Gear Progression Feedback
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There are two major issues with the current gear progression and economy. I'll go through them individually.
Firstly, recipes.
Recipes do nothing for the game but gives an additional time sink that in time will be useless anyway.
This means recipe is basically useful for the first couple of months before it gets completely deprecated. All it does it to lengthen the time you can first craft a stronger armor/weapon, and later on it becomes a completely redundant item.
Some suggested changes to the system is to :
i) Dramatically increase recipe drop rates, and make specific monsters drop specific recipes. Recipes can then be limited use, and there will be a market for them.
ii) Remove recipes completely and replace them with a different system, or completely negate the use of any pre-requisite besides town tech to craft equipmentThe second issue is the drop rate of specific reagents and items.
The drop rate for some of these rarer reagents and materials are way too low. Some examples are like soul shard, force stones, hardened skin, etc etc.
To have a thriving economy, we need to change from taking a really long time to get an equipment that can last a really long time, to taking a moderate amount of time to get an equipment that does not last as long. We will probably need a few balance passes to make this perfect, but right now it's skewed way too much to the opposite way of being so rare to get equipment that it doesnt make sense to lose them at all.When we make equipment relatively easier to get, it will also make more sense when we have durability punishments in PvP. ( Which imo, we should ).
Now I'd like to discuss about some gear progression that was great but was removed. Primarily, the socketing system and the upgrading system. These two systems promoted the use of materials and gold, and were pretty liked by most players. I think these two systems should have been kept, it would be great if we can have both quality AND upgraded gear, like +1, +2, +3, and depending on how much you upgraded your equipment, you can enchant it with additional properties.
The upgrading can also come with failures which might hurt the durability of the equipment you're upgrading, or make it be destroyed entirely, which could add more gear sinks that the game desperately needs.
TL;DR :
i) Recipes need to be changed
ii) Rare reagents/materials need to drop more often
iii) Bring back socketing and upgrading gear, to +1, +2, +3, etc.
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On recipes I 100% agree.
On the point of the item rarity, I actually think that they are fine. Players wanted an equip which was harder to obtain and now they have it. This though does not allow the equip to destroy at the rate we would need. So probably the easiest solution here, is to double the amount of rare materials required to craft the item, while also doubling the drop rate (so that the material cost is an even number for every piece). Now, when the set item gets destroyed, you automatically recover and create into your inventory half of the rare materials required to craft it. So for example a battle mage armor would cost 4 force stones and you would recover 2 when it gets destroyed. This has the advantage of keeping the target of obtaining a set at the current difficulty, while making it way easier to replace it when it gets destroyed.
On the third point I mostly disagree with the +1/+2/+3 system... and I'm not saying that only cause I finally modified all the items in the wiki and don't want to revert it all! That system had scaling issues which were hard to solve.
The old socketing system instead was fine, with the caveat that tier 1 enchants should cost only the chipped gem and not gold.
