Critical Hit or Critical Hit Damage). So on this level, the Hellfire Ring just can’t compete.
Some people on the forums have suggested rolling up the Ring of Royal Grandeur’s secondary into the Hellfire Ring. I think the argument does have a lot of validity so let’s use that aspect as a starting point for the design. My idea here is to allow several different static versions of Hellfire Rings and increase the flat dex/int/str attribute roll basics into more variations. So you could have one variation with the experience bonus for alts, one variation for the set bonus secondary and another with something like a Unity capability. Maybe what we can do here is remove the unique equipped part or make them different in title so you can wear two types.
Perhaps, one type of ring can be used for more offensive perhaps and the other for defensive purposes. The offensive one can use the Ring of Royal Grandeur’s secondary set bonus while the defensive one can be used either in conjunction with another Unity or perhaps give a flat 30-50% defense bonus vs everything. I’ve read that the double Unity ring and invulnerable follower provides a flat 50% damage mitigation so adding this would make this infinitely useful and pretty much a must-have for melees having trouble in high ranked Greater Rifts.
All three rings should be given a socket by default and the offensive ring might have things like guaranteed elemental damage while the defensive one might have reduced elite damage on top of the flat defense bonus or an elite damage bonus similar to how Unities currently operate. On top of the sockets and guaranteed useful secondary bonus, these rings should never have another useless secondary bonus like +life per kill or +%elemental resist damage. Besides the main stat (int/dex/str), they could have 2-3 more stats to make them far more desirable than a Ring of Royal Grandeur, Stone of Jordon and/or Unity. In this manner, you still get some level of randomness but these rings will never be garbage compared to the other three aforementioned rings.
An example offensive Hellfire Ring might look like +15-20% cold damage, +15-20% elite damage, socket, 500-600 dex, set bonus secondary, +8-10% critical hit and +40-50% critical hit damage. A defensive Hellfire Ring could be +15-20% reduced elite damage, +45-50% reduced damage vs everything, socket, 500-600 dex, +% attack speed, 90-100 resist all and 500-600 vit.
What happens to rings like the Ring of Royal Grandeur then? I think they still have a place as a stepping stone leading into Ubers. But they shouldn’t be better than a poorly rolled Hellfire Ring, which ought to be the next stepping stone leading into very high level Greater Rifts. Here, there’s a far better logical progression for content as opposed to the purely RNGesus style that’s going on currently.
The Hellfire Amulet needs a similar massive retuning. Although the passive is a great idea, the sheer randomness of other attributes make it a pretty frustrating experience for anyone who isn’t leveling an alt. So just like the way I re-designed the Hellfire Ring, I want to apply a similar strategy for the amulet. The real thing with the amulet is that it gets stiff competition for other neck pieces that have affix immunities and near quadruple rolls. The ideal amulet these days will have a socket, critical hit damage, critical hit and elemental damage. If you’re lucky and get all of that plus an affix immunity then the Hellfire Amulet won’t ever beat it and that’s a huge issue to me.
So we definitely want to keep the passive secondary as it really can be useful if rolled correctly. But we should add the affix immunity/healing secondary as well. Most people opt for Critical Hit Damage over other things for a decent amulet, so let’s guarantee that part here with anything between 80-100%. Adding a guaranteed socket too and +% elemental damage would certainly turn this baby into a must have even on a poorly rolled one. You would still have main stats but I imagine most people will end up rerolling them for something else. I think like the Hellfire Ring, we should allow for 7 stats rather than 6 and make a few guaranteed which will make this BiS no matter what.
Something else I would like to see with these two pieces is a way to improve upon them similar to Legendary Gems. Rerolling affixes all day just isn’t compelling enough for me and I’d simply prefer to provide a scaling mechanism. Perhaps, one idea is to allow people to continue farming Ubers or Act bosses to get materials for elevating stats. That would help in creating a new meta game beyond just eking out small amounts on gems.
At any rate, I hope that these ideas will be considered by Blizzard. I don’t think they alter the game too drastically but they definitely make the experience more focused and logical, not to mention worthwhile compared to the current state.
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