Realmers!
There has been a lot of discussion around the current design of the Enchantments system which we would like to address. Some of this information has already been released at some stage of the development so far, but as we are planning to rework and extend the system it makes sense to cover all of it here too.
In brief, we intend to roll out a 2.0 version of Enchantments. This will be done in installments in order to get these phases out there faster, rather than waiting the many months it would take to develop the system in full. The new shape Enchantments will take will be discussed in detail below.
Current Design – Issues and Feedback
The current design of Enchantments fills the original purpose the system was requested for: A progression system to take players into the new difficulty of the content we are releasing. The plan was to extend the endgame, adding Engravings until the new difficulty 10 Biomes were also added, and then extending things further with new tiers of equipment, higher-level enchantments, etc. As it was also initially planned to be seasonal only, the power level could be quite high, allowing up to 4 enchantments at a time.
When player feedback caused us to rethink the seasonality of the system, this, unfortunately, took a lot of our remaining development time to fix, limiting what enchantments we could provide. In addition, dialing back the powerlevel to only one slot, made it even more narrow in scope. The planned difficulty 10 content has also been slow to arrive in the game, which means we had to make the cost of enchantments higher than we expected, to prevent the power creep players were also complaining about. This has reduced the impact and engagement with the system overall.
Feedback has also been given that players want almost every item in the game to be enchantable. This represents a serious balance issue that would require us to rework the game to prevent items from becoming too powerful at lower levels, followed by further rebalancing them for the realm rework, stat rework, combat rework, etc. In other words, given the size of the team, we’d have to spend more time balancing than releasing new content, which is not viable.
Planned Rework
To address these concerns we are going to do the following:
- Make Enchantments randomized
- This will prevent any game-breaking weapons or single enchantments from becoming the meta by allowing people to choose it.
- Item level will also determine what table of enchantments each piece of equipment can roll on.
- So a T1 dagger will not get Enchantments as good or better than a T14 dagger, for instance.
- Allow all equipment to have enchantments.
- Everything will start with 1 slot, and more slots will be added alongside balance updates.
- UT’s will have an engraving slot, and a small chance to have other enchantments as well.
- As Enchantments will be random, this is not as large of an issue as if they could be chosen.
- Make dust a currency used to reroll and improve enchantments.
- We will add blue and red dust back into the game to allow for these kinds of behaviors.
- Dust will also drop from most dungeons as a result of these changes, with higher-level dust appearing in higher-level dungeons.
- Engravings will remain as-is but will use Purple dust to unlock the slot.
- We will also continue to release them in batches mostly focused on the endgame, but can add them earlier if time permits.
- Add cosmetic dust and slot to all items.
- This will allow for the customization of weapon graphics, shots graphics, sounds, etc.
Release Roadmap
Instead of spending 6-8 months and waiting until all of the other reworks have been completed, we will add in the new system for Enchantments and develop it alongside these updates. So to begin we’ll add a single, randomized slot to all items, which is not likely to unbalance the game. Then, as part of the other reworks, we will expand the number of available slots, and update the content to prevent power creep.
This also allows us to develop small batches of new enchantments using new mechanics as they are implemented. These can then start appearing in the game by being added to the enchantment tables used by the items.
UTs will remain the same and continue to use Engravings. If they do have additional slots added down the line, this will be done to the 2nd slot onwards, leaving the first as an Engraving slot.