Update Discussion: October 15, 2020

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Originally Posted by Citan

@Aionlasting - yeah, that's another smallish part of the equation I can work on. But I don't think it will ultimately prevent players from making ultra-death-nukes. It will just mean you need a really good tank in order to group up, and everybody else will be a paper-thin nuker. I don't think that fixes the fundamental issue of too much DPS.

Same with other combat mechanics like Rage management. They need fixing, but they seem a little bit ancillary to the core issue.

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Thank you sir. I appreciate the response. I can tell you as one whose played your game for five years now or more, this has always been a problem. Whether I was playing as a tank, or playing as a support class trying to heal a tank. The damage is just absolutely wonkey, there's no predictability or consistency to it, you're either dead or alive, and when the game is in that kind of state, why go for anything other than damage? Kill them within 3 seconds before you die yourself. If you offer players incentives to need tanks, support, and make monsters reflect those needs (atleast as far as group content goes), then its at least reasonable to surmise that players will begin to fill those roles and group content will be more than just nuke everything down or die.

Either way, I wish you luck sir.

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Originally Posted by Citan

My knee-jerk idea was to just reduce the total number of treasure mods you can have on at once. But now I'm thinking maybe a new mechanic that forces players to take a certain % of defensive mods. (Say 40%.) I don't have a mechanic for that in mind, but one easy approach would be to make all the mods on certain slots (say chest, legs, necklace) be defense/survival. That's awkward for pure DPS skills, though, because their defense/survival mods would be crappy. But maybe that's fine. Actually that's probably for the best.

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There is something in the game that can push defensive properties onto players: The base properties on white gear.
After all, everyone has some armor whether they like it or not.

Speaking as a tank player who tries to stack defensive mods rather than offensive ones, one of the strangest things about tank best in slot gear is that many pieces are lower level, simply because of their defensive base stats being superior to treasure effects. For example, the Hunter's Breastplate is one of the best tank chest pieces because it gives 10% fire and cold resistance which is incredibly good. It's impossible to get a level 80 hunter's breastplate in the game and therefore you'll have weaker treasure effects, but it doesn't matter because as a tank it's worth sacrificing the bonus damage from higher level mods because the elemental resist is so valuable and limited.

So if you want to try and push defensive effects onto players, my suggestion is this: Weaken the effects of random treasure effects, but improve the base effects of equipment, primarily defensively.

By doing so you will:
1. Weaken the maximum amount of damage players can do.
2. Push defensive bonuses onto players.
3. Shrink the power difference between poorly geared players and well geared players.
4. Improve the flexibility players have with defensive gear choices and tanking

The easiest way to do this would be to crank up armor numbers on player equipment across the board, but I think there is a lot of potential in equipment base stats. I would love it if the majority of equipment pieces had additional non-offensive bonuses to them, similar to the Hunter's Breastplate's resistances. For example, metal armor pieces could generally lower physical damage while cloth pieces could provide magical resistance. You could have inherent bonuses on armor for healing, damage reduction, regeneration, evasion, power regeneration, taunt, etc. which would give players lots of decisions to make on which piece of base equipment they want to have.

One big problem I have with some of the other suggestions (Like lowering the maximum number of mods on gear) is that it kind of takes away part of the fun with Project Gorgon. Yes the power difference between full yellows and reds is too much, but yellows are a goal that people want to work towards so they play more, and having more mods lets us be more flexible with our builds which is also a lot of fun. I think a suggestion like mine will make the game more fun by offering more choices to players to customize their build, while also giving a good excuse to nerf treasure effects so player damage is overall weaker.

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Originally Posted by Citan

The core problem from a player's POV can be summed up as "I don't need to defend myself if I can finish combat in 4.1 seconds". This playstyle means you are more than willing to drop defense in order to hit the magic DPS level where everything is trivial. And if something is higher, you just die.

