World Weapon Base Stats

One problem with crafting that I haven't seen many people talk about is that of the inability to customize an item's base stats. This is especially a problem with weapons (crafted armor health is op as it is, and consumables seem fine), where your dps is locked by the system, making it hard to craft anything like cataclysm or alcatraz, which are good because they have high dps/raw damage values that can be increased incredibly by +% damages. Yes, there have been discussions about being able to customize crafted weapon attack speeds further, but that was a specific branch of a bigger problem. I have a few solutions to this problem, so here we go:

Spoiler: different types of materials

One idea is that crafting materials could have different "traits". Basically, when you mine, say, a piece of dernic wood, you could get "heavy dernic wood", which could lower attack speed and increase damage of the weapon it's used for, "sharp dernic wood", which could slightly increase the damage of the weapon, "magical dernic wood" which increases the strength of ingredients, and so on (in addition to the quality of the material). Here's a list of all my ideas so far if you're interested:

Spoiler: material trait ideas

heavy -> -attack speed, +damage
sharp -> +damage
magical -> +ingredient effectiveness
light -> +attack speed, -damage
reinforced -> +durability, -damage
scorched -> -durability, +damage
hollow -> -durability, +attack speed
dense -> +durability, -attack speed
blunt -> -ingredient effectiveness, +damage
plain -> no change

The potency of the modifiers of the traits without downsides would be weaker to balance them out.

The main downside I see to this is that these various materials would clutter inventories, so this could be a way to reintroduce the refineries, where refining would give ingredients a trait.

Spoiler: different materials

This suggestion is similar to the previous one, except that instead of materials having different traits, there could be entirely different materials that have similar effects to the traits. For example, using bamboo instead of wood could decrease damage but increase durability. The big downside is that it will take a lot of effort to come up with all of the materials, not to mention actually adding the harvest nodes, but it would give players more control over the traits they want and add a whole new dimension to crafting.

Spoiler: ingredient modifiers

Another way to fix this problem is to either make ingredients that can modify the base stat of a weapon instead of an id, or make entirely new ingredients devoted to this purpose. For instance, -attack speed ingredients could actually modify the attack speed of the weapon rather than create an id for it, and +raw damage and +raw spell damage, when used together, could modify the base damage of the weapon. The major difference between what I suggested and the system that is currently in place is that base stats, especially base weapon stats, can be modified in many more ways and are used in different calculations than stats given by ids. This would be the simplest solution, but also the hardest to balance since crafting always has a way of stacking one id to oblivion.

Anyway, if you read this, I appreciate you taking the time to do so, and if you have any ways to improve my suggestion, please let me know in the comments.

 

I think adding more types of materials would make the system even more over complicated than it already is. 10 different material traits is just way, WAY too much to ask of a player to keep track of.

I thought the best way personally to solve this problem was to allow the player to choose the exact level (not range) and attack speed, and the base damage would then be calculated for each different level and attack speed, instead of randomly chosen. Then the player could modify the damage range of the weapon so you could have weapons that do 1-400 damage or something or 200-200 damage.