Let’s Talk Enchanting!

Lineage 2 over enchantment babyyyyy. Loved that shit. Spend a week grinding to craft a weapon just to burn it all to hell by failing to over enchant it. Kept the base gear lvl of all the players roughly the same, while the lucky ones were above everyone else.

I hate the BDO/Lineage style of enchanting with a passion. It fails to operate as a predictable gear-sink, it fails to reward players properly and slowly creates gaps which then require catch-up mechanics, and in nearly every game I play it's poorly balanced in other ways on top of both those things.

I prefer enchanting systems where you are putting things into 'slots' and the quality of the gear determines which slots are available. Then, the team can tweak the slots, and for balance purposes, can 'return the materials'. e.g.. if a certain enchantment in a specific slot was deemed too strong, a good database design would simply let the devs 'remove all slotted instances of that enchantment and refund the materials', or remove any second one.

I'm not an overall fan of gear homogenization in this way, but there are times you need it, and it's important to give yourself all the levers to pull, in the game design phase.

I also have a sort-of out-of-context quote from another 'popular' thread that I'll just paste here in entirety as 'my preference for this sort of system being balanced'.

Azherae wrote: »

Sword A of Green Tier has 4 Enhancement slots. Sword B of Purple Tier has 8.

The crafter can put Attack into all slots, but the more Attack in each slot, the harder it is to get the next one in. This is based on total number, not 'number relative to the weapon'.

So it's equally easy to get an Attack +20 Green Tier sword as it is to get an Attack+20 Accuracy +20 Purple Tier sword, but it's really really hard to get an Attack +40 Purple Tier Sword.

But 'casuals' don't have enough Evasion, let's say, for the Accuracy to be necessary. It's nice, but it helps more in PvE or against other 'hardcore' players. The Accuracy 'doesn't affect the fight much'.

Now you have 'Green sword people' fighting 'Purple sword people' and the overall damage done is similar. This sort of design can't be described simply by things like 'gear power in tiers', so even attempting to paraphrase it, leads to concerns like yours.

But if you ask someone 'how much stronger is Sword B than Sword A', in most games, the answer will be 35% stronger (assuming the semi-standard range of 200-600 accuracy and opposed stat calculations). It's 35% more effective than Sword A in fights against strong or equal enemies, but not when facing 'Casuals'. An Attack +40 Purple Tier Sword would be a 'casual slayer', but would involve a massive investment for a sword that might not hold up in 'even' PvP as well.

tl;dr hardcore players already have time, tend to be number-crunchers, and collect tons of gear. Make them HAVE to do all that to be versatile without giving them as much advantage over 'casuals' unless they're specifically aiming to go out there and kill said casuals as a 'preferred enemy'.

Personally I think that enchantments should focus on Accuracy being added to specific skills or types of skills, to prevent the usual terrible metas in games where the player is just told to get the max Accuracy they can first, then go for damage, then follow the meta-rotation.

I still want to play another game finally where your enhancements and enchantments are targeted to your style of play, if only because it encourages more diverse builds or at least in the 'casual space', you can reasonably get more leeway by pushing your preferred abilities and style to their max instead.

Even more stimulation to the economy, since a re-spec of certain kinds (changing Secondary) results in needing to grab some basic gear for that too.

But I could go on about this forever, so I'll stop here.

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You can just replace 'Attack' and 'Accuracy' in my example with 'Armor Penetration' and 'Skill Cooldown reduction' and...

Then you have ESO.

I'm definitely not playing Ashes if it turns out like ESO.

Craft 'optimal stats' onto gear and then possibly over-enchant RNG for even more broken stats? Building a game on quite that terrible a foundation is definitely not what I'd expect from Intrepid, but I agree that the things that were said before indicate that they could go this way.

So obviously my feedback to Intrepid, is, and excuse my language because I feel this strongly about it...

Seriously... just fucking DONT.

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Do you know how one becomes powerful and super-wealthy in BDO? Never enchant. Leave that to some random noob.

This is the way EU servers for BDO got, to the point where they had to mess with it. Because EU players are apparently less inclined to try to get ahead in this way or something? For a long time there were problems on their servers that the English Community Team had to acknowledge explicitly because the EU players in general just 'had the good sense to not enchant anything' and it resulted in everything high level being extremely rare and even more stupidly expensive.