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On elites:

The reason we don't build defense is because we can't in most situations. Even if I didn't want to get 3-4 shot, or stunned for 4 straight seconds, (or stunned for 4 seconds and killed in 3-4 shots from full health, it happens), I'm not given the ability to by the game. Consider adding % mitigation to dps skills (something like two 10% mods to physical/elemental mitigation would be worth considering, note that finishing blade mod).

Could this game handle a Status_resistance stat? That would be nice to deal with the crazy stuns these days. I'm not a programmer, but you could give players stun handicaps, so if you have a +4 stun handicap and a mob stuns you, it's like you were stunned for the fifth time (and give mob stuns diminishing returns like you did players). Speaking of, could you increase the minimum stun length on mobs? After you've used 3-4 stuns, they tend to be useless. I used to use stun to "evade" rage attacks (stun > big damage > kill mob / decrease rage), but you can't do that anymore because you don't know how long that stun will last.

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Originally Posted by Ranperre

On elites:

The reason we don't build defense is because we can't in most situations. Even if I didn't want to get 3-4 shot, or stunned for 4 straight seconds, (or stunned for 4 seconds and killed in 3-4 shots from full health, it happens), I'm not given the ability to by the game.

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Seconding this. Trying to build "Tanky" in this game isn't an option for the vast majority of skill combinations. End game enemies simply do too much damage while most skill lines don't have proper mitigation options to handle it even if the player wanted to build pure defense in the first place. Even some skills like Cow can't tank properly at end game despite having a lot of defensive options simply because a lot of their options aren't good enough.

Nerfing damage and adding regen and/or mitigation to the existing damage mods without changing the number of mods could be fun and it could also make the fights longer without more deaths. Maybe core/nice attacks add mitigation, normal attacks restore armor/hp etc... Making builds with much fewer damage mod slots sounds so much less fun to me. Could even add things like stun and knockback resist to the nerfed damage mods.

First, we had to add basic attacks to the lineup, then we had to have an even(ish) number of mods from both skill sets on our gear. Now, removing damage mods off 3 pieces of gear seems overly restrictive.

Protection from armor being sporadic at best and completely unreliable is something I talked about at length in older posts ( as well as suggestions of how to combat that). I even specifically mentioned how almost everyone would end up wearing cloth armor.

Same goes for speed of combat, aka monsters kill you so quickly that your only option in most cases is to build for extreme damage.

If it is easier to adjust ELITE monster stats then it is to nerf players, then please reconsider lowering their ( "their" being elites) damage by at least 30% ( but honestly I'd say more like half) and increase their health by a large margin( by large I mean like 500-1000%). For non-elites this doesn't really need to be done but still might make the game more interesting.

Throwing 15 monsters at a person or party at once just makes these issues even more insane, if you are dead set on that ( and to a lesser extent still keeping the multi-respawn mechanic) then consider using non-elite monsters that aren't each capable of 3 shotting a max geared player.

There will be very little build diversity until monsters stop being 3 hit killing machines. Being stunned for 20 seconds straight by trash is the same situation btw, if they hit you, you basically stand there and die. ( meaning the best way to combat this is to kill them before they can hit you, which works but isn't really fun).

You may want to re-read my essay length posts from the past on this subject. I haven't played in I think about a year now though I'm unsure exactly, but I still loved this game and still read the forums.

if you actually did this, I might even download it again ... but in the end it's your game, if i was so smart I'd have made my own right ... but I do still want to help, so take that how you will.

At the end of the day I'd like to see a game that can still be fun without being forced into meta damage or bust builds. My original builds were NOT damage builds btw, they were sustain ( sustain was FUN btw )... the increase to incoming damage made sustain nearly impossible though , and took away the fun. ( to be clear this increase to which I refer isn't just limited to single mob hits, it's also the amount of mobs you fight at once in most cases).

Anyways, rant over. How have you folks been? I miss this community.

Some great points and observations have already been made on the topic of rebalancing.

I wanted to echo the idea that building defensively doesn't reward a player compared to building offensively. When I make a build and sacrifice damage mods to become tanky, I will go from surviving 5 hits to surviving 8 hits. As the current system stands, that means surviving from 5 seconds to 8 seconds.

