So one thing that is bugging me about LAO III is that Normal, Magic and Unique weapons are useless vendor trash compared to the Legendary weapons. I have nerfed them too much and made Legendary weapons too powerful. Basically there are ton of items that will never be used because of this.
The way that items are set up is that with every quality increase (Normal > Magic > Unique > Legendary) there is a both a damage increase by increasing the damage rarity and an increase in the number of affixes that can spawn on items.
For weapons, this weakens the lower tiers dramatically compared to the upper tears. One good Legendary weapon will last 20+ levels or more. Making it a waste of time to even look at lower tiered weapons.
With armor in LAO III, this is actually ok, because the differences are not as dramatic in most cases. I find that I wear a pretty good balance of different tiered armor quality, even green items can be very useful especially with enchanting. I look at every piece of armor before selling them... with weapons I just sell them off without needing to look because they are junk.
So here are my two main ideas on how to resolve this.
1. Set every weapon tier to have the same base Damage Rarity, essentially giving them all the same base damage.
2. The main difference then becoming how many affixes the items can have. The higher the tier, the more affixes the items can have.
By doing this, it can potentially make every weapon useful to some degree at some point. The way to improve weapon damage comes through higher level items (encouraging a player to progress further in the mod), affixes, enchanting, socketables, and stat investment.
This will also more than likely lead to an affix overhaul which I will most likely do at the same time. Taking some ideas from my item overhaul mod such as 1h weapons and 2h weapons being able to spawn different affixes.
I have other ideas, but this is what I will start with.
Before I add any more new weapons, I think I need to deal with this issue first.
Hey RnF,
This is interesting! I guess most games work that way, you get some higher tear item and everything below gets junk...
I would prefere a system where a Normal weapon can be nearly as good as a legendary. Therefore I'd say Normal weapons have the highest dmg rarity and legendarys the lowest. This way the Affixes have to bring the difference while you can find viable normal weapons at any level.
I remember some ppl called "the white legion" playing TL2 with normal items only..
Another way could be DPS based - the more stuff the weapon gets, the slower it will attack.
with that legendary Items could get junk pretty fast in progress...
Hey RnF,
This is interesting! I guess most games work that way, you get some higher tear item and everything below gets junk...
I would prefere a system where a Normal weapon can be nearly as good as a legendary. Therefore I'd say Normal weapons have the highest dmg rarity and legendarys the lowest. This way the Affixes have to bring the difference while you can find viable normal weapons at any level.
I remember some ppl called "the white legion" playing TL2 with normal items only..
Another way could be DPS based - the more stuff the weapon gets, the slower it will attack.
with that legendary Items could get junk pretty fast in progress...
hmm, reversed thinking with item damage rarity, that is interesting! This is actually very doable. Will have to give it some thought, but
really like this. Does change my mod quite a bit though ha. But it makes all weapons useful to some degree and gives the player something to work on with the items to make them better. This could be a good "crafting" system, all through a random one.
I could compliment the amount of affixes that spawn on items with enchanting and socketables. Normal Item enchantments would cost more slots while Legendary Enchantments cost the least amount of slots which would allow Legendary items to get the most item bonuses.
Could also make some more powerful socketables that can only be slotted into Legendary items (I think, never tried that before).
Thanks for the input!
great!
Mate I really appreciate this "collaboration"
I am still far from modding these things - I may do it but on really low speed since its all new to me... But I have these ideas in mind for a long time
Let me shout out another thing here that I'm tossing with:
I was thinking about more decision based mechanics called "influence" - to unlock quests and so on - it's a simple stat in the range of negative to positive and whatever you do (finish a quest or something) you get a stack of that stat.
I was wondering if Item Affixes could roll off that stat so when your "influence" is high the weapon will roll a more powerful affix while it rolls normal around 0 influence and "crazy" if influence is negative.
The Idea is a counter mechanic to enchanting: "corrupting"
By "crazy" I mean something that is stronger then a good roll for the price of a really bad roll. lets say you get a huge life on hit roll but lose life over time?! Or High crit chance and a negative armor roll.
these Items could work out like a balancing tool. You lack in DMG but got lots of armor? get a corrupted weapon! You need more defensive stats? get a corrupted chest armor wich lowers your crit chance to 0?
things like that, havn't really figured them out yet but I guess you got the point.
edit:
original post - first mentionedagain, I just through them out here because I fell like you might get them to run
Sorry it has taken so long to get back to you. I appreciate the collaboration as well. Helps with new ideas.
I have been working on my weapons in my LAO III mod and am testing the rarity changes we discussed. I didn't go all in with Normal items having the highest Damage Rarity, but they are number 2
I like it so far. It feels better and most weapons can be useful now. But in the early stages of testing, so will follow up with more once I have progressed more.
The influence thing sounds cool. Not sure how to go about that, this sort of thing isn't my strong suit when it comes to tl2 modding. Affixes can reference stats though, so I think this would be possible.
Corrupting is possible, the affix would have to two effects. One being the big health boost, and the second being the negative effect of loosing health. Wayback has something like this in his affix expansion mod. Basically an affix would add a crazy amount of armor, but slow you down by 20% because it was "heavy" armor.