World Ultimate Item Customization

I've posted earlier suggestions about item customization, but they lacked detail and some parts were scrapped. So instead of editing those 2 threads, I decided to gather all of my ideas in one place and hone in on them. This is my longest suggestion yet, and I hope it's the best. Enjoy!

Item Changes

Spoiler: Fully Elemental Powder Conversion

It’s impossible to create a weapon that does only elemental damage using powders as ingredients. This limits how well crafted weapons mimic gimmicks and gives the player less freedom and flexibility to customize their weapon.

To solve this, instead of powders as ingredients applying the neutral damage conversion AFTER SUCCESSIVE powders, the neutral damage conversion of all powders used as ingredients should combine and apply to the original base damage.

For example, an Tier VI Air powder has a neutral damage conversion of 35%. 3 Tier VI Air powders on this bow would therefore convert 100% (doesn’t go over 100%) of the neutral damage to Air damage instead of partially.

This should also make it more intuitive since you no longer have to do repeated calculations to find what your final damage will be.

Spoiler: Non-Randomized Combat Level, Base Damage/Health, & Durability

Currently your base stats are randomized based off the level range you select in the crafting GUI. This makes getting the exact base stats you want involve more RNG than getting an ID and unnecessarily annoying. Although the ranges are relatively small, I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to get the exact stats you want. You already have to deal with RNG from IDs, even more than obtainables since their base stats and skill point bonuses are static. Which should be the opposite since crafted items take exponentially more time to obtain, and they were originally supposed to be a guaranteed way of obtaining powerful items to bypass the RNG fest that are mythics and ID re-rolling. It also makes calculations a lot easier to do when say calculating the DPS or balancing ingredients.

Initially, your combat level will be automatically selected by your current combat level and you can modify it with the arrows as before. Then the system will set the base damage or health and durability according to the specific level. You can check out the specific values on the Crafting Baselines sheet below.

Spoiler: No Bonus Damage From Powders as Ingredients

This may be an unwelcome change, but it is a necessary one. Crafted weapons obtain busted damage by spamming powders as ingredients, as evidenced by people soloing the Eye (who has water defense btw) with water bows under a few minutes. That's not even mentioning how you can use them with attack speed bonus to create even more busted damage. In exchange, the durability penalty has been severely reduced on powders and they no longer have skill points requirements.

Spoiler: Damage Range

This is an... interesting one. When a base damage is selected, it multiplies the base damage by 0.9 and 1.1 and rounds down to calculate the minimum and maximum damage respectively. Or in other words, the difference between the maximum and the minimum is always 20% of the base damage. While it's good that the damage range is static, it also limits how well crafted weapons can replicate gimmicks like Fatal or Torrential Tide.

To fix this, you can now edit the damage range in the crafting GUI:

The quantity represents the ratio of the difference between the maximum and the minimum and the base damage. The system automatically sets the damage range to 20 as before. A damage range of 0 means the minimum and the maximum are equal, while a damage range of 100 means the minimum is 0 and the maximum is... maxed out. In addition, the base damage also decreases up to 20% of the original base damage as you decrease the damage range and vice-a-versa. This is to discourage people from making weapons with guaranteed damage and to create a risk-reward situation for experimenting with bigger damage ranges. You can find an example in the Crafting Baselines sheet under "Damage Range."

Spoiler: Attack Speed

You can select your attack speed in the crafting GUI:

The system initially sets your attack speed to normal. I am not the first one to suggest this, though there are 2 crucial differences I want to make:
1. You can choose up to Super Fast or Super Slow



2. The attack speed will now also modify your total raw melee damage on your weapon

The first one is for more customization and gimmicks, and the second one allows the first one to be feasible. As I said before, a huge problem with crafted weapons is that people can stack base damage from powders as ingredients to get crazy amounts of damage. This also applies to raw melee as well. While the inital base damage is currently modified according to the attack speed (Base Damage * [2.05/Attack Speed Modifier]), the same amount of raw melee or elemental damage from powders on super fast would give way more damage than on normal. This is probably the main reason why they restricted attack speeds to only 3.

An easy fix to this problem is to simply modify the total raw melee damage on your weapon as before:
Raw Melee Damage = (Initial Raw Melee Damage * [2.05/Attack Speed Modifier])

You can check out an example in the Crafting Baselines sheet under "Attack Speed Modifiers" and it shows that the DPS will be held relatively constantly across attack speeds.

Unfortunately, this doesn't do anything about raw melee from other sources such as armor or accessories. Now we could instead just do the same calculation as before except it also sums up the raw melee from other sources. However, obtainables also share this problem, so if this change were to be made, it would be a change to the ID itself universally across crafted and obtainable items. Which is a whole other discussion to be had, so I won't get into that here.

Spoiler: Powder Slots

You can select the number of powder slots on your weapon or armor. From levels 1 to 19, the maximum number of powder slots is 1, 2 for levels 20 to 39, 3 for levels 40 to 59, 4 for levels 60 to 79, and up to 5 for level 80 and beyond. The more powder slots you remove, the more your health or base damage will increase and vice-a-versa. The system will automatically set the weapon or armor to have the maximum number of powder slots for its level.




