Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Path of Exile: New Guild Bank

With a new league launching later today all organization of the guild bank is wiped out. The new league will have a brand new stash with 13 unnamed bank tabs in it. The question I have is what should we do with those 13 tabs? How did we use the bank last time and how could it be better this time? What do other people want out of the bank?

Gems: Personally I really liked having a lot of space dedicated to gems. At least while I was actively playing and staying on top of it we tended to have at least one copy of most of the skill gems sitting in the bank in case people needed something specific. It was awesome when I wanted to create a trapper guy and was able to just take most of the needed gems from the bank, and I was able to do that because for the most part people loot and quest for gems they don't need, but someone else might. Storing them all in one spot seems really good because it reduces the need for personal stash overlap (I'd keep one of everything myself otherwise) and spreads out the luck factor of who gets what stuff to drop. I don't know how the vaal gems are going to screw with things, but if we went with 3 gem tabs again I wouldn't complain.

Currency: Maybe it's just me but I feel like having currency in the guild bank was a bit of a disaster. One of the cool things about PoE is how you can spend a stupid amount of money trying to randomly make a specific item better. Different people are going to have different ideas of what items are worth pimping out, and that's just fine. The issue that crops up when everyone pools all their money is it's so easy for someone to end up spending it all trying to pimp out something that other people think is silly. I kept getting myself into a situation where I wanted to try to make a good 5 link item but didn't want to waste other people's currency so I never did it. Eventually I switched to just storing my own currency in my personal bank and used it to make my 5 link and was happy. So I feel like everyone should store their own currency and do with it as they feel best. (I also think when running in a group we should do permanent allocation loot so the people playing ranged characters can get their share of the currency.) So I feel like using a couple guild tabs for different types of currency is probably not a good use of space. I'm not going to stick any currency in the bank, and won't be taking any out either, with the exception maybe of map enhancers when running maps in a big guild group.

Loot: I feel like leveling items and niche uniques are the real things that make a guild bank so useful. Having a bunch of resist rings, and damage rings, and belts, and 4 socket items, and life/resist/resist/resist items seems really strong. Being able to walk up to the bank and compare your current belt with a big selection of other belts of various levels seems really good. When I was playing hardcore and basically had the guild bank to myself I wanted a tab for each inventory slot, basically, so I could easily compare with all the gloves we had at that point. When I found a new glove upgrade I'd store my old gloves I wore in the bank so next time I died I could use them again. I feel like that's the sort of thing that could come in really useful.

So we have 13 tabs. How would I use them? Well, 3 for gems, 1 or 2 for incoming stuff so people could just dump them in, 1 for a selection of flasks and dinky stuff like some portal and identify scrolls, 1 for good 5+ link items, 1 or 2 for build defining uniques, and 4-6 for slot specific stuff. Maybe? I don't really know. What would other people want in a guild bank? Should there be a tab for maps? I feel like maps should probably be personal like currency. What about vaal fragments? I don't even really know what they do other than summon a big boss fight. Are they even tradeable? Who knows!

1 comment:

rbuehler said...

I think I agree with every single thing you say here. I definitely feel the same way about currency being personal, and gems being communal (3 is the *minimum* number of tabs there imo), and I definitely think a 5L tab belongs. I also think tabs for other loot slots makes sense (rings, belts, gloves, hats, boots (esp 4L for the last 3)).