The issue lies that with a build that is sacrificing mods for defense, I die within 8 seconds. The fix (albeit not what is wanted from a development standpoint) is to max a DPS build capable of killing everything in 4.1 seconds, and taking my chances that the 5th mob hit wont kill me before I kill them.

This system is set up on almost a rock paper scissor method of battle, and as solo play is concerned, it's not that fun. The current tactic that works in all situations is to be ranged, and never let the monster get close enough to hit you, while modding out for max DPS. The current "tactics" for handing big groups, and high level elites as a solo player is to sort of exploit the existing limitation on how you can AVOID taking damage altogether, by running, using evasion, and sometimes rage management.

Nobody wants to be nerfed, and I do not believe that the current system is without merits.

The things this system does RIGHT are the rewards of crafting, and rolling max enchanted gear. When you do get the build you want, it feels rewarding, and it's fun to talk shop about the whole process with other players.

I believe mitigating the mods available on gear isn't the solution. Some people WANT to play straight DPS, or at least have the option for one of their builds to do that, and I would hate to see dps builds Pidgeon-holed to one or two combinations because of mod limitations based on best in slot for chest. That would feel like taking away toys, and in my opinion, would remove some of the best parts about the current combat system.

Top Damage combinations are completely contested. There are powerful builds, and knowledgeable players, but I have never seen a consensus on what is top DPS/Meta. Fire/Ice is a very strong combination, and I've seen it played at least 5 different, very effective ways. I've seen Fire/Staff rival it, I've seen Fox/Priest, Warden/Mentalism, Bard/Druid, Sword/Psych, Archery/Ment all do similar feats. It is very very rare in my experience to see a game reach a balance like this. I understand this is not the balance in question, the concern is how strong that top tier is. I hope a solution is found that keeps the best of all options available.

-Suggested Solution
What I have seen mentioned in this thread, in previous threads, and thoughts for balance I have had myself; is to extend the length of combat. A lot has to go into the balance of it all, but the low hanging fruit is Extending mob HP, by a LOT, and reducing the damage mobs deal. Perhaps lengthening the combat refresh to 45 seconds would balance this concept. It would force players to rely on heals, or healing mods, and overall would give a lot more gameplay hours to leveling up, farming for gear, resources, etc. Perhaps even encourage more group-play for efficiency sake.

I trust the development decisions. I love this game, and I understand this is a discussion, and I am grateful that Citan asks for and considers the opinion of the players.

I've thought about it a bit more and reread the posts carefully. The biggest issue I think actually is just the lack of ability to tank. Only a couple of skills even have access to any level of % based mitigation that actually allows you to survive monster attacks. The base problem comes more down to the fact that flat mitigation as well as player hp/armour scales linearly while mob damage, mob hp/armour and player damage all scale exponentially. % mitigation and evasion are the only tanking things that scale well enough. This means your options for tanking are incredibly limited. I actually think that right now, groups with a good tank are better than all dps groups. The biggest issue is that a tank is not useful until they have a completed build AND it's required that they use a very specific set of skills in order to be useful. If they lack any one element then it doesn't matter if they can get 99% of the aggro of a dps player, if it's not over 100% they're useless and just function as a worse dps player. Similarly even if they can get aggro, if they don't have all their damage mitigation, they will just die too quickly for it to be worthwhile. Additionally, a good tank is much less useful to a weak group than a good dps, so players are naturally drawn to dps. This then extends even further to support, where a good support is only valuable if there's a good tank, and the good tank is only valuable if there's good dps. This is what causes most of the groups to become dps only, even when actually I think the optimally constructed group right now is 1 tank, 1 support and 4 dps. Most players in the process of making a tank or support build find themselves to be useless in groups while they still develop their builds and so end up switching or quitting.

