I have read some posts about the weapon, gear, rune, infuse, enchant. I want to talk about it and give some suggestions.
First I want to talk about the stats requirement and scaling for weapons. I believe any character should be able to at least “hold” a weapon no matter what. The problem is whether they can use it effectively. The weapon should do more dmg with the stats scaling, and some weapon can scale with multiple stats with different scaling levels. This also enables us to try every weapon and see their movesets.
Second, I want to question if we really should destory a weapon to extract the rune. I am comparing the runes to the gems in POE. But for the current state of the game, it is really punishing to “just try a rune”. We should have the freedom to just move the rune. Or at least give us accurate description/preview of what the rune does on a weapon. I know one rune can go on different weapons, but they look different. So we should be able to use a rune, without worrying about ruining a weapon we really like.
Third, gear crafting system. The enchant system and gem system really feels way too simple. Even if you say white items are the most customizable, most people still decide to enchant them because purple/blue items are just better if you have the good rolls. I don’t know if we are going to eventaully be able to craft every gear(at least for the non-uniques, so at least we can craft a bunch and enchant them all) in the game. Right now I feel like we are making builds based on the gears we get from RNG, instead of making our own builds. If we want an ARPG that really go on a long run, I believe it’s time for us to think about an in-depth system. Not just you can keep rerolling the enchant, but you can spend mats to put/upgrade a prefix/affix(sorry I don’t know our terms for this) on our gear. Even rarer mats to add a slot to our gear. The gems right now I feel like it’s the only customizable prefix/affix we have in the system, but honestly I want to see it to be different. The gems should have general effects that everyone can use. (Right now it does fine) But I want to see gems and the random affixes on gears separate. They shouldn’t have overlaps, so you don’t just hope you get “extra X damage” on your weapon and slam another gem that does the same. If you guys haven’t, you can check out the gear crafting in Last Epoch, where I really like the crafting potential system. Each action you take on the gear will spend a random amount of potential within a range. We can say white items have the most potential. For purple item they have less potential, and reroll their negative effects could cost a lot more. I’m not saying we should copy from other games, but I really want to craft my own gears.
I really love this game so far, and I feel like we need to be able to really customize our character, and to make our own builds. That means more freedom to do more, and less unneccessary punishments.