World Evolving Items - A New Tier Of Items That Level Together With You.

The title speaks for itself. But I want to give more details.

[Evolving Items] would be a unique tier of item, rarer than a legendary item, but more common than a mythic. And like their name implies, Evolving Items can be upgraded over time and obtain better stats and IDs. An Evolving Item will start off with mediocre IDs, not much better than a Unique Item of the same level, however, with each stage of their growth, they become stronger and more comparative to a Legendary Item. In addition to growing stronger, they may also have a different lore and model once upgraded, for cosmetic purposes.

These items would look something like this.

Spoiler: Evolving Item

Evolving Items require experience to evolve, and will do so by leeching off your experience with an ID called "XP Drain". Some of these Evolving Items will have lower XP Drain, making it less of a hassle for you to evolve, but at the cost of requiring you to grind more to level your Evolving Item, and others will have higher XP Drain, so it will be easier to grow your weapon but less easy to level yourself up. The XP Drain will stop when the item has gained enough experience to reach the next level, or is already fully levelled up.

Before you can evolve an item, you have to fulfill a certain set of requirements. For example, an Evolving Item may require Soul Points and certain Refined Materials or Ingredients in addition to having sufficient experience, this would make Ingredients more valuable, as currently most people just dispose of them or sell them to the blacksmith, not even worth keeping in the bank.

Once this is done, the item is then brought to the item identifier, together with all the items required to upgrade it. When the item identifier sees that you have brought him an Evolving Item with all the necessary requirements (in your inventory) to evolve it, he will evolve your item (rather than re-identifying it) for you for a hefty fee (think identifying a couple of legendary items).

There are of course a few issues with this suggestion:

• Because they are rarer than legendaries, most players would only obtain a few unless they go out of their way to get one (loot running), meaning some might not even hear of this feature due to its rarity. Of course, it won't be as outrageous to obtain as Mythics are, but it is still a possibility nonetheless.
• Grind. In addition to draining your experience, an Evolving Item will also (probably) require some ingredients to upgrade, and the identifier will also demand emeralds too. The idea of requiring refined materials to upgrade your gear would sound pretty repugnant to most players, as the crafting system is already big enough of a grind.
• Adding a whole new tier of items means adding new mechanics (item identifier evolving, item has stats that can change, a new type of ID), as well as items within the item tier. If they could change lore and model based on their evolution stage/level, that means every item individually would automatically require more effort put into them, you could say that adding one Evolving Item requires thrice as much effort as a Mythic (?) or maybe only as much as a Set item (again, (?) because idk what kind of work goes into these things)

I got the original idea from some Chinese Animation (Quanzhi Gaoshou).

 

Honestly I love this idea alot
I think a few details could be changed or need to be further thought about but the concept as a whole I love it.

1: Forget using soul points to evolve cause the system has been total bs since 1.18

2: How rare exactly are these items? To my knowledge legendaries are a 1/1000 chance where as mythics are a 1/147000 chance (or so) so having these items be inbetween is kinda...eh. Like 1/2000 or 1/100000? kinda deal.

3: How long will these take to level? Mainly Because the leveling should go at a rate that feels similar to the leveling speed the player levels (ik you said it would be like crappy unique to better than legendary) as it feels like the weapon should level with you in a sense.

4: What level range are items? 10 levels id assume

 

Not sure why, I thought it would be a good idea for it to require soul points because they're supposed represent the essence of your soul? So putting soul points into it would be represented as putting a part of you into it. Since Soul Points regenerate, I thought it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but I'd like you to elaborate more on the total bs system part, I don't understand that part.

Perhaps somewhere around 1/12000, making it 12 times rarer to obtain than a legendary item. This shouldn't be an item people chance upon frequently but with a 1/12000 rarity most players would encounter them at least once, so it seems logical.

The item has to be manually evolved, but I think you're referring to the XP Drain. A good one will have a similar XP Drain to the player, but there might be those that could be either painstakingly slow to evolve or draining too much of your XP, so each one is a challenge to evolve.

Items would be able to evolve all the way until somewhere between level 70 to level 100 (depending on the item), so they'd still be viable in the endgame, the idea is that the item can grow together with you until it is no longer obsolete.

 

I see
I like this idea alot
And my rant with soulpoints is that you still can drop items at max soulpoints so it just seems like making a soulpoints draining system could be a bit of a pain to players.

 

Actually a good idea tbh.

Although soul points are bs indeed lol

 

Great idea, just elaborate a bit more in the future, like the specific drop chances and maybe a formula for the cost of identifying them.

 

I actually like this idea a lot. With some further expansion and clarifications, this could turn out to be amazing.

As others have mentioned, some kind of standard for making these items would help a lot. I'm no expert in item making (far from it), but I am fairly certain with some standardized way of creating these items, as well as clarity regarding how the items upgrade. Ex. is it just the base stats that increase? (health, dmg, defense), do the lvl 1 ID's stay static but increase in power, or does the item gain/lose ID's as it evolves? Also, does every item have exactly 15 stages of evolution, or does it change.

Another problem is what would happen when these items get replaced by higher-level items. Even if a lvl 45 item can get evolved all the way to be on par with level 80-90 legendaries, eventually it would be replaced by those higher legendaries. Furthermore, the player is leveling slower than average just to get this item to that level. This personally wouldn't be a dealbreaker (would incentivize its usage if it can last to even higher levels), but I can certainly see other people sad to realize they spent a hunk of their XP to level this kind of item, only to end up selling it for a better one down the road.

One solution to this could be to make these items exclusively for late game (starting level at 90-95 or so). Especially if they can be more powerful than a legendary of that level, it can serve as a true late game sink instead of trying to play the Wynn Lotto and get a mythic. However, this causes the problem of making the items themselves difficult to create and balance, since they have so many knobs to fiddle with and late game items generally have major balancing challenges as-is. I could continue on about benefits and drawbacks of a system like this, but I have rambled on enough.

Tl;dr I would love to see this in game, but it has quite a few kinks and technicalities to work out.

I could also be wrong about all this, like I said I'm no item expert. Take my arguments with a grain of salt.

 

Maybe you can add item(ingredient/other weapon/materials) as you level it up similar to uhhh a mod? the one you used in blood n bone mod pack, i think that might work and helps more than just flat stats increase.
Edit : tinker construct mod(ahhh good ol days)