Even though mid to endgame weapons will receive more powder slots, their current base damage will be unaffected. While it may seem that this would be a bit unbalanced, it really isn't. For reference, the Hive weapons have 5 powder slots, Cluster, Bonder, and Crimson have 4, Gravity has 5, and Neutrino has 6! Sure, most armor and weapons have 2 or 3 powder slots, but also keep in mind that crafted items are supposed to be stronger than regular items anyway and they no longer receive bonus damage from powders as ingredients. As for attack speeds, the attack speed you choose will limit the maximum number of powder slots you can have:

• Super Fast: 2
• Very Fast: 3
• Fast: 4
• Normal & Slower: 5

Again, this is to prevent prevent people from using attack speed modifiers and powders to boost their DPS to broken levels.

I did test out if the current base damage of bows was reduced in accordance to their gain in powder slots in the "Powder Slots" tab in the Crafting Baselines sheet, and the results weren't significant. Let's say I make 3 crafted, level 100 bows, Tier 3 materials, no ingredients: Bow A that has 3 powder slots with the current damage, Bow B that has 5 powder slots with the nerfed damage, and Bow C that has 5 powder slots with the current damage. Without powders, Hive Bow does 988 DPS (Average of the damage range multiplied by the attack speed modifier), Bow A does 1,050 DPS, and Bow B does 944 DPS. With 3 Tier VI Earth Powders, Hive Bow does 1,133 DPS (Taking into account the Earth % damage modifier), Bow A does 1,195 DPS, and Bow B does 1,090 DPS. With 5 Tier VI Earth Powders, the Hive Bow does 1,233 DPS, Bow B does 1,190 DPS, and Bow C does 1,295 DPS.

So you're talking about differences on the scale of 5% to 10%, which isn't going to make or break anything.

Crafting Changes

Spoiler: 9 Crafting Slots

I'm anticipating this section to be the most controversial, and I wouldn't blame you. The crafting GUIs for only armor and weapons (NOT JUST Armoring and Weaponsmithing) have 9 crafting slots now.




(I flipped the GUI because of how the icons work. The consumables were just for consistency.)

This is such as huge change to the system that it may turn many people off. Though I believe that this change is necessary for many reasons:

1. It allows for more IDs to be placed on crafted armor and weapons. This is one of the weakest aspects of crafted armor and weapons compared to their equivalent obtainables. You can currently only get 2 or 3 decent IDs out of a crafted item, which is better than nothing but pales into the comparison the number of IDs most mid to endgame obtainable items have.

2. It gives the player more flexibility and freedom build-wise.

3. There are more possbile synergies with ingredients with effectiveness, boosting the potential and creativity of builds.

4. Since powders no longer give bonus damage as ingredients, it helps crafted weapons be on the same footing as obtainables and gives people more people room to convert their damage to elemental. You would use half of your ingredient slots to convert 100% of your damage otherwise since it takes at least 3 crafting slots.

5. There are 48 different parameters you can have in a ingredient (IDs, durability, sp reqs, effectiveness, etc.). If you were to create enough ingredients to cover all possible combinations of positive 2 parameters (excluding durability), you'd get 1081 different ingredients alone. If you wanted to have a combination of 1 negative and 1 positive parameter, you'd get 2209 ingredients.

As you can see, the more IDs you have, you'll have exponentially more unique combinations. Which can't be anywhere near satisfied with the mere 333 ingredients for armor and weapons we have at the moment. So one can't just easily add more ingredients with multiple IDs. Now not all of these combinations are noteworthy, but it still demonstrates how the current system severely limits your freedom and build-making.

6. It's closer to the vanilla crafting GUI and is symmetrical. Not important, but still a perk :)

Spoiler: Ingredient Revamp

Obviously this would require a major rework of most ingredients, which I'm currently a third underway. You can check out my changes in the Ingredient Revamp Sheet. Green means that the ingredient was changed. Before you do though, it is essential you read about the new tier capping system below.

In addition to making ingredients compatible with 9 crafting slots, my main goals are:

• Make most items unique and distinct (No longer having 5 defense sp ingredients for armoring in the first 20 levels, but no other sp ingredients, or higher level worse items like Bat Ear)
• Exclusive IDs to obtainables such as Spell Cost are now available in ingredients (Only in the late game).
• Actual skill point ingredients *Soft Silk sweats nervously*
• Pure ingredients, i.e. weak Tier 0 ingredients with 1 ID. This is to help achieve as many combinations as possible
• Nerf skill points across the board
• Fill in missing niches or IDs such as exploding for Tailoring
• Give ingredients more professions i.e. most tailoring ingredients also include armoring and vice-a-versa. Same goes with weapons. I honestly don't know why there are arbitrary profession restrictions, especially for weak items. It just severly handicaps build potential, especially since there aren't enough ingredients already to cover most niches. And it unintentionally makes some professions better than others like with Woodworking.
• Ingredients in the early game are useful *cough* elemental defense % *cough*

I could use your feedback the most in this section. Feel free to comment or propose new ingredients, especially for Tier 2 and 3 ingredients.