Rather than add % mitigation to more skills (or in addition), how about % max hp or % armour mods. Currently it is possible to achieve stats such as 1300 hp and 1500 armour as a player, but it requires you to commit your entire build to it in order to achieve it, meaning you then lack the mitigation required to go alongside it. With this, player hp/armour would be able to scale much better and make tanking more viable. Making tanking easier means a player wouldn't have to go to Yaffy level dedication to their build before they become useful to a group. This then extends to more groups with tanks and thus more supports feeling useful too. Another option is to make the flat mitigation scale better too, or even the flat max hp provided by skill level and such.

I still think a large nerf is necessary to the damage mod numbers in general, but put it alongside providing more tanking options and it might just work. I don't so much like the idea of being forced into certain mod choices and I don't think all dps groups being able to do content is a bad thing either.

I liked the heart mobs. I went in thinking the last one was going to be as hard as Zuke and was pleased that he dominated my unsuspecting group. This happened because his HP was so big refresh timers meant something.

To the balance topic:
Warden is a good example of a skill set where every offensive skill competes for the same slots. When making a build with warden, I kind of find that frustrating. It’s as if there is damage left on the table but I know that’s not the case.

I’m in favor of the solution where elite mobs get rebalanced to have 10x the HP. I think this could also be met with major armor changes. I’ve heard player complaints that armor does not really matter even if you have ~1500 armor and 800 hp, and they’re mostly right. Maybe for every ~200 armor the hp depletion ratio changes? Right now, my understanding is, if you have 800 armor and are hit for 400 damage (after mitigation), 200 goes to health and 200 to HP. I think changing this law with higher armor values and increasing the armor value of leathers and plate could help. The idea is that the HP:armor ratio of cloth users at 80 is the same (roughly 4 health for 3 armor), leather could be the same, and plate should be around 1 health to 3 armor or 4(so at 80, someone with 800 hp would have 2400 armor, and the make believe 800-post mitigation damage might deal like 50 health: 750 armor or something). Massively higher armor values would also make armor heals more significant.

I also agree that a lot of changes need to happen to the white stats of gear. What’s so hard is you don’t want the 95% type of groups to just be unable to compete content. Nerfing damage mods and buffing support should happen but the “how” is where everyone is going to disagree. I’d like more debuff options and healers probably need a reactive(you get hit + heal for X amount) /rune/ward type of heals.

Another method I think could work would be to add universal mods to gear, and every skill can roll “signature support does X” on ring, or “first aid and armor patching is less likely to consume materials” etc and make gear more likely to drop (but not roll) with these mods. For example, lets say I’m running sword and shield and something yellow drops, they see there is are tons of these universal mods on it but its named like “Universal Mod Shield: Signature Support bla bla bla” . I think this would push the player in the direction of transmuting in general because that’s what really divides the top players. The idea behind the universal mods is that the pure support builds don’t add enough compared to the high damage dealers, and this could close the gap.

Immunity wise—this has not been mentioned yet, but I’m in favor of some changes. I am on board with demons being immune to physical and any immunity on individual and optional bosses. I don’t think I like how common trash is immune to cold in WT, which makes the people running ice magic feel like they’re being carried through half of the dungeon. To be clear, I’m fine with ~60% immunities on trash, and 100% on named but not trash totally immune to elemental damage.

I like to offer the following series of wild proposals (I specialise in those). I propose the following as a thought experiment, if all these proposed systems are implemented in game, how do you guys think it will work? How do you predict the players will behave in game (both hardcore and casual players)? What intricacies of the game have I overlooked? Feel free to offer your thoughts/criticisms.

Warning, epic wall of text incoming.

Of course all the numbers I offer below is purely a blind stab in the dark and subject to balancing adjustments.

Gist of the proposals

It has been stated by Citan that the aim is to have three mods per piece of equipment, lets just make it so that all equipments pieces have three skill mods, regardless of colour/rarity. The colour/rarity will instead increase the effect of the mods. So for example, a white/normal tier item will have 50% of the effectiveness of a gold/legendary tier item, a green tier item 60%, a blue tier item 70%, red tier item 80% and purple tier 90%. Max enchanted items will offer additional effectiveness, say 10% extra for a total of 110% for a gold item, instead of an additional mod. Equipments will automatically have a generic mod and an endurance mod, and those will scale according to the rarity of the item in the same way as skill modifiers.

