The crafting traits conundrum

tinythinker

This is a long post about crafting traits. My favorite option among those discussed is to limit the effectiveness of such traits to three per outfit for armor. Why, what that means, and other suggestions require much more reading. Proceed at your own risk.

Basically, there are three very popular armor traits: impen, divines, and infused. Reinforced is in the orbit of this trinary system is you are a tank. Other traits, especially prosperous and training, form a less popular duo. In the middle are traits that are OK for some regular builds but still get far less use than the popular group.


Every trait can be useful for something, but the less popular ones are often for specific types of situations or unique builds, whereas the more popular ones are good for general use in either PvP or PvE. That’s because they help the most with managing outgoing damage or incoming damage (this second one includes healing).


When the least popular traits show up in dropped set items, players get frustrated. There are many threads on this. Also, some players feel locked into “needing” certain traits to be competitive, making the frustration of RNG for getting the “right” traits even worse. Below are potential solutions. The first has been offered by many people. I also share my own proposals. Feel free to share yours. These can ideas can be separately (either this *or* that) or together.


1. Limit (the majority) of dropped items to the big three + one (impen, infused, divines, reinforced), with a small percentage being well-fitted (for some stam PvP builds) or sturdy (for tanks) and none being prosperous or training. The latter two would only come from players intentionally crafting them.


2. Remove impen. Not a typo. Give the current imen bonus for each piece of light armor worn, so that base mitigation for wearing cloth is still inferior but you take less damage from critical hits. Create a 5-piece set that gives the old impen bonus (reduced chance of critical hit). Balance the new PvP meta without the impen bandaid for power-creep.


3. Boost the value of prosperous and training. Have prosperous give far more gold, also have it give more telvar, and maybe have it give a small chance to get an extra set item from a chest. Can do some similar buffing for training. Still, these won’t be as useful as the big three+one because they don’t help manage incoming and outgoing damage. See suggestions #4 and #5


4. Rework game so that managing damage isn’t the end-all be-all. Rework prosperous and training to be useful in the new other-than-damage area of the game. This obviously is huge and long-term, somewhat impractical at the moment (like prosperous and training).


5. Limit the effectiveness of crafting traits to three. So even if you wear 7 pieces of divines you only get the value of 3 pieces. The values can be adjusted a bit to still make 3 pieces useful, but not as powerful as wearing 6 or 7 in the old system to keep things balanced. This will help to make the value of other sets increase. I can see 3+3+1 and 2+2+2+1 combos becoming popular. So for PvE I might to 3 divines + 3 infused + 1 prosperous (if it’s fixed as per suggestion #3). People would be less upset about getting various traits from the loot table.

Yes, we could change the less popular traits again to do different things but that won’t get at the imbalance of the relative value of the crafting traits. Most people on the forums seem focused on something similar to suggestion #1, and suggestion #4 is a bit much, so I would like to see a combination of suggestions #2, #3, and #5