Spoiler: Ingredient Tier Capping

Each tier now has a limit of how many of the same items you can place. Tier 0 and 1 are 3 items, Tier 2 are 2 items, and Tier 3 is 1 item. Otherwise, you'll receive an additional durability penalty; i.e. for every 1 item you put in past the limit, the total durability penalty of the same items (not other items) will increase by 100%. For ingredients that give durability, their durability bonus will be turned negative and the rule still applies. This way it prevents people from spamming a single ingredient to get broken stats (Blood of the Nivla Beauty, Glimmering Coin) and encourages players to diversify their ingredients. It also allows for individual ingredients to be more powerful without worrying about people spamming them. Which is why this is a necessary change whether or not you agree with having 9 crafting slots.

Spoiler: Static Skill Points

Skill points are now static and count towards requirements. As they degrade, their effectiveness (i.e. elemental damage & their respective perk) will decrease, but the amount that they count towards requirements will not. Whether or not there's 9 crafting slots, skill point bonus will be nerfed on most ingredients.

Again, this is to make crafted items have less RNG and more fair, and makes them more equal to obtainables.

Spoiler: Crafting Levels

I might be wrong that 9 crafting slots would be the most controversially. Either way, I think this is the most necessary change out of the whole list, which I why I saved it for last.

It's no secret that the reason why most people don't do professions is because they are grindy and tedious. This was by design; professions were meant to only be done by a small fraction of the player base that enjoys grinding, while everyone else could just buy crafted items to enjoy this. Except that's not what fully happened.

Most people preferred to rather craft their own items and people were unsure if there was even a market for their items, so the market was and is still mostly filled with consumables and ingredients. And the grind was and is still absurd.

And no, please do NOT say that some people enjoy it. Because yes, there are people who do enjoying grinding. But you can't say people enjoy grinding professions because most profession tryhards rely on bombs and Hunted Mode to bypass the grind. So even they don't do the actual grind.

This creates a situation similar to how double XP affected quests, so people would only do them when there's a prof party or it's double-xp weekend and others would get locked out because the server is full. Which is completely unfair and is practically a pay-to-win situation. Granted, this aspect wasn't intentional and the staff aren't greedy, but it's still a bad consequence of the system regardless.

Spoiler: Crafting Levels Cont.

So what do I want to do?

Upon creating a class, you choose a specialization for a crafting profession. While you will still gain crafting xp and levels in that chosen profession, your crafting level will not determine what combat level you can craft your items and instead it will be limited by your combat level. So your crafting level could be level 20 and you could still craft level 90 gear as long as you are level 90 and have the right materials. Every current class will also get 1 and ONLY 1 specialization per class.

However, if you choose to do other crafting professions on the same class, you won't be able to level them past the highest crafting level of your specialization profession. So for current classes, your highest level crafting profession will be automatically selected as your specialization. To level them up higher, you will have to level up the crafting level of your specialization.

I believe this is the best middle ground:

1) It preserves everyone's current crafting levels. So the prof-tryhards won't lose a single ounce of their progress and even players that have only gotten up to level 20 in a profession won't lose their progress.

2) Maxing out each profession would take as much work as before, so it wouldn't invalidate anyone's past or future achievement.

3) Allows the average player to experience 1 crafting profession or 2 without having to create countless items they will never use or want.

4) Is still restrictive enough to not flood the market with crafted items because most players (especially casuals) don't have 5 or more level 100 classes and they still need to gather or buy materials as before. In fact, this would help the market because now you wouldn't need tons of materials to craft what you want. So casuals would just seek to buy materials instead, generating more demand for materials and profitting gathering professionals.

Gathering professions will be completely unaffected by this. Why? Because crafting levels are worse since they're less necessary. Unlike gathering levels, they make you feel like you're wasting your time and resources by requiring you to craft tons of useless items you'll never want or use just to create the single item you actually want. Which is extremely disheartening when you find a legendary after 5 minutes in a nearby loot chest. Imagine how much worse Minecraft would be if you had to craft 10 wooden swords before you could craft a stone one, or 100 iron swords before a diamond one. They also create this friction of your combat level being high enough to use the equipment, but your crafting level won't allow you to make it, which is extremely frustrating and annoying by disrupting the core gameplay loop. And Hunted Mode doesn't affect crafting levels either.

And when I say they waste your resources, I mean in the stacks. Even if you used bombs in Woodworking, you would need 16.7 stacks of royal bug blood to go from level 90 to 103, and another 7 stacks of it to go from 100-103.

16.7 STACKS WITH XP BOMBS!!!

And no, you can't just use higher tier ingredients because they're much rarer and more expensive. So you're going to definitely bankrupt yourself by trying.