This will mean that a level 10 gold tier item will have perfect damage modifiers, why would anyone upgrade their equipment? That leads us to my second proposal. The level requirement of items will instead increase the intrinsic properties of the item. For example, an full suit of armour with level requirement of 10 will give only 100 total points of armour, and only gives very slight amount of combat refresh. A full suit of armour with level requirement of 80 will give 800 points of armour and combat refresh appropriate for a level 80 character.

Amulets and rings, main hand and off hand items will all need to have equivalent upgrades accordingly. So for example a level 10 sword might only offer +10% increased slashing damage, but a level 80 sword has + 24% increases slashing damage. There are already amulets in game that gives increasing stat that are divided into tiers, for example the amulet of max health +10 is the first in a series that goes up to +30. What I propose is that for example, the level 10 version of amulet of max health gives +10 health, but the level 80 version gives +80 health.

I further propose that we add more intrinsic stats to armour pieces to differentiate between metal/organic/leather/cloth armour pieces. The current system is that the different armour pieces have relatively small differences in absolute armour value (in my opinion), but a big difference in combat refresh values. I propose that we add another stat to the armour pieces, metal armours grant extra taunt, leather armour grant evasion, cloth armour grant negative taunt, and organic armour grant reflect damage. These all exist in game currently in some form but I propose they are made uniform so that all metal armour grant bonus to taunt, all leather armour grant evasion, etc. An alternative which can be combined with the above suggestion is to make the full set boni (bonuses) stronger. So wearing three pieces of metal armour will grant + 50% taunt, to incentivise wearing mostly one type of armour to fulfill a particular role.

Augmentation will still exist and remain a way of adding an additional skill modifier onto equipments, so that you can get a maximum of 4 mods. The effectiveness of the mod you apply through augmentation will match the tier of the item you extracted it from, rather than the tier of the item you applied it to. So to extract a full 100% effectiveness mod you have to sacrifice a gold item to get it, and to make a best in slot max enchanted 4 mod piece of equipment with maximum effect on all the mods (110%), you have to extract the mod from another max enchanted gold item.

Transmutation will also still exist in game as it does now, and you can obviously use it to roll non-gold tier items to get the mods you want.

I have an even wilder proposal to make, recently Citan tried the idea of allowing us to upgrade a lower tier item to the max level. I didnt get the chance to try this feature but the idea is incredibly appealing to me. I somewhat dislike the idea of everyone at level 80 looking the same because they are wearing the same armour. There are so many interesting art assets in the game that it is a shame that so many of them are not seen at higher levels (I personally love the aesthetics of the knight armour and helm). There is also the issue of many low level items with excellent intrinsic mods, armour pieces with good elemental resistance, and low level amulets with excellent damage modifiers. I once found an amulet in yeti cave that added 10% to electricity damage, which would be best in slot for particular builds except it only spawned with level 40 mods.

I propose we introduce the ability to upgrade an item to the next level (in 5 level increments) using the breakdown product of augmentation. For example, you can upgrade a level 50 sword to level 55 using a recipe that consumes 100 medium main hand beads. But to upgrade it from level 60 to 65 will consume 100 large main hand beads. Taking it a step further, potentially we can upgrade item tiers as well for phlogs. For example we can upgrade a blue tier level 80 sword to red tier by paying 200 quality phlogistons, but upgrading a red tier to purple will cost 500 phlogistons and upgrading a purple tier item to gold will cost 1000 phlogiston. This allows an alternative way to getting gold tier items for players who do a lot of soloing, but it is less efficient than just straight up farming and getting it as a drop.

These are my predictions on how such system will affect player in game behaviour and decision making.