No money is lost when enchanting happens, just materials and gear. Concentrating your free cash economic power therefore allows you to buy gear from people after the initial period where those people are getting geared up. The people with the highest luck in enchanting then dominate the server, then they receive items for more high level enchanting, which they don't need, then they sell those items, and then whoever was waiting in the wings buys the item.

Meanwhile everyone else is concentrating free cash flow into the hands of whoever is dedicated at providing the materials but sensibly NEVER enchanting, deflating the economy temporarily, until that person decides to splurge.

I know this because I am that person. I don't care enough about BDO to get to the level of say, BladeBoques, but I know that enchanting is almost always a way for the less savvy to lose money (and therefore POWER), and 'buying things from the lucky few who spend all their money at the enchanting casino and need to break even by selling off some' is the way to always get strong and make money (and yes, I understand that it is not always possible, it just doesn't matter long term)

This strategy is the one used by the 'ultra-wealthy' to stay 'ultra-wealthy'. Whether or not you believe me is entirely up to you, I'm just offering my advice as 'the person who exploits economies in games', on 'how to make one that I, and people like me, will exploit less'.

Intrepid choosing to ignore that just gives me another game to exploit, so in terms of my POWER within Ashes it is in my best interest if my words are ignored. Such a fate.

We have not received permission from Songcaller to share the quoted post.

Well, let's just disagree on that. I can't support games that prey on the gambling addictions of others when there are so many other good ways to implement it. I play BDO explicitly to inspire myself to study what not to do in design. Any game where 'time invested' and 'hard work' are trumped entirely by luck, solely for the purpose of economic control, just doesn't have a good enough economy designer.

So I'll once again give something for free.

The optimal way in my mind for this to work is actually MORE engaging and skill-increase related for the Enchanter, and could be fleshed out into a full system WITH a material sink that doesn't require pure destruction, just material losses with real choices.

Step 1: Choose one target enchantment (probably with low success odds) and two related fallbacks, for a slot
Step 2: Enchant... go, dice roll!
Step 3: If target is achieved, rejoice! If not, go to step 4.
Step 4: If Target not achieved, apply fallbacks 1 or 2 to the slot.
Step 5. If player is unsatisfied with the result and want Target enchantment, clear the slot (no item refund) and return to step 1, otherwise proceed with less-than-optimal item until desired to return to step 1.

Now you can build all sorts of weird trees of skills and augments and affiliiation stuff into the fallbacks, so that specific Enchanters will 'fail' in the way you are willing to settle for. Players can even create 'their own personal Legendaries' by getting the right combination of enchants from the right people.

They already have 'you will need copies or similar materials to repair durability on items'. They don't need item destruction enchants too, that's just a gate, because these paths must have endings, and whoever reaches the ending no longer needs to do it.

Technically you'd want MORE 'Frost Elder Sword' to exist, because then you don't have to make it so strong, or 'Best In Slot for fighting X other encounter'. Let the players control what is important to them, and INCREASE the amount of them so that we also increase the amount of repairs required for them. Economy improved all the way down.

Overenchant is the solution one comes to when you don't have an Economy designer yet, imo. That is why I am hoping they will change it.

I feel like overenchantment is meant only for pushing the peak of character progress. You can get you BiS, you can get additional effects on its attack/defense functions, but if you want to go up in power - you gotta risk smth. Just putting more resources into the weapon is not a risk, it's an assured way up through time.

Imo enchantments for vertical progression of gear should be ultra rare. Someone over enchanting a weapon should be a damn event for the server. That one person will get 1-3% boost in power, but their reputation will be that of "someone at the peak of their progress". The whole guild should work for that kind of thing. And by the time that player gets to a chance to destroy their BiS weapon in an overenchant - they should already have a backup. And if they decide to risk a unique legendary - that'd be a great way for it to "change hands". But if they succeed to OE that legendary - they deserve the powerup, because their risk was gigantic.

You can't be a gambler if you don't have the means to gamble. But you can take risks when the opportunity presents itself.