Pretty Upset

Is this a known/confirmed bug? Found a decent

Eth

Arreat's Face today and immediately upped it for a5 merc. Everything changed but the defense!

before upgrading, a unique item has the max defense of the base+1 (so in this case, a 181 def

Eth

Slayer Guard). upgrading rerolls the defense for the new base's defense variable (175-252

Eth

Guardian Crown here). You got unlucky and rolled a low one:S (445 / 2,5 = 178 base def

Eth

Guardian Crown).

uuee wrote: 9 months ago

before upgrading, a unique item has the max defense of the base+1 (so in this case, a 181 def

Eth

Slayer Guard). upgrading rerolls the defense for the new base's defense variable (175-252

Eth

Guardian Crown here). You got unlucky and rolled a low one:S (445 / 2,5 = 178 base def

Eth

Guardian Crown).

This game never ceases to amaze me...

Yeah, this can happen when the upped counterpart of the base item has a defense roll that overlaps with the possible defense roll of the original item. Another example is

Vampire Gaze - since

Bone Visage's defense roll overlaps with

Grim Helm's (the lower end of

Bone Visage's defense roll is lower than the max defense of

Grim Helm), upping it might lower the defense of the upped item. Always check the possible defense rolls of the upped base item before upping, it might not always be worth the risk to upgrade... for

Vampire Gaze the risk of lowering defense is about 45%. For

Arreat's Face it's only about 7-8% risk. Just really bad luck, sorry

ShadowHeart wrote: 9 months ago

Yeah, this can happen when the upped counterpart of the base item has a defense roll that overlaps with the possible defense roll of the original item. Another example is

Vampire Gaze - since

Bone Visage's defense roll overlaps with

Grim Helm's (the lower end of

Bone Visage's defense roll is lower than the max defense of

Grim Helm), upping it might lower the defense of the upped item. Always check the possible defense rolls of the upped base item before upping, it might not always be worth the risk to upgrade... for

Vampire Gaze the risk of lowering defense is about 45%. For

Arreat's Face it's only about 7-8% risk. Just really bad luck, sorry

I'm actually less upset understanding the math of it now, was furious it was a 'bug'. Thanks for the explanation!

Really two "bugs" in one go here.

As the other two already stated, when you up a piece of armor with ED, it stops adhering to the "base max+1" rule and randomly rerolls the def despite having ED on it, possibly giving you the same or occasionally even lower def than before upgrading, depending on the def range of the upgraded version's base item.

In addition to that, when you upgrade an ethereal item, it then ignores the "eth starts with full durability" rule and instead rerolls durability as it would if you freshly found the same thing as non-eth. As a result, you also now have an item that is technically damaged, with 30/55 durability in your case.

Both of those are somewhat annoying, obviously, but not isolated cases. These changes in "normal item rules" happen every time you up something like this so going in, if you know about them, you know you're also taking a gamble in terms of the resulting defense and such.