Pure DPS and support character that has reached level 80 for the first time will try to continue using their level 70 gear, which they have invested time an resources into transmuting/augmenting. It will provide them with equivalent damage and healing as level 80 gear, but it will not give as much survivability or sustainability (due to lower combat refresh). There is still the incentive to replace what they have with level 80 gear, but only once they found level 80 gear that matches the rarity of what they have.

Tanking characters by contrast, will try to upgrade to level 80 gear as soon as possible for the greater survivability. They are willing to use red/purple tier gear because it provides them with acceptable damage output to hold aggro (because they are wearing metal armour and have a bonus to taunt, and they possibly also have mods that grant extra taunt), but they will still try to get level 80 gold tier gear to provide extra damage.

Players who have builds that allow a degree of flexibility (like me!) have an incentive to have multiple sets of gear. I might have a unoptimised set of level 80 gear that allows me to be a tank, I can hold aggro well because of the bonus to taunt I can get from metal armour; but I still have my level 70 perfectly rolled gold tier gear. If I don't feel like being the tank today, I can just slap on my old level 70 gear, I can do top tier damage but I have to be careful that I don't outdamage the tank and draw aggro from the tank. I can still contribute to the team in my old level 70 gear and have a good time.

A player who first hit level 80 area after grinding his way through level 70 content will face some hard choices when upgrading their gear. Lets say they have perfectly rolled and augmented level 70 gold equipment, that are not max enchanted. They find a purple level 80 chest piece, it provides more armour and combat refresh than their existing equipment, but it does less damage (assuming you invested the phlogistons into rerolling it) and it has one less mod, so it is not an upgrade and it is placed into storage. They eventually find a level 80 gold chest piece. They spend the phlogistons to reroll it until they get all three mods to be the ones they want, and they dig out the old purple chest piece they rejected earlier, extract a mod from it, and apply it to the gold chest piece. But the mod extracted is only at 90% effectiveness because it came from a purple item, so they will need to get another gold chest piece, so that they can upgrade that final mod to 100% effectiveness. They can sacrifice their old level 70 gold chest piece to get that augmentation if that particular mod they need exists on it, but there is a chance that that particular mod is one of two mods for that skill (remember you have three mods on all items, two for one skill and one for the other) so there is only a 50% chance of extracting the correct mod in that case. A hard decision has to be made as to whether you want to risk destroying your old level 70 gold chest piece for 50% chance of upgrading your new level 80 chest piece.

Players will start hoarding gold items regardless of level for the purpose of potentially using them for future augmentation. In the example given above, if they don't already have a gold chest piece they can readily sacrifice, instead of farming level 80 areas for a second gold chest piece, they might consider farming Sebule Crypts, get a level 30 gold chest piece, then use crude phlogiston on it until it rolls the mod you want to extract, then extract it using small main hand beads. Much more economical option but more importantly it is something you can do solo, instead of having to find a level 80 group to do The Wintertide.

There will be less equipment sold to vendors, as everyone will be breaking down a lot of items to get as much beads, baubles, ornaments, contraptions and phlogistons as possible to fuel their upgrading needs. This will probably end up removing a bunch of councils from the economy, which I view as a positive.

Examples of pathway to get the best in game items.

To get the best in slot chest item, it will be an epic journey:
1) You have to craft max enchanted gear until you hit an gold item
2) You may have to keep crafting if the item doesn't have a favorable distribution of mods (say for example you prefer two mods for skill A and one mod for skill B, but unfortunately the item you rolled has one mod for skill A and two for skill B).
3) You reroll the mods on your max enchanted gold item until you get three mods you want.
4) You keep crafting max enchanted item until you get a second gold item.
5) You reroll a single mod until you get that elusive fourth mod you want.
6) You extract that mod (taking the risk that if in this case there are two mods of the skill you want, you have only 50% chance of getting the one you want).
7( Enjoy your best in slot item. Now repeat for other slots.