If you still feel uncomfortable after all that, please consider this:
I don't mean to vilify anyone who does like professions right now. All I have ever simply asked is that we can all enjoy them. Because the economy isn't just about a very select group of people; it includes everyone. So please, if you enjoy professions, let others enjoy professions like you have.

Crafting Baseline Sheet:


Ingredient Revamp Sheet:

 

Some really excellent ideas here! I'll go into more depth once I've had a good think about some of them :) The static SP ID's is 100% necessary though. I can't see why it's not in the game anyway!

 

The crafting levels one will mess with craftsman/ironman runs, unless I'm misunderstanding your suggestion. I would prefer a system that encourages but doesn't enforce the use of one crafting profession.

 

Oh, I guess just make an exception for craftsman/ironman runs then? Especially since you can't toggle craftsman/ironman once you've already created the class.

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Edit: Wait, craftsman also includes quest items, so maybe it would still be fine and it would add an extra layer of challenge then? I mean Champion Armor is pretty good.

Edit 2: Nvm, I made an exception for Craftsman in the last edit.

 

I don't understand this point. Is that really an advantage when you can practically only do 1 or 2 crafting professions anyway? I guess a disadvantage is that you can't switch over if you don't end up liking your profession midway, but does anybody drop a crafting profession midway and level up another crafting profession? You could still just make another class and speedrun the first half of the game; it's not that hard and it's about as time consuming as to level up the other crafting profession. And I don't see how this changes or outweighs forced crafting either.

 

it only includes items you need to wear FOR quests, not quest rewards (check out IC-C which is the ultimate challenge run)

even if you figured it out, just putting it here for future readers to not get misled

 

Thank you!

 

First bump

 

Another bump

 

Here comes some feedback:

Spoiler: Item changes

Item Changes

Fully elemental powder conversion
I fully agree with additive powder conversion.

Non-randomized health, damage & durability.
I know you know this, but it's important to not that as of right now, the health, damage & durability are all random within a lvl range. A lvl 105 dagger can have worse damage & durability than a lvl 104 dagger. I agree that these should be tied to their level and that each level should individually be chooseable. I'd keep the level automatically selected to craft the same way it currently is, at the highest level you can with the current material but pretty much agree with everything here too.

No damage bonus from powders as ingredients.
People being able to get through the water defense of the eye with high damage bows is not an issue in my eyes and powders are currently in quite a healthy place I think. They are used quite often because they are A: the only thing that boosts the base damage for the weapon and B: The only thing that offers elemental conversion for the weapon.
If other ingredients filled those niches, they would be used less. They're mostly used because of a lack of better options, not because they're great when you compare them with the other ingredients people eactually use.

(Choosing) Damage Range
I think that an added button in the menu which has no use in the other professions will look a bit off. Also, if there's no DPS increase with bigger damage range, people will objectively want the lowest damage ranges for consistency. So I don't think that this is the way to go.
A way to do this which I would like is if there were ingredients which give modifiers to max and minimum damage. Like how currently a T6 earth powder adds 20 (for those who don't know, Powders don't add the damage they say they do. It's (min+max)/2, in the case of T6 earth that's (18+22)/2=20) earth damage to both minimal and maximum damage, except an ingredient that gives -50 minimum damage and +100 maximum damage. (Just eyeballling numbers here.)

Attack Speeds
Choosing between Slow/Normal/Fast is something I definitely favor. There's an asterisk for the other attack speeds.
The reason I think they limited the attack speeds isn't just base melee damage boosting from raw melee and powder damage bonus. But also for a big part tierstacking on super fast weapons to later cancelstack with armor and accessories.

When reading this part, I am a bit confused. I assume that you're talking about the main attack neutral damage ID like on sharp tooth.

but when you craft a weapon with the Razor-Sharp Toot, the weapon doesn't get 25 minimum raw melee damage and 75 maximum raw melee damage, it gets a number. Let's say, 60 raw melee damage. It's not a range anymore whilst on the weapon. So there's no minimum and maximum raw melee damage, I'll assume that you're talking about the possible range the weapon can get, not what the weapon WILL get.
I think that this is a great solution and might even make it possible to create crafted heavy melee weapons.

Anyway, With this change something like the following will be possible when slapping 6 fighting sticks. (It'd have 162 durability)

And, well, a super fast weapon with +6 tier attack speed is quite insane for cancelstack. This isn't even including the 3 extra slots you're talking about. And obtainables do not share this problem because there's no obtainable as insane as this. Skien's Madness and overdrive come the closest with at best super fast with 3 tiers of extra attack speed.

I honestly prefer being able to choose a weapons attack speed to be super fast/slow over having attack speed bonus ingredients, but if this change goes through, there should be a huge nerf to attack speed ingredients to counteract this.

