Changes to Weapons and Equipment 2022-10-14 15:00

With this update, cascading recipes will be removed for all weapons and equipment items to return to a more classic framework; this one is based on ingredients that require fewer preparation steps, going back to a more seamless system. These changes also present the chance to rework various in-game items, mainly weapons, this time updating the items' characteristics as well. As you'll need to craft an item after the update to benefit from these changes, we figured it would make sense to offer these alterations in tandem with the changes to crafting.

Changes to Recipes

History

With Update 1.47 in June 2020, we modified a large number of recipes in the game. We had several objectives at that time.

• Revalue certain resources: in smoothing their use from one item to another, we were aiming for better balanced prices, based more on the difficulty of obtaining the resource, not solely on the power of the items that use it as an ingredient, although this aspect should still have an impact.
• Promote interaction between professions and players: in having item recipes much more frequently use manufactured resources (ones that need to be made by a crafter) from harvesting or food professions, we wanted to restore value to these recipes, and by extension to the professions producing them.
• Streamline recipes: dividing resources into types (unique monster resources, monster family resources, and rare or common boss resources; pebbles; essences, etc.) and recipes into categories (dungeon, zone, and Ascension Island recipes, etc.) allowed for recipes that are consistently varied in terms of the ingredients needed for recipes in the same category and equal level. And more broadly, this allowed for better use of the various types of possible ingredients, while also familiarizing adventurers with recipe patterns they may find throughout the game.
• Enable item destruction: in introducing a system of pyramid-like recipes (a level 1 item is used in a level 50 recipe, which in turn is used in a higher-level recipe, and so on), our objective was twofold:
  • Firstly, to reduce the amount of items in circulation with the aim of raising selling prices for crafters, and by extension the selling price of the runes that these items were used to produce.
  • Secondly, to reduce price gaps between items and boost them overall, mainly at higher levels, by incorporating the value of all items and resources in the previous recipes. This also promoted the destruction of lower-level resources when certain items were created specifically to be used in recipes.

Rating the Outcome of These Changes Now

After a little over two years, we can see that this new system has had fairly mixed success. First of all, it's important to note that it takes a long time to draw conclusions from changes, especially ones tied to the economy, for trends to have a chance to stabilize (on prices, the "panic" caused by the change, evolving game behaviors, etc.).

In some respects, updating recipes has been a great thing for the game.

• The prices of various resources have indeed gone up (or down, for ones that were overharvested).
• Various professions are more often called upon to create items, and instances of cooperative crafting have also increased (we're aware that some of these come from players with multiple accounts, but even so!).
• Streamlining recipes is also beneficial, and it makes it easier for us to produce recipes (and therefore items).

That being said, a number of downsides have also emerged over time.

• Item destruction, first of all: while this works well for low-level items, it has been ineffective with very-high-level items (170 and up) as no recipe uses them. Hence the mixed results.
• Then in terms of replacing equipment, our aim was for a player replacing their equipment to sometimes be able to reuse their old headgear to craft their new headgear, and so forth. This approach was actually pretty misguided, because in reality, a player will usually wear good quality equipment, and then they'll want to sell that equipment for a fair price rather than reinvest in it.
• Finally, the main obstacle: how arduous this system has been for players. For us it was about being able to automate, when attempting to craft an item, the cascading creation of all necessary equipment as long as you have the resources in your inventory. This would have limited the number of crafting attempts required to craft one item. For various reasons, we were unable to implement this system, and so item crafting has become far too tedious, especially for a mobile format that we'd like to streamline.
• There has also been much more of an impact on the price of certain smithmagic runes than we had hoped for, and although supplies can be high at times, prices are still not leveling off to be consistent with supply and demand.

For these reasons, we decided to remove this pyramid-like system despite its benefits.

All recipes have been updated to replace equipment with other types of resources found in recipes. At the same time, we're still considering new systems we might introduce to ensure that items of every level are used or destroyed, for them to lose less value over time.

Updated Characteristics

With the last few updates, we've sought to make older equipment useful again by reworking the bonuses for a large number of sets, especially in Update 1.54.

For the next update, we wanted to go further by taking advantage of the modification to recipes to make more extensive changes to characteristics.

As we've explained before, there is no way to retroactively modify (i.e. applied to existing items) the characteristics or damage of weapons and items.

With the changes described above, we thought it would be a good idea to update the items' characteristics as well, since they must be crafted using these new recipes.

