So I was replying to “Why Gems and Enchantments NEED a boost”, misleading title btw, he’s talking about effect alteration, rather than number increases, and my brain must’ve caught on fire, as I wrote several paragraphs for my ‘response’. I thought it should probably go in its own thread so people don’t get off topic in his (several of his points inspired my own, or I blatantly stole), so here it is:
Something I noticed between enchanting and infusing is that enchanting has the potential to roll bonuses that you can’t infuse into that gear slot.
you can currently use gems to slot healing effectiveness into your helm, but not your chest, boots, or gloves. This gave me a situation where I rolled HE on my helm, which let me stack a gem + purple roll, and then I got a blue HE roll on my chest, with around 20% per bonus, totalling 60% bonus healing effectiveness. I think this is fantastic, as I couldn’t get more than ~20% HE with only white gear, however I think you have a point that purple, blue, and white gear should serve different rolls for excitement, and that the current curses are… not great.
Some absolutely just kill gear, like taking 20% extra damage, no, just no. on the other hand, as soon as you hit level cap, things like xp loss become totally irrelevant. others like gold loss on death kinda suck, but can be completely mitigated with economic prepwork.
I think that the current enchantment system should be tweaked a little so that each colour has it’s own roll to play in your loadout.
Unique/gold (Gold metallic underlay with a rainbow foil finish, like a collectable trading card): Build definition, no infusion slots. This should be the exalted form of purple gear that, if you chose to use it, you make the rest of your build around. Twin daggers that are strength scaling? Give them a bonus that increases their poise damage by +10, but reduces their attack speed by 20%-30%, and a unique rune where you slam the ground with one knife for a stun AOE, then carve the earth with the other for a landslide cone attack that knocks them over. An intelligence scaling rapier? have it blink for free, but you lose 100% of your poise defence.
Cursed/purple (wavering dark animated purple border): Potency, one infusion slot. When you slot a piece of purple gear, it should give you one major benefit, and one major detriment, radically altering what your build is/isn’t capable of. None of the more common/minor bonuses that you would see on blue gear, just potent, build altering effects with immediate combat relevancy. Instead of giving that 22% bonus to focus gain, how about removing the health cost of using channel, but you gain a timed debuff that sets your poise to 0. ;How about increasing your charged attack/poise damage by x%/x, but you heavy roll without the ability to shove?How about you set your weight class to light, but you can’t use anything from your elixir/potion/bomb slot? One thing that I think curses should NOT do is impact you outside of combat. It’s too easily mitigated in the case of exp or gold. On the other hand, some effects really need to be scaled back. Anything that reduces my focus or health, or gods forbid, increases the amount of damage I take, immediately gets thrown in the trash.
Purified/ice blue (blue fractal/crystal border): Purity, two infusion slots. As I said above, blue gear has the potential to really focus your build without the downsides of curses, and I think that should be leaned into, making your build more pure. To this end, I believe that Purified gear should be able to roll any effect that you can infuse, on any piece of gear (weapon AND armour infusion effects), but only two of them. Additionally, Purified gear should always come with a modifier removes the effect of infused crystals, but each infused crystal is purified and provides an x% effect bonus to both rolls on the gear, scaling with the grade of crystal infused. A purified piece of gear should be able to reach greater maximums for it’s two effects than Forged Gear (details below), but should overall come with less total stats than forged gear.
Forged/metallic grey (a border patterned after swords, reflecting light of faceted surfaces): Certainty and Malleability, four infusion slots, re-rollable infusions and replaceable runes. Get away from the ‘common’ or ‘white’ gear mindset, forged gear is reliable and flexible. Does your build rely heavily on taking hits without flinching? Slot a Forged chest piece and infuse it with a x% health increase and a x% poise increase to accompany your Purified gauntlets that increase poise. As a bonus, you can slot two more things that don’t elevate your build, but do round it out, like more focus capacity and a stamina shard so you can swing that big hammer one more time. But oh no! you’ve rolled the minimum % of get wrecked scrub! No matter, this isn’t enchanted gear, where the delicate enchantments that give the gear its value prevent you from making changes. Simply use the ‘reforge’ option to re-roll the percentage using other gems of the same type as currency. Forged gear shouldn’t be the best at any one thing, where cursed items have unique enchantments, and purified gear can get higher modifier maximums, Forged gear should give you the greatest amount of benefit, just spread across several stats. On the runic side of things, extracting runes shouldn’t destroy Forged gear, allowing you to test out new, exciting runes without the associated stat loss we currently endure, or really screwing up your primary weapon.