Attributes sound like they’re going away but if things are being overhauled that just means it’s valuable to talk about the current system and what could be better.
The point of having RPG Attribute requirements for different weapons, where your selection locks you into certain options, is that this choice can deliver a player fantasy of a themed character. The limitation of only being able to use certain weapons is desirable because it makes your character feel like it embodies the role that your attributes represent. You want your heavy Strength knight guy to have a big shield or a big 2H weapon that you associate with ‘Strength’. You want your Dexterity bandit dickthief to flip around with some small nimble weapon because that’s what Dexterity means. Even if mechanically Dexterity is just Attack Power, if choosing the green Attack Power means you get to use all of the things which you associate with your Dexterity player fantasy then that still achieves the first goal of an attribute system.
Somehow, amazingly, Wicked’s attribute system manages to fail even at this first goal. When all that was needed was to divide up weapons according to the fantasy those attributes represent, we have somehow ended up with a system where almost none of the weapons that you would associate with your build are actually usable on your build. For 2 reasons:
- The damage scaling system for split stat builds penalises you for not having equal distribution of both stats, meaning there is no such thing as “A Strength build with some Faith” in Wicked, and so these are not hybrids. If you want to use a STR/FTH weapon then you must commit to STR AND FTH, and thus lock yourself out of both pure STR and pure FTH weapons due to their high requirements
- As a result of 1, every single weapon class now has to be carved up between these TEN completely separate build slices, with priority being given to serving as many of them as possible because they all need weapons made specifically for them
This leaves us in the absurd situation where in a game with 9 Curved Swords, a DEX character can only use 1 of them. In a game with 8 Straight Swords a STR character can only use 2, the first one is encountered on the beach and the second one is a late game rare drop. In a game with 6 Clubs, none of them can be used by a STR character and 4 of them are DEX/FTH. There are 4 Katanas in the game right now, the archetypal edgy DEX weapon, a DEX character can only use one of them. That one DEX katana is a later game random drop which you may never see, so the very first Katanas you will encounter on the majority of playthroughs will be pure FTH and a DEX/INT weapon which requires equal investment into INT. If you decide to go DEX/INT for the only Katana you have found you now lock your DEX character out of all the pure DEX weapons because that’s how damage scaling works.
These perfectly even hybrid stat combinations do not have the emotional weight of pure attributes. How many people have a STR/INT “player fantasy”? What does that even look like in your head? It’s a niche role, but due to Wicked having “stats which matter” all of these attribute combinations need to be fully served by the available weapons. What this looks like from the player’s perspective is that you are constantly seeing weapons drop which look like they are a thematic match for the character you are trying to create but you can’t use any of them because they’re split across these 10 totally separate pools that don’t overlap in any way. Then the very high attribute requirements for higher tier weapons ensure that even if you were willing to take a damage penalty to have greater weapon variety you are still going to be screwed out of the top tier of Pure scaling weapons if you took some INT to use that Katana.