Powder Slots
I see what you're trying to do here, but I don't like it. Due to how unvalued Powder slots on armor are, people will just go for more health. Five powder slots by base rather than the current three completely undermines the point I think you were trying to make for the water bows for no longer being able to get through the water defense of the eye. But I already disagreed with that point so it's no reason to disagree here.
I disagree because there's a massive difference between a super fast weapon with powders and a super slow weapon with powders. For reference, each Powder in a super fast weapon (4hits/second) is 8x as effective as a powder in a super slow weapon (0.5 hits/second) So use that as a tool to balance out the difference between the two. Three slots for fast/normal/Slow, five for very slow/super slow and two for very fast/super fast. I still say at least two because powder specials are fun.
More or fewer powder slots could also be something that ingredients change, though I'm not sure if that's technically possible.

Spoiler: Crafting changes

Crafting Changes

9 Crafting Slots
I'll go over each of your points one by one.
1. It allows for more IDs to be placed on crafted armor and weapons. This is one of the weakest aspects of crafted armor and weapons compared to their equivalent obtainables. You can currently only get 2 or 3 decent IDs out of a crafted item, which is better than nothing but pales into the comparison the number of IDs most mid to endgame obtainable items have.

Whilst this is true in theory, in practice people will still only get the 2 or 3 decent IDs they care about. It'll just be 16/4s mana regen instead of 12/4s.

2. It gives the player more flexibility and freedom build-wise.

This is a good argument imo.

3. There are more possbile synergies with ingredients with effectiveness, boosting the potential and creativity of builds.

Ingredient effectiveness is fundamentally balanced around the 3x2 Grid. I.e. Boosters to left and right have bigger effects than boosters above and below. Over the grid effectiveness changers have been balanced around effecting 5 other igredients. Not 8. When working with ingredient effectiveness you'll notice that it's alot easier to get +99% ingredient effectivesness than it is to get +>100% ingredient effectiveness. This is because +100% is a huge breaking point for 1/4s or 2/4s mana regen and steal as well as attack speed bonusses. If i.e. Borange fluff would be +13% effectiveness to all ingredients rather than +12% it'd be used in MANY more items. Ingredient effectiveness, as it is, can not exist in a 3x3 grid. All ingredient effectiveness items would have to get majorly nerfed. (This includes vertical only ones like plasteel plating due to them having more interactions with horizontal ones like obelisk core.)

Also, creativity isn't born from having an excess of options. It stems from being limited in what you can do. The fact that so many ingredient effectiveness boosters add up to 99% means that I've had to look in many different directions to get something akin to what I wanted to create. The 3x2 grid allows for plenty of creativity.

4. Since powders no longer give bonus damage as ingredients, it helps crafted weapons be on the same footing as obtainables and gives people more people room to convert their damage to elemental. You would use half of your ingredient slots to convert 100% of your damage otherwise since it takes at least 3 crafting slots.

If there were to be five powder slots like you want, full conversion would be possible that way, too. The extra slots simply won't be used just for the conversion except in extremely niche cases.

5. There are 48 different parameters you can have in an ingredient (IDs, durability, sp reqs, effectiveness, etc.). If you were to create enough ingredients to cover all possible combinations of positive 2 parameters (excluding durability), you'd get 1081 different ingredients alone. If you wanted to have a combination of 1 negative and 1 positive parameter, you'd get 2209 ingredients.

As you can see, the more IDs you have, you'll have exponentially more unique combinations. Which can't be anywhere near satisfied with the mere 333 ingredients for armor and weapons we have at the moment. So one can't just easily add more ingredients with multiple IDs. Now not all of these combinations are noteworthy, but it still demonstrates how the current system severely limits your freedom and build-making.

The 3x2 system does limit freedom relative to a 3x3 system, but the amount of 'noteworthy' combinations will be about the same. Big number doesn't mean better here.

6. It's closer to the vanilla crafting GUI and is symmetrical. Not important, but still a perk :)

To be fair, I do like that.

----
All in all, despite my negativity there, I think that with the right ingredient revamp, it'd be better than the 3x2 grid. Having said that, I don't think it's worth either the work or the amount of complaints from the people who have crafted things that are now broken or completely out of the meta. Having said that, I have some stuff to argue about your ingredient revamp.

ingredient revamp.

• Make most items unique and distinct (No longer having 5 defense sp ingredients for armoring in the first 20 levels, but no other sp ingredients, or higher level worse items like Bat Ear.

I read this as "Don't make too many items that fill the same niche and don't make items that are objectively worse than some at lower levels." The first part I agree with so long as each niche isn't filled yet at every level. (which it isn't) and the second part I just agree with unless it makes in-world sense why something is objectively bad. (I'm pro joke items)

• Exclusive IDs to obtainables such as Spell Cost are now available in ingredients (Only in the late game).

Only if they have high downsides.

• Actual skill point ingredients *Soft Silk sweats nervously*

• Pure ingredients, i.e. weak Tier 0 ingredients with 1 ID. This is to help achieve as many combinations as possible

As many combinations as possible isn't a benefit if those combinations suck. I'm for 'pure' ingredients that only have one ID. But don't make them for the purpose of having it no matter how useless.

• Nerf skill points across the board

Necessary for skill point requirements. But even without those, skill points are currently very powerful. Mainly mythical hoof and the scribing aura's come to mind. But also Soft Silk and alike. I want this.