Alternative way to get best in slot item without max enchanting
1) Farm low level areas until you get the drop you want (for example farming Sunvale until you get a knight armour drop)
2) Farm a lot of crude phlogistons to serially upgrade it to gold tier (lets say you need 50 to upgrade to green, 100 to upgrade to blue, 200 to upgrade to red, 500 to upgrade to purple and 1000 to upgrade to gold, for a total of 1850 crude phlogistons)
3) Farm a lot of medium and large chest baubles to upgrade it to level 80 (it will take 100 medium chest baubles to upgrade from 40-45, 45-50, 50-55, 55-60 and it will take 100 large chest baubles to upgrade from 60-65, 65-70, 70-75 and 75-80. So you need 400 medium chest baubles and 400 large chest baubles in total)
4) Enjoy your best in slot item. Now repeat for other slots.

Advantages of my proposals

I believe my proposals strike a decent balance between catering to casual players, who can find red and purple items relatively easily (assuming no dramatic changes to current drop rates), and be able to get 80-90% of the damage output of a player who is decked out in all gold tier items. Truly hardcore players will have an epic grind to get the truly best in slot items, they can either go down the crafting route, hoping for two max enchanted items before they can get the best item; or they can get a low level item, then farm for a lot of phlogiston to upgrade it to gold tier, then farm for a lot of beads/baubles/ornaments/contraptions to upgrade it to level 80.

I think the ability to upgrade equipment to level 80 will be welcomed by many players, both those who want more options in terms of ways to obtain high level equipment independent of finding high level parties to run The Wintertide; and those who are keen for a greater range of aesthetics and want a greater range of armour arts to be available at late game.

Predicted challenges

There will be extensive combat rebalancing required, Citan have stated that balancing mob difficulty is not as difficult and I will have to take his word on it.

There will be a requirement to add more "utility skills" to some skills sets. With only three mods available to boost your damage, we will have a greater incentive to take on skills that do not have a strong damage modifier but a good innate effect. For example for my current build of Sword/Shield, I take on multiple range reduction skills plus stun, plus some support skills from shield. I predict a lot of players will start bringing more of these "utility skills" like those, and it is quite likely that some skills will need to be retuned so that they offer more utility. The only example I can think of is that Fire Magic is mostly damage skills and there isn't many "utility skills".

I have written all of the above from the point of view of a player transitioning from level 70 to level 80 gear, but ignored the leveling process. To be honest I have't played at low level for a while and I honestly don't remember enough of the leveling experience to make any useful suggestions/predictions on the leveling process.

Proposed implementation
Like Citan have alluded to, implementing such a large number of changes at once will break the game and probably make a lot of people angry. I suggest the following stepwise plan of implementing these changes:

1) Add more armour types, one of the underlying assumptions is that there has to be an valid option for metal/leather/organic/cloth armour at different levels and there will have to be a lot of extra items created, with armour art assets to go with it.
2) Add armoursmithing to the game, and complete the crafting system so that all these new items can either be found or crafted, and there has to be a way of crafting all the equipment types in the game. For example currently we cannot craft metal armour, we cannot craft level 80 organic armour, and most main hand and off hand items are not craftable.
3) Change the intrinsic stats of the armours/equipments to my proposed system. There will have to be a way of converting old items to the new items, potentially using the legacy item golems.
4) Enable the upgrading of equipment level through use of beads/baubles/ornaments/contraptions.
5) Enable to upgrading of equipment tier through use of phlogistons
6) Bite the bullet and change all items to have three mods. The method of converting old items to new ones will have to be done carefully to avoid breaking everyone's carefully optimised gears. I propose that people wearing gold gear should be able to choose what three mods they get to keep, and maybe those wearing purple gets to pick two mods they get to keep. Keeping their existing augmentation will be contentious and I would advocate we should lose our augmentation to force us to hunt for new augmentations

That is a long essay.... writing this has given me an appreciation of how difficult it is to make any changes. Every change will have ripple effect onto other parts of the game and what started as a single idea actually turned into many many proposed changes in order to make it work...

Is that wild enough for ya all?

Chilton