I will link this topic since it is the most recent I could find but the last post there was in early July and a lot has happened to the game since then. Crafting…so I was thinking of ideas
As I stated in my topic concerning how to implement red items and how said items might look stat-wise, it became clear quite quickly there is a deeper concern that needs to be addressed before such potentially new and interesting items can be added: The “Crafting” System
In short: the system is nothing like what they promised and you can barely call it a crafting system at all, at best it is a modification system and a bare-bones one at that.
A list of aspects that need to change based on what was spoken about in my other topic:
- RNG: there are too many layers of it and not enough ways for players to counteract bad RNG via crafting
- Locks: nobody likes them (this is almost unanimous) and we need some way to get rid of them
- Blessing Acquisition: is not what was promised and frankly sucks as-is
- Perks: with the new system there is no real reason for tiers 1-3 to exist, get rid of them
- Weapon Stats: It sucks having to roll the weapon shop slot machine hundreds if not thousands of times just to get a 380 with good stat distribution only for the above problems to render it less than it could have been.
- Weapon skins/transmog: Yes, they now are monetizing skins, fine (they did that in VT2) but give us more than red or blue skins for our weapons that we can earn
- Beyond level 30: You get nothing from the continued experience gain after 30, that should change.
Some starting ideas for how to address each of these:
RNG: This will hopefully just be mitigated outright by making the appropriate changes to
Locks: Many have suggested and I agree that a resource should be used to break locks. Obviously they want locks to be in the game and I think that is fair, but a resource used to break one lock once on a weapon would still make locks relevant without completely destroying a good weapon stat-wise with undesired perks/blessings.
Maybe that is a new resource, like points for handing in your gear to Hadron or maybe it is just a cost in diamantine, doesn’t matter that can be worked out more later as ideas start to form a whole picture.
- ALTERNATIVELY: Instead of making locks the enemy, make locks our friends. Each weapon gets two locks between perks and blessings, that’s it, and you choose where they go. The locks prevent re-rolling of perks/blessings through the upgrade process, potentially saving you materials at the end where you will be able to adjust things for material costs. The catch? You are stuck with those locks. This may seem like it sucks but the following changes to perks and blessings will make it make a bit more sense why this may be good (specifically just lock-in the two perks you want if they come up and don’t lock the blessing unless you luck out and it is one you want). Other games have done a similar concept, this is a bit more involved that the first suggestion but ultimately give more player agency and the option to simply have no locks at all and just pay the cost later to get exactly what you want.
Blessing Acquisition: We were promised the ability to upgrade blessings from low tiers to higher tiers by stocking up blessings with Hadron, that never happened. Some may argue that isn’t needed because you can just get the higher tier blessings but as someone with about 300 hours I can tell you I am missing a lot of the tier 3 and 4 because I don’t have the resources to upgrade stuff purely to hand it in.
We should be able to do what was promised, hand in a weapon and store the blessing of our choice from it. Two tier 1 makes a tier 2, three tier 2 makes a tier 3, 4 tier 3 makes a tier 4. Simple and fair progression. Yes, it requires a lot of items (24 tier 1 for a tier 4 if my math is right but I suck at math) but that is perfectly fair and doesn’t actually take all that much time, certainly less time that waiting on the RNG lotto to give you the blessing you want but you can still get lucky and skip this grind. That is good RNG, what we have is bad RNG that forces you to rely only on RNG with not a lot you can do about it, this would help.
Now, those chances obviously are not final just easy starting points I think are fair, these of course being for a weapon generated at that tier, not upgraded. Upgraded gear will just have whatever blessing it had before it upgraded (or if using the alternative locking will be weighted 70/30 in favor of keeping the existing blessing) unless it should gain a new blessing in which case it will roll as below (this more-or less falls in-line with how it currently works, which is perfectly serviceable).
For randomly generated gear:
- White: No blessings, obviously
- Green: No blessings, obviously
- Blue: one blessing random tier weighted tier 1 (30%), 2 (40%), 3 (20%), 4 (10%)
- Purple: one blessing random tier weighted tier 1 (10%), 2 (30%), 3 (40%), 4 (20%)
- Orange: two blessings, each of random tier weighted tier 1 (5%), 2 (15%), 3 (40%), 4 (40%)
- Red:(that’s right with this new system they make sense) two blessings both max tier for their type, a third tier 5 blessing which is the unique red blessing, this can be turned in to put on other red weapons. As stated in the other topic this should not be OP but rather add utility or a small boost.