• Fill in missing niches or IDs such as exploding for Tailoring

Yeah

• Give ingredients more professions i.e. most tailoring ingredients also include armoring and vice-a-versa. Same goes with weapons. I honestly don't know why there are arbitrary profession restrictions, especially for weak items. It just severly handicaps build potential, especially since there aren't enough ingredients already to cover most niches. And it unintentionally makes some professions better than others like with Woodworking.

Hell no.
There's a difference between the professions for very good reasons. For the more powerful ingredients you don't want rings with effects as powerful as you can get on boots. You don't want food with effects as powerful as potions except they last an hour. The 'weak' items don't matter as much, but they are in a certain profession for flavor reasons. It absolutely and 100% intentionally makes some professions better than others.

• Ingredients in the early game are useful *cough* elemental defense % *cough*

Don't first start vouching for filling all niches and then throw shade against elemental defense %.
Also, ingredients are useful in the early game. Crafted early game items are basically always better than their 'obtainable' counterparts. Few people use them because you level so quickly in the early game that you're past them very quickly, not because they are useless.

Ingredient tier Capping
My first reaction said no, but...
I...
I quite like this idea.
This is the exact kind of restriction I was talking about when I said that creativity comes from restrictions.
I also like that it's a soft-cap penalizing you for not adhering to the rule.
I do wonder how you can properly tell others how this works since it seems overly complicated for an invisible system. But I like it as a system.

Static skill points
Honestly, having skill points still degrade based on durability but allowing everything to be used as if it had max skill points is such a good solution I'm ashamed I didn't come up with it. I already said I agree with an overall nerf to skill points in crafted items.

Crafting levels (cont)
I think you're right in people disliking this more than the 9x9 grid ;p

I also think that professions are needlessly restrictive to people who don't want to do many MANY hours of work for basically no benefit. (I say this as someone with lvl 100+ in each profession.)
The way I understand what you're saying here is that for one profession, chosen upon creating the class, your combat level will functionally be what is your crafting level for that profession in the current system. So you can always craft stuff for that profession at your combat level.

The only use for getting that crafted level up is to be able to start crafting other stuff. You will only get a benefit once you reach lvl 110.
First off I don't understand why 110. Max useful crafting is 103. Max combat lvl is 106. But that completely excludes any possibility of using crafted stuff other than your profession before the very end of the game.
How about only being able to get a crafting level in other crafting professions for up to as high as your chosen crafting profession is. This doesn't restrict you to a single profession and gives an incentive to level your chosen profession.

Also,

Crafting is NOT the part of professions that make you feel like you're wasting time and resources.
Gathering is the part that makes your feel like you're wasting time. Crafting is the pay-off, seeing that XP number go up as you craft and getting a few LE from the items you just crafted IS the payoff until you're able to create the great items you started doing it all for. Gathering is repeating the same task over and over again whilst watching something on another screen. Wondering wether or not you can still craft those few stacks away in the 13 minutes of bombs remaining is the exciting part of professions. (yeah ik it sounds sad.)

The gathering professions feel a lot worse to do for me.

Edit: oof I fully understand why this thread was in full spoilers now

 

The Eye is supposed to be the final and hardest fight in the game (at the moment). It shouldn't be soloed in a few minutes. So I don't understand how adding more base damage is balanced, especially when you take into account raw melee, attack speed modifiers, and higher attack speeds. For example, if you have 60 strength and your powder slots filled entirely with Tier VI Earth powders, a crafted bow with normal attack speed, level 97-99, and Tier 1 materials does 892 DPS, the Hive Bow does 1,478 DPS, and a crafted bow with normal attack speed, level 97-99, Tier 1 materials, and 6, Tier 3 Earth powders does 1,971 DPS. With just 6 Tier 3 Earth powders you can increase your DPS by over 120% at the cost of 60 SP, which is absolutely insane! Keep in mind that none of these bows use their powder slots and the crafted bows are made with Tier 1 materials. So imagine how much more busted that damage would be if you used your powder slots, elemental damage %, higher material tiers, AND all the other factors I mentioned previously?

You do more DPS. For example in the sheet, if you have a base damage of 100, at a range of 20 you'd do 205 DPS and 246 DPS for a range of 100 at normal attack speed. At higher or lower attack speeds, the base damage would be modified as before, so you'll always be doing the same percentage more or less depending on the range you selected.

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I was, my bad. I'll definitely fix that.

That's why I also want to do Tier capping. You would only be able to use at most 2 fighting sticks since from the Crafting Baselines Sheet, using 3 fighting sticks would give you -750 durability (-125 * 6), which is more than the maximum durability you could ever have. I would probably make fighting stick Tier 3 too and maybe nerf it some more.

I completely forgot about this aspect. Thanks for catching it. Though I think I would still give Very Fast 3 powder slots, Fast 4, and any attack speeds slower 5 due to how even some Super Fast weapons have 3 powder slots.

