Hey, I know this is not balancing and therefore not one of the top priorities atm. For some time I have been thinking about how the introduced illusions from the dlc and the seperation of craftable red weapons brought a whole new feeling to illusions in general, at least for me. First, let me explain what I mean.
I always had the feeling, that having blue glowing rune weapon showed a certain amount of dedication to one character or a huge amount of luck. I have been playing Kerillian a lot (At least for my standard - I know this varies widely here) and put some time and effort into getting the dual daggers. When I finally had them, it felt like a little achievement.
The bond between veteran weapons and dedication always felt real for me for a long time. Until the DLC was introduced. I bought all DLCs vor V1 and was surprised to see a break to its traditions in introducing one or multiple new weapons. Instead the purple illusions and new hats were introduced. It is disputable, if this was a good move or not, considering the already huge amount of weapons and the difficulties to establish solid niches for every single one and the already small time frame, fatshark had to finish the DLC after its mentioning on the road map.
However, the new illusions were already initiating confusion on my side, as my mentality always has been the correlation between dedication for one character and the respective veteran weapon you wanted.
This confusion was enforced by the introduction of the new crafting system. Now, finally reds were craftable and from every veteran item you had. The resulting, final break between illusion, veteran weapon and dedication to one character lead to a whole new mentality on my side.
At this point I don’t consider illusions not to be as strongly connected to dedication or reds, illusions are applicable to any weapon of any rarity and veteran items are craftable and not connected to grinding and illusion.
All of these changes made me think, that this system right now feels very empty. You have two type of illusions, which are coming from two different types of sources, one bound to a veteran weapon and the other from a Bogenhafen chest.
My suggestion at this point would be to change the system commendation chests work. No one, who plays legend cares for 90% of the drops from it. It’s just crafting material with extra steps. Remove all items of lower rarity than red (or even reds too, as this would make my suggestion more consistent) Keep the drop rates from hats and add a new color system of illusions to drop. This is basically an opportunity to implement the already existent mod, which introduces the color variety. The implementation would lead to the final cut between illusion and weapon, would introduce tons of new loot, would boost fashiontide to a great extent and would be pretty easily doable I imagine, as no new skins need to be made.
This could go even further if you want and use different rarities for colors.
Please, tell me what you think, as I said I know it’s not a top priority right now, but I thougt it could be an interesting feature. Also sorry for the long background story.