Perks: As stated the ability to select whatever perk you want largely removed the presence of lower than tier 4, but with locks you sometimes had to settle for lower. With the above change to locks this concession would no longer be relevant so what about lower tier? Simple solution: make the tiers of weapon predicate the power of the perks. Taking a weapon from white to orange takes it through the tiers so tie the perk power to the tier of weapon, players end-goal is all orange anyway right so it will just be another form of progression.
Yes, lower than orange will be lower power as far as perks go but I think this is fair given you are expected to upgrade your gear anyway and this will encourage the use of resources and guarantee an increase in power.
- White: No perks, obviously
- Green: one tier 1 perk
- Blue: one tier 2 perk
- Purple: two tier 3 perks
- Orange: two tier 4 perks
Red: two tier 4 perks, one unique perk that can’t be changed (think small buffs like 5% attack speed or a tier 1 perk, nothing much but just a little extra spice).
Weapon Stats: In my other topic and in several other crafting-adjacent topics the desire to improve weapon stats and the mystery of “why the heck does it stop at 80%” has come up and I think it is a good idea to look into, if difficult to balance without the end-game making the entire crafting system pointless to players relatively quickly.
My thoughts on how to tackle this are relatively straightforward and will use a similar power-scaling method as the above for perks, that being base-line stats based on the tier of the weapon (but still a chance of a low tier weapon just happening to get god-rolled stats).
Additionally adding a way to pay materials to directly increase a stat by a random amount which each tier of weapon allowing a maximum upwards adjustment from whatever was initially rolled for its base stats but not exceeding the maximum for its tier. The weapon will not decrease stats when upgrading. If it had 20% damage as a white it will not drop to 15% on a bad roll. The combination of these two things will encourage players to try to get high-rolled base items, dump resources into getting them as close to max as possible before upgrading and further increasing until you hit the end of the upgrade path.
- White: garbage weapons you are not really meant to use once you are level 30, they get a baseline 5% and a max of +10% improvement via direct stat improvement crafting, each stat may only be increased one time. Every stat can still roll higher but the max they can roll is 30% with a curve peaking around 13-15% and steeply dropping of to 30%.
- Green: Still not great but a marked improvement over white. Base of 15% with a curve peaking at 40% and maxing at 60%. Nice even bell-curve. You can individually increase stats by up to +15%, each stat may only be increased one time.
- Blue: Base 30% with a curve peaking at 50% and maxing at 80% with more weight to that peak and a gradual drop to that max. You can individually increase stats by up to +15%, each stat may be increased twice.
- Purple: Base 50% with a curve weighted towards peaking at 70%, gradually dropping to 80%, then nosediving to a max 90%. You can individually increase stats by up to +20%, each stat may be increase twice.
- Orange: Base 70% with a even bell curve peaking at 90% and (obviously) maxing at 100%. You can individually increase stats up to +20% and each may be increased three times.
- Red: base 100%, what did you expect? Cannot be crafted (method of obtaining TBD after tackling emperor’s gift, spoiler alert: largely go back to VT2 multiple rewards method of giving item rewards at the end of missions)
Weapon Skins: Tangentially related so let’s cover them here. We need more than just red or blue re-colors. We have at least some small variety in armor cosmetics so why not weapons. Obviously you save most of the fancy stuff for paid content but give us a little something-something to spend our dockets on.
Red weapons could alternatively just be max-rolled Orange weapons with a cool unique skin instead of just slightly more powerful weapons, if implemented like this they could be exclusively gained via difficult penances and nobody would bat an eye since they would be something cool for players grinding the hardest content to show off and players uninterested in the hard stuff can still get maxed weapons via the above crafting system and will just have to do with paid cosmetics and whatever is added for dockets.
Beyond level 30: Again, tangentially related so let’s talk about it an how it could interact with the crafting system.
After level 30 we keep getting experience that does nothing mechanically. What if instead that experience was converted to a new exchange currency that allows players to essentially trade-in their work for materials and items. Effectively it is just dockets but with the ability to buy a weekly limit of plasteel, diamantine, purple weapons, and purple curios. Since experience is gained at a lower rate than dockets already experience could just be a 1:1 or a 2:1 conversion to this currency. If made a weekly stockpile of items and materials to buy from it wouldn’t negatively effect the material economy too much but would give players with less time to grind the ability to better interact with this new and improved crafting system which will obviously require more materials.
In addition, gaining enough experience to level gives the player a “care package” of a TBD amount of plasteel (maybe 1k), diamantine (maybe 300), ingots (probably only like 100), and a weapon or curio with a higher chance of being purple or orange. This way players feel the grind a little less and again enables players with less time to play to still engage with the crafting system meaningfully.
I know that was a lot, and I know I didn’t cover every idea ever but I feel that is a solid foundation to start the discussion. So, thoughts?