While yes, it does counteract the other change, it only does so slightly. I already showed in the example how the DPS doesn't increase very much or relative to the Hive bow from crafted bows having 5 powder slots. You were never meant to have 6 powder slots on a weapon, let alone 9 (6 crafting slots + 3 powder slots) even if that means giving up your IDs on the weapon. And remember, you can place 6 powders as ingredients no matter what the attack speed is of your weapon. Which creates even more busted options with tier stacking. Whereas you can limit the number of powders by modifying the number of powder slots based on the attack speed like you mentioned.

 

Edit: Nevermind about the example with the crafted bows and the Hive bow. I forgot to take into account the 60 strength requirement. Though the whole attack speed Tier stacking still applies though.

 

Not quite

This is why; it'll heavily penalize you if you try to spam the same ingredient to get an overpowered stat, as with the fighting stick example earlier.

That's my plan; it's also why I skipped over Bob's Tear because I wasn't quite sure yet how or even if I should change it.

Agreed; pure ingredients will be mostly for the low levels (1-20), with the exception of "raw" IDs such as melee, spell, poison etc. since the baseline of these IDs increases dramatically across level ranges. Beyond that it'll be mostly combinations.

I didn't mean in the sense that most ingredients would be available for all or most professions; just that ingredients that are in similar professions would be grouped together. So again, most items that are in tailoring would also include armoring and vice-a-versa, BUT NOT jeweling, weapons, potions, or foods. I was planning on actually removing professions from ingredients that shared dissimilar professions. In the Ingredient Revamp Sheet under "New Ingredients", Blood of the Nivla Beauty now no longer includes scribing, Lion Fang only includes jeweling, and Thin Quill only includes scribing. I was also planning on making different ingredients for poison for weapons and armor since their baselines are way different in the mid to late game.

So I can see why weapon professions should be separate from armor professions or from consumable professions, but I don't see why something for Tailoring should be separate from Armoring or Weaponsmithing should be separate from Woodworking. I don't think Weaponsmithing should be better than Woodworking or vice-a-versa because you shouldn't be punished with the class you choose since they already have their inherent advantages and disadvantages.

I thought crafting levels also went up to level 110 such as gathering professions.

I would love to do that instead, it's just that I am afraid the prof tryhards wouldn't accept it because then you'd only have to level up your crafting profession once to have access to all the crafting professions. Which would invalidate the progress of people who had to level up all of their crafting levels before to be able to craft everything. It's the same reason why I didn't just straight up remove crafting levels.

 

The eye can be soloed in a few minutes with more weapons than the crafted water bow. It's not something exclusive to crafted items and therefore no indication that an aspect of crafted items is better than it should be for balancing reasons.

That lvl 97-99 bow with T1 materials and 6T3 earth powders is also effected by 60 strength for the 1666 DPS. Which both increases melee damage and earth damage.
It's actually 909 DPS if you remove the strength. Here's the link: https://wynndata.tk/s/2rk1y7
The version without powders has 773 DPS. (https://wynndata.tk/s/0r4e9s) That's about 17.6% extra DPS. Not 115%. Do not underestimate the power of skill points.
Taken to its full extreme with a weapon people would actually use, powdered FFT for courage and damage (The powders don't show on the weapon but you can see that the damage has no neutral damage left so it is in the DPS.) the difference would be between https://wynndata.tk/s/sn2uoa, using all T6 powders and an elephelk trunk for dura as well as T3 ingredients and https://wynndata.tk/s/1yms7g with everything the same except no ingredients used.

That makes 1382 DPS vs 1193 DPS.
That's a difference of almost 16% when using lvl 103-105 T3 bows and all 5 kinds of T6 powders for as far as the base damage goes.
For reference, +16% melee and spell damage is what the Enhanced Potential Microchip can give you at max rolls. That's 1 ingredient rather than 6 and it uses a whole lot less durability. Yes, +16% base damage is better than +16% spell and melee for the sake of other items with extra% damage but you get my point.

So no, I do not think that the damage bonus for crafted weapons on powders is overpowered.

I actually didn't think about that. Not feeling too much like checking rn but there might be some really cool recipe which uses several of the different attack speed bonus ingredients, flipping the others over. Especially in a 9x9 grid. Which would keep the same problem, I might work on an op attack speed recipe using ALL of the suggestions sometime later. I'll even treat fighting stick as T3 for the sake of it.


QUOTE="Dr Zed, post: 3297854, member: 38235"]due to how even some Super Fast weapons have 3 powder slots.[/QUOTE]
These weapons were balanced around being powdered. So would crafted weapons be, but crafted weapons should also be balanced around each attack speed and seeing how one super fast powder slot is worth 8 super slow powder slots, that means that you'd have to nerf the base damage of the super fast weapons quite a bit relative to how much you nerf the super slow ones.
Probably still doable.

Empire builder is kinda a joke wand but has 8 powder slots. Singularity has 15 powder slots and is amazing. There is precedent for having enough powder slots for a special + all elements.

True, but.

