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Items
From Hellgatewiki.com
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Items Overview
As in most role-playing games, items are a major aspect of Hellgate: London. Finding better items, using new weapons to do more or different damage, switching equipment in and out to increase your character's overall effectiveness, and leveling up to meet the requirements of higher level items are constant activities in Hellgate: London, whether you're a casual player or a dedicated "min/max" type of guy.
There are no charms or other "stick in your inventory for stat bonuses at the expense of inventory space" type items in Hellgate: London.
Items can be modified and customized much as they could in Diablo II, thanks to slots and the six types of "mods," items that approximate the jewels, runes, and gems of Diablo II and have effect only when inserted into a weapon.
Item Qualities
Item quality is generally denoted by a number of stars, from one to five, as well as by text color. Four star items do not currently exist and are believed to be the placeholder for the future implementation of set items like those in Diablo 2.
Item Crafting and Upgrades
Flagship initially said there would be no crafting in the game, at least not in anything as involved as the Horadric Cube recipes of Diablo II. This concept changed during game development and even past release. Crafting takes a few different forms. One can approach the crafting NPC in every station to view a random assortment of items that they can make with the proper raw materials. Item blueprints are also occasionally dropped by demons and can be used to create a specific item. The Nanoforge allows players to upgrade the base stats of any item up to ten ten times, using raw materials. Subscribers also have access to a crafting device, the Transmogrifier, that is almost identical in operation to the Horadric Cube from Diablo 2.
Item Variety
The sheer profusion of items, especially of weapons, in Hellgate: London can be confusing. Keeping the huge variety fun and not intimidating is a design and presentation concern. FFS apparently put a fair bit of thought into this.
We have to be careful to balance the progression and addition of new things. As we did in Diablo II, we only introduce a few of them at a time. So you've got 3 skills to pick between at the first level. You'll be okay with that. At the next level [the second tier of skills becomes available at character level 5] of you've got four more skills to choose from. Weapons are handled in a simlar style. early on you get machine gun type stuff... we only slow introduce the radical, wide variety of weapons. By that time you've got 20-30 hours in, you're educated, you know what's going on, you know what you're picking between.
--Tyler Thompson, IGN video interview, E3 2007.
Stats, Attributes, Defenses, and Damage Types
- See the Game Mechanics and Character pages for far more details about damage types, stats, defenses, and more.
All Hellgate: London characters share the same four attributes. In addition to the bonuses for the stats themselves, they are also essential for equipping items.
- Accuracy
- Points here increase your % chance of Critical Damage and to/hit, as well as damage on some item types.
- Strength
- Points here increase your damage with some item types, and may also boost defenses.
- Stamina
- Points here increase your hit points and stamina points.
- Willpower
- Points here boost your power, as well as armor and defenses.
Strength replaced Concentration during late development, and its function was substantially changed. A character will gain five points to spend amongst these stats every time they level up. Equipment can also add bonuses to these stats.
There are five types of damage and five corresponding "states" in Hellgate: London.
- Physical
- May stun the target, which immobilizes the demon for a brief period.
- Fire
- May cause target to ignite, resulting in a loss of 5% of total hit points per second.
- Electrical
- May shock the target, preventing the target from using any skills besides basic attacks.
- Spectral
- May phase target. Phased characters/demons take double damage and deal half damage for the duration.
- Toxic
- May poison target, resulting in X damage over X seconds. Poisoned characters/monsters may be slowed in movement and attack for the duration.
You'll find weapons with all these types of damage, as well as armor to protect against them. Other character aspects include critical hit damage (various skills and weapons raise your % chance to hit for double or triple damage), increased speed (for attacks and/or movement), hit points, health and shield regeneration rate, and many more.
Paperdoll and Inventory
The paperdoll and inventory space in Hellgate: London both underwent a lot of changes during development. The equipment slots have been streamlined a bit on the paperdoll, and the inventory spaces have changed as well. In early versions of the game inventory had 12 slots for large items (guns, armor, swords, etc) and 24 slots for small items such as mods and health injectors. This changed several times during development, and the latest inventory can be seen to the right, beside an older version. It's 6 spaces wide by 12 high, and large and small items fit into it together.
Equipped items do not take up space in the inventory; armor and weapons are moved from the inventory into your paperdoll item slots and three weapon switch slots.
Flagship has talked about enabling additional carrying space through backpacks or jewel (mod) bags or other common RPG features, or separating small items such as health and power increasers. Nothing is confirmed yet.
Item and Skill Prerequisites
One tricky aspect of Hellgate: London is that all of your attributes will be involved in meeting your item requirements, and the requirements are cumulative. In Diablo II you just needed strength and/or dexterity to equip gear, and the requirements were not cumulative. If your character had 100 strength and she needed 75 for her boots, 60 for her belt, and 100 for her armor, she was fine. All that mattered was that you had more than the minimum requirement.
In Hellgate: London, everything you wear (all higher quality items, at least) will have some sort of stat prerequisite, and they add up. So if your Guardian's helm requires 3 Strength, his armor requires 4 Strength and his shield requires 6 Strength 13 Strength to equip them all. And if he only has 20 Strength, that's just 7 left for other equipment. During development, many skills (higher level ones at least) also had attribute requirements. (So if your 20 Strength Guardian wanted to use a skill that cost 8 Strength, he'd be out of luck. He'd have to put more points into Strength, take off one of those items, or use a different skill.)
This is a much simplified example with pretend values, but you get the idea. In the actual game, items will have all sorts of different attribute prerequisites, but they'll also have a chance to add to your attributes and other stats. Building a good character with just enough attributes to play, but without lots of extra points wasted in non-critical attributes can be quite a jigsaw puzzle of a challenge. See the Weapons and Armor pages for more details.
