Remove Base Durability Scaling

So @Dondasch brought up something with the new Unicorn Horn - it's supposedly balanced out by its high durability requirement, but this is irrelevant when you just slap a bunch of low-level ingredients with small durability costs.

Ingredients are currently balanced by level in a multitude of ways, and in my opinion the compounding balancing factors are the source of many of the problems with balancing - every new balance change leads to another overpowered use.

One of these balances is durability - lower-level materials/ingredients have lower base durability/lower durability drawbacks, in general. Another is the ingredient limit - max one ingredient for levels 1-9, max two for levels 11-29, etc. The third is the general trend for ingredients to be more powerful at higher levels.

Notice how ingredients are balanced - because of the ingredient limit, higher level ingredients are often only slightly more powerful than lower-level equivalents with the same stats. For the same reason, lower-level effectiveness boosters can't ever really be balanced at-level, because of the ingredient limit. Decaying Heart is decent but not that strong at level 66, but becomes far more powerful at level 100. Bob's Tear literally has no use until level 30, because you don't get a slot below it until that point. These two things are, in my opinion, a major contributor to the weakness of lower-level crafted items relative to identifiables. The IM team can't have, for example, Feather of Grace give +4% to +5% walk speed, even though this might make it more balanced at-level for a 2 star ingredient, because this would make it far too powerful at endgame, as a no-req walk speed booster. One the other hand, balancing everything according to endgame would probably lead to Feather of Grace being nerfed, since it already invalidates many walk speed accessories just by slapping 6 of them.

Another example is Familiar Essence. Both are quest rewards of decent strength, not particularly overpowering at their level because you only have 1 or 2 ingredient slots. At level 100 though, you can just slap 6 Familiar Essence for +6/4s mana regen, since they only have -30 durability each - they're balanced for lower-levels, but this doesn't work too well at higher levels. That's why the IM team added -80% effectiveness, to try to prevent endgame usage of Familiar Essence (don't remember when exactly this happened, might even have been before release), but this opens up all sorts of avenues where people use Familiar Essence specifically for its flipping ability - which is why it got "nerfed" down to -40% now. All sorts of fixes are tried to prevent things like this, but they often also end up causing other problems.

(I ran through a few possibilities before settling on this particular fix, such as removing the ingredient slot limit at lower levels. I rejected that one because it opens up a lot of other problems - e.g. the low base stats like attack tier and mana regen are already hard to balance, and that change would only make it worse.)

Proposed solution:
Currently the base durability of crafted items increases with level - using level 10 tier 3 ingredients yields something like 160 base durability, while using level 100 tier 3 materials yields around 420 base durability. Ingredients correspondingly increase in durability cost at higher levels. I would suggest,
- Base durability doesn't change with level - e.g. Tier 1 ingredients always have base ~320, Tier 2 has base ~370, and Tier 3 has base ~420. Exact values aren't too important, I just picked those for convenience.
- Ingredient durability costs get changed so that they decrease at higher levels. For example, using the 320/370/420 bases above, Familiar Essence could have -150 durability, since at level 10 you can use it and one other item (perhaps... Paralyzing Spores, which might have -100 durability or something). Endgame items would have similar durabilities as they already do, being balanced for full slots and level 100 items. This method prevents Familiar Essence from being dangerously powerful at endgame, without having to mess with effectiveness and whatnot, which risks unexpectedly overpowered alternate uses.

Possible downside - This prevents lower-level ingredients from being as viable at higher levels, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. It would mean you can't use a Unicorn Horn and 5x low-level item of your choice for a high durability item with a ton of power, but it also means something like Large Lapis becomes essentially unusable at endgame (that said, note that Large Lapis is already durability-balanced for endgame use...).

 

Also I'd really like to know the reasoning for anyone who voted no. Always nice to improve.

 

Gonna have to correct this, you can actually use ingredients below bob's tear at level 10 (bad but not useless),

besides that, nice post.

 

Thanks for the correction. I'll have to test this out some more.

 

Yeah, if you put any ingredient then put another one, then remove the first one they don't shift down so you could even put 1 ingredient in the last slot.

 

Yeah, I wondered if that might be a problem, particularly at very low levels. Scaling the base durabilities something like A + B*(ingredient cap) would allow for the same baseline durability costs at all levels (maybe this is how it's already done, I haven't tested the base values in-depth myself).