With some ingredient effectiveness and flipping of Panda king's crown this can be more than 12/4s mana regen.
Than again, it'd force people to use worse ingredients for the same purpose so perhaps people would instead opt for a more all-round good item and pick a great item from several niches. That'd also not be possible post ingredient-effectiveness nerf. So you might just be right.

That seems more reasonable. But I still have my doubts.

for 'obtainables' some items are very extreme in their stats and having two of these kinds of items will make a build very broken.
For example, Necrosis has WAY more poison than any item in the game. So if you were to add a pair of boots that has 4K poison, it'd be amazing with necrosis. But another helmet with poison can rival with necrosis without buffing poison on a whole an insane amount. No armor/accessory other than a helmet will ever get near as much poison as necrosis will. (Until they raise the level cap or something.)
Similairly, no item with amazing stats but very bad negative walk speed, below 100%, will ever get added to another place than the boots. Because if they were boots, their huge downside would be negated by statue. This is also why galloping spurs had to be boots, if it were anything else, it'd negate the downside of statue. Making that item 'free' to use. (AoR is an exception because it was necessary for the equippable health regen to not be an armor piece that gives too much HP and it also negates much more than just walk speed.)
These are extreme examples but they do show that there are differences between the armor pieces for obtainables.
As far as crafted items go, they can be used next to obtainables, so an Armouring ingredient can't go too far into extreme niches for both boots AND leggings. Vice versa for tailoring.

I'll admit however that this does not translate very well as armouring and tailoring are both kinda just as good at what they do. Just some of their best ingredients differ a tiny bit. Most of their best ingredient are even shared.

The big difference between woodworking and weaponsmithing is that the classes attached to woodworking are ranged and the classes attached to weaponsmithing are melee. But the difference between them isn't that big. The difference between the power level of the ingredients is one of the inherent advantages and disadvantages in my eyes. Just like how the baseline DPS is different.

Profession levels go up until lvl 132. But the last time gathering levels get something new to gather is at lvl 110 and you can craft the highest level stuff (with what you gather from lvl 110+) at lvl 103 crafting.

Seeing your response with "invalidate the progress", I think you misunderstood me.
I did not mean "Get one crafting profession up and be able to use every crafting profession until that level."
I ment "You have one main profession, this MUST be your highest level profession. You can only level other crafting professions up to the level of that profession".
No other professions come for free, you earn the right to do the other professions by doing the 'main profession'. Leveling all professions would be just as hard as it is now. A very tiny bit harder even because you'd have to make sure to keep one profession on top.

This'd also allow for craftsman to be used with the system rather than make an exception for it.

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On a side-note: If anything akin to this complete overhaul were to get in, what would you like to see happen to the already crafted items people own?

 

I'll give you that one since I did majorly mess up the calculations for that example.

I haven't gotten that far yet with ingredients with attack speed, though keep in mind that there are only 8 ingredients that modify attack speed and 3 of them are only for 1 consumable profession. I'll also make all of them Tier 3, so you'll only be able to use 1 of each ingredient since (-168 * 4) = -668 durability.

So do you want to do a the attack speed modifier like how I did for raw melee damage then?

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That's fair; that's why I have been having trouble with Tier 2 and Tier 3 ingredients. I want them to have powerful IDs and be essentially an archetype for a specific build. Like how Volatile Matter is an archetype for exploding builds.

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Ooh... I get it. I'll definitely do that then. That's a really good one; thanks!

 

This is a tricky one; on the one hand I would like to leave them alone to turn less people away and not make anyone invalidated by it. On the other hand, that doesn't solve the broken ingredients or combinations or ingredient spamming, and some IDs such as effectiveness need to change to fit in the 9x9 crafting GUI. It also would cause the value of older crafted items to jump through the roof. Which would be not only still be unbalanced, but it would be unfair for other players since now those items would be unobtainable. Plus I don't think it's currently possible to change ingredients without changing the items they are used in.

So what I'll try do to do is have most popular/endgame Tier 2 and Tier 3 items keep their purpose/niche (ex: Glimmering Coin will still have loot bonus), but modify them in some way to fit with the new system and be overall more balanced. It'll be mostly Tier 0 and Tier 1 ingredients that would get completely changed, especially in the lower to mid levels.

For example, in the early game there are a lack of SP ingredients for weapons and armor except for like defense for armoring. Which is kinda jarring given how obtainables from level 1 to 20 give skill points in all 5 elements. So I changed Soft Wools to skill point ingredients that give 2 SP in their respective element rather than elemental defense. Don't worry, I did the math, they have -38 durability each, so 4 of the same will give you -304 durability.

Boi, I'll give elemental defense so much shade that you couldn't even see it. And don't worry; I made "pure" ingredients with elemental defense %, just in the level 20-30 range. I just think it's much more reasonable to have access to skill points in the early game than it is to have elemental defense %.

Fair.

 

@Melkor I changed the crafting levels section, so I don’t know if you would want to give that another look.

 

Another bump

 

Another one

 

Long time no bump?