Updating the enchant aspects
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Since the creation of the enchanting system, many combinations have come and gone and what we have today is a subset of the initial set of possible enchants. When they were first created, the enchant recipes covered reasonably well all the existing aspects, but with the removal of many of those, today this is no longer true.
In the current situation there are some aspects which are over used, and some that have literally zero recipes tied to them.To be more specific, this is the current situation for each aspect in how many combinations it is used:
Primal Aspects:
Mind: 7
Body 14
Soul: 8This here is the first issue. For those that didn't notice, all combinations have always one and exactly one aspect from the 3 primal ones. Now, here there isn't a real imbalance, because Body contains all the Resist X enchants, which we may consider as a single enchant type.
Manipulation:
Transform: 11
Negate: 8
Create: 7
Destroy: 0 !!!
Transfer: 2Same concept as the primal aspects. All combinations have one and exactly one manipulation aspect from these 5. In here we can notice that all combinations that originally used destroy, are no longer existent. Most of the ones using transfer have gone as well. Right now, destroy on a reagent is completely useless. Negate contains mostly all the resistances, while transform and create contain almost all the combinations.
Universal:
Air: 3
Earth: 1
Water: 2
Fire: 2
Chaos: 10
Time: 4
Death: 2
Life: 3
Order: 10
Energy: 14!!!
Knowledge: 6The other 2 aspects of the enchants come from the universal list, and here too we notice some serious imbalance. Most of the elemental aspects are almost not used (especially important now that we have legendary reagents coming from elementals). Similar for death and life. At the same time, chaos order and energy are grossly overused.
Luckily, rebalancing them isn't that difficult, because you do it separately from Primal, Manipulation and Universal aspects. At the same time though, the aspects have been clearly combined to provide a reasonable combination for that effect, and I would like to preserve that as much as possible. You also need to avoid duplicating combinations. In particular, I would propose the following changes:
For Primal:
No changes needed here
For Manipulation:
Accuracy, Critical Chance from Transform to Destroy
Cooldown Reduction from Transform to Transfer
Critical damage from Create to DestroyThis would give a bit of value to Destroy, and a little more use to Transfer. It would leave us with Transform having mostly all the stat bonuses and evasion. Negate would have all resistances, willpower and fortitude. Create would have many of the niche ones like lockpick, stealth and detection, plus 2 more generically used like mana and endurance. Destroy would have 3 generically used ones and transfer too. They would have around the same weight in total.
For Universal:
We clearly need to knock down a bit the value of Energy while giving to elemental aspects. I would move Bonus Endurance, Strength and Health Regen from Energy to Earth. Cooldown Reduction and Luck from Energy to Death.Dexterity from Energy to Air. Willpower from Energy to Water.
Bonus mana from Order to Life.
Critical chance from Chaos to Fire and Critical Damage from Order to Fire.
Lower Mana Cost from Order to Water.
Detection from Chaos to Air.WIth these changes, Energy Chaos and Order would still be the most important universal aspects, but at least some dignity would be given to air, fire, water earth, life and death.
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It has taken me 3 months to have a vague understanding of enchanting. I always use the Enchantment finder site. In short, the whole process is needlessly complicated and needs some reworking. How to do this? I have no idea. I just hope someone will....
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The enchanting system and its depth and complexity is my absolute favorite part of FO.
Having said that, I'd still agree with @spoletta that it could use some rebranding as well as additional enchant types to extend the value of certain reagent attributes in the system.
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@GamerSeuss while I'm not saying I dislike the system as a whole, it all feels rather unintuitive. It is difficult to find the best combination for the enchantment you want even if you are using one of the finder sites that are available. Nevermind attempting to find a t2 enchant without a site. Just my 2 cents.
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I personally find it a very fun activity to devise new combinations, but that is subjective I guess.
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Spoletta, you are a patient persistent saint for having documented this problem so well.
The enchanting system is hugely important to the game and sadly has only been reduced over time.
I hope that your post increases awareness of the sad situation and that we get some variety back.
It would also be nice to see gem enchanting also come back with your other previous thoughts on that (t1 socket cost 100g, t2 1k, t3 2k?) because then the few of us that can and do enchanting can provide it as a pre-packaged service to the rest of the players who are thoroughly confused and/or frustrated by it.
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@Junkie The uncertainty is part of what I love about enchanting.
I'm not saying I've never used an Enchantment Finder site, because I have, but, I prefer to experiment and play around with trying to figure it out myself. I also like the fact that sometimes you try for one enchant, and get another. Adds randomness to magic, making it more magical.
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You are able to remove the RNG out of enchanting now btw not sure how long this has been in but i dont think anyone knows the trick
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@Veeshan if you mean imbibing Gemstones in the Starter towns, that's well known by long time testers, as that was the default in an older test phase that was scrapped. Not sure if the benches for it were kept on purpose, or if they will be going away.
The best way is to either put a lower tier version of the one you want first, then use a higher one to "upgrade" ot, or find a recipe with only 1 result
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At this point, I have all possible enchanting combinations for the reagents currently in game. I'm talking 2.86 million for one recipe alone. I could analyze these combinations to see what is used the most and the least. There are definitely some properties that are used much more than others. Once I have it all in a database I can analyze it if anyone is interested.
