I'll definitely do some thinking on that, there are so many cool weapon skills that go unused, and non-standard builds would also benefit from more flexibility on gear bonusses.
PWI also went back and forth on this, first TT was all fixed, then nirvana had variety (same with r8 vs r8r(r) ), then g16/r9 is fixed again, after that g17 with variation...
Tricky part is balancing it out with the effort spent, how long items are useful and how it compares to other stuff...
Current crafting and material system is a big part of mob drops, but the resulting gear is pretty meh even if you get a good roll, and a good roll is extremely unlikely. ☆gear and ☆☆gear stats are terrible, even ☆☆☆gear is fairly low for the level, molds/instance stuff can match ☆☆☆gear that's 10 levels higher, and are guaranteed to come out with generally useful stats.
This also gets worse the higher level you go, with material droprates decreasing, chances for ☆☆☆/ ☆☆ decreasing and the amount of materials required going up.
I'd like to rebalance this so crafted gear is useful, in my opinion the system strikes a good balance when crafting sufficient items to level your skill will leave you with a decent set of gear for those level ranges and:
- a great (unlikely) roll can rival equivalent level mold / (green) instance gear.
- a good roll is a bit worse than equivalent level mold / (green) instance gear.
- The worst possible roll is usable, if not particularly good.
I think this can be done by placing crafted gear at about ☆☆☆gear level of stats, with good chances of useful addons and sockets.
At that point crafted gear will always have noticably lower base stats than mold/instance stuff, with more variety in addons.
I'm not sure if dropped items should match crafted quality, being able to get decent stuff from drops is nice, but it shouldn't make crafting obsolete. 3* stuff drops pretty regularly in instances but getting something specific would still be fairly tough.
Opinions on making changes to this? The editor would need some fixes to allow changing this, and it would be a lot of work so I'd like to see how the community thinks about this before looking into it in detail.
I've gathered some misc info on the current system & things that can be changed below.
Crafting:
For all three crafting types:
- Level 1 has recipes for one set of gear
- Level 2-4 have recipes for two sets of gear each
- Level 5-8 have recipes for one set of gear each
A set of items consists of:
- 6 items for tailor (Cape, hat, chest, legs, feet, and wrist)
- 4 items for craftsman (Necklace, belt, ring x 2)
- Varies per class for blacksmith:
- 4 x magic
- 3 x ranged
- 3 x pole
- 2 x fist
- 4 x sword
- 4 x axe/ham
4 items per crafting level seems about reasonable for blacksmith (what's a bm?
)
Items needed to level a crafting skill from:
1 to 2: 10
2 to 3: 10
3 to 4: 10? + quest
4 to 5: 15
5 to 6: 15? + quest
6 to 7: 20
7 to 8: 20? + quest
Making stuff:
At lv 1-4 creating one of each relevant item will fill your bar easily.
At lv 5-6 crafting 2-4 of each relevant item will fill your bar.
At lv 7-8 crafting 3-6 of each item will fill your bar.
Drops:
☆ Quality drops from regular mobs and bosses, and can be crafted or bought from npc.
☆☆ Quality is craft exclusive
☆☆☆ Quality mostly drops from instances, (very) low chances from crafting (especially at higher level)
Decomposing:
☆☆ quality changes affect availability of chi stones
☆☆☆ quality changes affect availability of mirages
Things that can be changed:
it's possible to:
- Tweak the socket chances for crafted gear, separatly from dropped gear.
- Tweak addons for crafted gear separately from dropped gear (but not the unique addon)
- Tweak the chances for 1/2/3 star on crafted gear (Via recipe)
- Tweak addons separately for 1/2/3 star versions of each item
It's not possible to:
- Change unique addons for crafted gear only, this is shared with drops.
- Change the number of addons for crafted gear only, would also affect drops.
- Extend the number of addons beyond 3 (Could maybe be modified on the server)
Unsure if possible:
- Add skills on magical weapons, where they make sense. (For example pierce, distract, holy etc)
It should be possible to use ☆☆ equipment to only affect crafted gear, or creating new copies of ☆☆☆ equipment to get glowy versions that don't affect drops.
Using existing ☆☆☆ gear would also partially affect drops.
Stats:
If there's some sort of logic to the exact stats of gear I'm not able to find it, other than instance/mold gear having much higher numbers than other stuff.
- Gear of the same type tends to have the same ratio of min to max dmg.
- (Min + max dmg) / required level results in a similar value for each weapon category of a particular quality. (All magic weps for example)
- ((Min + max) * aps) / required level results in similar values for all weapons of similar quality, though it still varies a little over level & wep type.
- No clue how grade factors in (loosely correlates to refine values?)
Is it possible to add some more options to the client configuration? I like to run multiple characters and I'd love to have the option to set the launcher to start both windows and log the characters in automatically.
Something like a 'multilaunch profiles' : [1,2] option under global, and username/password fields for each profile to manage them.
Take my opinion with a grain of salt since I'm new, I'm assuming instances are similar to original pwi.
I feel like instance mobs are a case of intentionally designing the game to be annoying, and then offering a 'pay to not' option.
I'd prefer removing wines entirely and tweaking the instances to be more fun to run, but I have no concrete ideas on how to go about accomplishing that. In the meanwhile wines are kind of necessary imo, the reward of fb/bh instances isn't worth the effort it takes without them.