Class and Faction-Specific Items
Another form of item requirement is a class or faction requirement. The Hellgate Team debated this issue during the early design period. By the time of Alpha testing, it was clear which side had won that discussion. Almost all of the items in Hellgate: London are class-specific, and not just weapons; armor of all types is class-specific too, even when there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. It's not just high level armor, or unique armor; there are essentially three parallel lines of equipment, one for each faction, and that goes all the way down to the lowest level stuff. Junky one modifier leather boots you find at level two and discard at level four? Cabalist, Templar, or Hunter only.
- Only Templars can equip swords or other melee weapons.
- Only Templars can equip shields.
- Only Blademasters can dual wield swords.
- Only Cabalists can equip Focus Items.
- Only Evokers can dual wield Focus Items.
The result of this is that your character can actually use only a little more than one third of the items in the game. You can sell the items, or break them down into components to save for crafting, or if you're playing in a party with other classes you can trade the stuff around. This aspect is balanced, somewhat, however. Roughly half of the items dropped are for your class, while the other two fourths of items are for the other two character classes.
Obtaining Items
Balancing item drops is one of the trickiest aspects of a good RPG, and in a very equipment-dependent game like Hellgate: London, it's really a challenge. The Hellgate Team has said that they want players out finding good items, rather than trying to buy them. You can buy things, and you can sell everything, but the game is meant to be about killing and having fun, not reloading town hundreds of times in an effort to spawn one super special item on an NPC merchant.
They've also said that the endless boss runs so many players busied themselves (or their macro bots) with in Diablo II will be a thing of the past. Every level is going to be randomized in Hellgate: London, as are the locations of boss monsters, so killing the same monster over and over again just won't be possible; at least not quickly enough to make it worth the effort.
The chance of finding rarer items is increased by equipping items with +Luck on them. There is currently no quantification of the benefits beyond “more is better.” In general, symptoms of high luck tend to include greater frequency of hidden passages and rare monsters appearing, and presumably better items dropping.
Hellgate London does not have gambling as was present was Diablo 2. It instead has regular shopkeepers with changing stocks of items, and the crafting NPCs with varying set of items they can craft. The alternative end-game drain of Palladium is purchasing of items, and using the Augumentrex to add properties to items.
Spotting items on the ground is easy too, because they glow, sending up beams of light and sparkles; brighter ones for better quality items, it seems. You can see the effect (sort of) in this image, taken from a gameplay movie. There are two items here, each of which is sending up a plume of blue/white light.
Who got the items that dropped was a matter of who was closer and quicker in Diablo II. In HGL, the items that players see are unique to them. A party clearing an area together does not have to worry about sharing or quickly grabbing items.
Tradeable and non-tradeable items
The vast majority of items in the game are tradeable. Any armor or weapon that a player finds is tradeable, except, perhaps, for subscriber-only weapons and armor. All status boosting items and scraps are tradeable.
Currently, quest items and most subscriber items are subject to varying levels of being non-tradeable. Some subscriber items can be traded among other subscribers. Quest items can never be traded. Dye kits do not seem to be tradeable. Item pets (such as the Zombot) are generally not tradeable either.
Mods
- See the Mods page for much more info about these items.
Relic mod.
Mods are small, socket-filling items. Like the runes, jewels, and gems in Diablo II, they have no function on their own, but can add great benefits and bonuses to equipment, once you stick them into the socket.
"Mods are smaller items such as fuel cells, batteries, relics, ammo, runes, gems, and so forth that modify the abilities of the weapon. Everything from increased range to different damage types to affecting rate of fire and on and on and on can be achieved through adding mods to a weapon. Not every weapon has mod slots, and not every kind of mod fits on a weapon. It is a very simple, but very deep metagame that players can dissect for hours and hours, looking for the perfect combination of weapon and mod effect."
--Bill Roper, etoychest Preview, Jan 11, 2006
There are six types of mods in Hellgate: London:
- Ammo
- Rocket
- Battery
- Fuel
- Relic
- Tech
Each weapon type has a number of possible mod slots, into which only certain mod types can be slotted. For example, the Plagueblaster pistol has max mod slots of 4 fuel, 2 relic, and 1 tech. This means that you could find a plagueblaster with any combination of those mod slots, up to the maximum. You might find one with 2 fuel and 1 relic, or 1 fuel and 2 relic and 1 tech, etc. These mod slots occur in addition to any random magical modifiers a weapon might possess. While we know that weapons have max mod slots, we don't yet know if they have minimum. Every plagueblaster might have at least 2 fuel mods, for instance. We also don't know yet if it will be possible to add mod slots, up to or beyond the maximum allowed, through quest rewards. It seems a pretty likely bet, though.
As for the properties of mods themselves, they are random and highly-variable, but are grouped somewhat logically, by type and function. Properties that increase range, for example, are only found on rockets and ammos.
Healing and Power Ups
Read much more on this subject on our Game Mechanics page.
Characters in Hellgate: London regenerate power and shields, over time (and health, if eqipped with items that add such). Various items can be equipped to raise the health and shields levels, as well as increase the regeneration rate. Shields take damage first, and only after a character's shields are exhausted does she begin to lose hit points. There are very few ways to "leech" power or health in the game. The Hellgate Team feels that they made leeching too easy in Diablo II, and have changed that balance in Hellgate: London.
Health Injectors and similar items for power are the quickest method of regenerating these stats.
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| Weapons & Shields | Armor | Mods | Other |
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