Our Objectives

Here too we had several objectives in mind with the balancing changes made to items:

• Make low-level weapons more accessible by removing equipment conditions from a large portion of them. We felt these conditions had become largely obsolete and could be difficult for a new player to understand, as the player might end up buying an item only to find they couldn't equip it.
• Rework certain items and weapons whose overall power had diverged from the average. We therefore updated quite a few equipment items and weapons, for the most part boosting them.
• Remove certain characteristics: in this update, some characteristics will disappear as we felt they'd become irrelevant. We've reworked most of the items that lost these characteristics, except for ones that were already overpowered for their level. As you might have discovered lately, the following characteristics are disappearing:
  • Trap Damage
  • Trap Power
  • Damage Rebound
  • PVP Resistance: This one was no longer in use but was still shown in the characteristics panel.
     

For the smithmagic runes corresponding to the defunct characteristics, a compensation scheme will be set up. We'll say more when the update is released.
 

Our Method of Choosing Items to be Modified

Now to tell you a bit more about the selection process we used to settle on these changes.

First we made a list of all weapons (grouped together) and all items (sorted into categories) to compare them using two main criteria:

• The number of unique characters that use these items in combat
• The number of fights these items have been used in

Using these two values, we can separate multiple types of items.

• Items that are too powerful, too weak, or simply inconsistent: their values are too low or too high for the two indicators and sharply diverge from the median. The less an item is used, the easier it will be for us to fundamentally change its bonuses without negatively impacting players. In contrast, the changes applied to the most used weapons, for example, will only deal with retroactive elements wherever possible, so as not to penalize players who have them (which is a quite a few players).
• Niche items: these have a small number of characters using them but will appear in many fights. These items tend to be fairly well balanced in terms of power, but the conditions for using them or the set of bonuses granted may be too specific for them to be used by many players. Our goal will therefore be to loosen their conditions or offer more varied uses for them.
• Then there are items with a high number of users but appearing in very few fights. These are primarily very-low-level items, which only stay with players for a few levels before being replaced. We're not really interested in those here.

Based on the item's standing and level, we determined how flexible we could be in our changes, with the same goal of never making a weapon weaker than it was before, unless the change could be retroactive (for weapons) or very minimal (in the case of items), so as not to create powerful "relic" items" that could no longer be obtained.

Following this logic, the items that have undergone the most drastic changes are therefore ones that were seldom or not used, along with very-low-level items that generally haven't been smithmaged. Next are the niche items and the items most used at very high levels. So, the items that haven't been changed are usually mid-level items; their use is apparently neither excessive nor alarming.

Let's take three examples of updated items with their effects before and after:

This first item has been modified mainly to compensate for the loss of the damage rebound line, but also to make it more versatile. It was used by very few players, but in a high enough number of fights to indicate that the characteristics it granted were appealing. Thus, we aimed to preserve this identity when we remodeled the characteristics.

As for the second one, it is among the least used headgear items in the game, and for good reason: despite its AP bonus, it didn't allow for any gameplay possibilities, with its penalties to all elemental characteristics. Our goal here was to keep what made the item unique but modify its penalties to give it a slightly broader use, targeting a single gameplay mode through negative effects. This item's characteristics were also far below the standards for this level bracket overall, so it was possible to boost them as well.

Finally, the third item was a bit more complicated, as it was not used much at all either but was perfectly acceptable in terms of bonuses for an item of its level. So, we instead looked for what the weapon could be lacking in its use, in addition to its characteristics, plus what could be missing from full equipment sets of compatible elements, for it to complement them more easily.

That's why the characteristics aren't changing much, although elemental characteristics have been raised and % resistances slightly boosted.

The changes here focus on the addition of neutral resistance, which was often absent or low, and on the weapon's damage slot, which we constricted to make the axe weaker in the damage per turn it can deal.

These tweaks also gave us the chance to add more low-level weapons for hunters or featuring lines of elemental damage (non-neutral), as smithmagic is still a very obscure art at those levels.

To go along with these changes to items, we've also continued working on sets by tweaking certain set bonuses, as we've done before.

You'll get a list of the updated items as soon as the beta opens, and they'll be found on various NPCs so you can put them to the test.

In Closing

In introducing all of these changes, we hope to make crafting and using items more fun and more varied. We felt it was important to try and improve the incredible amount of items already in the game and help each of them to find a place before continuing to add new ones.

We don't want to create ever more powerful items and keep the game stuck in a constant headlong rush. Our goal for the game is to offer even more possibilities and choice in terms of gameplay, and that's why we care so much about enhancing what's already there, to see you imagine new combinations and unexpected play styles.