It honestly felt impossible for the NRFTW community to ever agree on anything until now. The general feeling about the game’s RNG appears to be unanimous: trying out builds and combat styles is a headache, and getting the items a player would like to test with not even perfect, but merely decent stats, forces you to constantly farm the same items and pray that luck smiles you. This translates, as many of you are saying, into settling for whatever weapon we happened to get by chance. To put it simply, getting the specific gear you want to play with can mean a tedious grind that lasts longer than the main campaign itself.
As for the reasons behind this system, I don’t think it’s so much a strategy to increase the number of hours players spend in the game as it is a mismatch in the numbers. This is the third time I’ve come back to the game, and the only thing that this new system has really achieved is making it impossible to create the optimized builds that used to break the game. Months ago, on this forum, videos were shared showcasing a surprising variety of builds that completely broke the game: characters that destroyed anything in their path with no effort at all. In most cases, all you had to do was press the main skill the build was focused on. Clearly, the game’s balance was broken. And I think this is the core issue: Moon Studios has handled a lot of things in this game really well, but the way numbers stack through enchantments, runes, and rings is a mess.
On this matter, I’ve left a comment in this other topic: Exhalt rings no longer there - #7 by Bl.z