DONE - Workbench

There will be a workbench in the town where you will be able to craft equipment from materials.

I'm still not quite sure how this will go. Let me know if you got ideas.

I still want people to farm monsters for equipments. This means crafted items must not be too strong.

Should player be able to craft blue, orange or gold equipments or only up to orange?
Should crafted equipments have a special characteristic?

I was thinking crafted equipment could be like a regular equipment stat-wise except that you get to choose the first bonus and that bonus is the strongest roll possible.
Ex: If 10-20% Fire Dmg is possible roll, it would be 20% Fire Dmg on a crafted equipment.

Player could choose is they want to create a blue or yellow equipment, with different cost.
There would also be a tiny chance that crafting a yellow equipment would actually craft a gold equipment.

What do you think?

It still has to be benefical to put in the effort to get a specific type of loot rather than crafting it directly. Maybe crafted items should not benefit of stronger original rolls and perhaps have all rolls hidden, forcing them to be updated to get to a level that is still surpassable by actual loot.

I'm not sure how rarity affects an item. Is it a multiplier for rolls? Maybe have a chance to craft rare items that is not as high as the chance for rarity in loots and quest rewards. Adding more crafting ingredients highens that chance in a way that it can surpass actual rarity chances by margins.

Remember: The point of crafting is to get equipment you need but cannot afford to grind for.

It would also be nice to have a way to improve gear. Let's say a roll is 5%. Add a lot of ingredients to increase it to 5.1%. Add a lot of similar equipment on higher levels to increase the equipment level and perhaps even the rarity. Here care must be taken to make the price so high that players would rather search for loot or craft anew. It's intended for players who fell in love with a specific outfit and want it to still be usable after many level-ups.

Ark wrote:
I'm not sure how rarity affects an item. Is it a multiplier for rolls?

I don't think there are any multipliers; at least, not from what I've seen in actual rolling. However, rarity determines how many boosts an item has (gold being 6, orange 4-5).

rc wrote:Should player be able to craft blue, yellow or gold equipments or only up to yellow?
Should crafted equipments have a special characteristic?

I think, if you want crafting to be meaningful at all, it has to allow the best of the best. If you can only craft blues, there is no reason to do it for long -- you'll have much better gear very quickly. If you can't make golds, then after a point (wherein a player is using golds) they won't find any use in the system anymore.

I think the intent should be to make a crafting system relevant from early to mid into late game. There should never be a point where crafting feels useless or a waste of time; which is honestly where many games fail when implementing a system. I'd say even the majority of modern MMO's tend to make crafting very difficult for little reward early on, or totally gimped end-game. Remember, crafting doesn't have to preclude going out in the wild. You can reward materials from tasks, quests, dungeons, and so forth that enhance or make crafting very appealing.

Now, if you're not keen on adding materials/resources and instead still want the best stuff to drop from mobs, I will propose a crafting system that involves something akin to item fusing.

• Players can take a dropped item, and destroy it through the bench, but saving one of the attributes to a magical orb/computer chip/whatever. This 'boost chip' could then be added during the crafting process to add that attribute to the item. The roll would then be determined by how many resources or materials you invested into it.
  
• Adding more 'chips' to an item obviously make getting gold items far too easy, so I'd suggest that each chip after 4 (4 being the first tier you get an orange item) has a chance to 'glitch' and break. Basically, you'd lose the chip and the item wouldn't get that boost. Each extra chip would increase that chance of failure.
  
• Attributes that were fused from a chip can not be pulled off again (ie. you can't add a boost, then make a chip from it when you're going to upgrade the item later).
  
• Allow the base damage modifiers or defensive modifiers to be changed on items through the system (ie. the x1.5 and x1.25, and the defensive allocations). This allows a much greater freedom in choosing fun uniques, and lets more synergy through.
  
• Personally, I'd also work the entire reroll system into this 'workbench' system, as it would feel much more streamlined and make sense.
  
• This system makes the UI pretty clean and easy to understand for complex crafts. It's simply drag and drop your 'chips' into the crafting screen with a base weapon. There's no overwhelming list with tons of attributes and numbers. Introducing it wouldn't be too overwhelming either.
  

If you want to make sure there are still drop-only items that are power-houses, I'd prefer going with 'set' style items akin to the Diablo series; give them unique bonuses that make them worth using in place of raw stat power from crafting, but also allowing a mix'n'match of set bonuses, raw craft power, and crafted unique synergies.

Some other idle thoughts:

• Allow items to be personalized! I rarely see it in games, but the few that do it make it fun: Let the player who crafts an item above a specific rarity (say, 5 boost orange or 6 boost gold) to name their item. Example of how it would appear is: 'Darklight' Orb, or 'Rin's Tear' Sapphire Amulet. The personalized name could appear as the main name, and then in the tooltip have it appear in smaller text beneath it. That would allow the names to fit in the UI very well.
  
• Allow personalized cosmetic looks for crafted items. It could be at the cost of CP, like it is now, but I feel the CP cost is actually pretty high just to look unique -- especially since they apply to single items, not accounts. This means when you go to upgrade, you lose that 100 CP investment. Right now, CP isn't hard to manage -- later on, if you had lots of players, it would seem a bit disjointed to me.
  
• Don't make the investment for crafting low rarity or low level items high. Blues should be cheap, cheap, cheap! Craft systems that fail often do because the effort vs. reward ratio is way off. Players should be able to make a cool set of gear very early on; it's fun. It allows players to feel like their accomplishing things right away, and they 'get what they want', in a sense.
  
• On the flip side, make sure crafting higher rarities is a bit harder -- but not to the point of frustrating.
  
• Don't add vertical crafting levels. All it does is force players to spam craft lots of useless items to get where they need for crafting to be useful -- it's not fun and another big misstep many games make.
  
• Allow crafted items to have unique 'Imbue' properties, in replacement of dungeon properties. Players could choose to overwrite a craft or dungeon imbue when they are rewarded them. In theory, you could reward a 'chip' from dungeons with the dungeon 'imbue' on it, so it can be crafted onto an item of the players choice in the future. This has the added benefit of making successive dungeon runs still useful after maxing an item, as players could work on saving a maxed imbue 'chip' for later.
  

I'll leave it at this for now. All in all, I'd say don't implement crafting at all if it's not going to be useful and accessible at all stages of the game, but if it is, then it has the potential to be awesome and allow a LOT of customization and personalization for players.

As discussed ingame, in order to make spending resources in rerolling worthwhile, rerolls should be nearly as good as original rolls instead of puny 50%. This avoids the issue that one postpones rerolling because getting good original rolls on new loot is likely.

Another reason why I rarely attempt rerolling is because levels cause my efforts to become redundant relatively quickly. Therefore levels have to be upgradable. Solution below next paragraph.

Finally, since rerolling is basically just 'rolling the dices again', simply farming loot might make more sense price-wise. Therefore a more selective upgrading system should exist. This point becomes weak if the first issue mentioned in this post is fixed, because then rerolling becomes a way to 'roll the dices again' by disassembling items that already lost their value due to outmatched stats.
If we however still agree on having selective updating, I suggest stat orbs, which are basically units of a specific roll type. For example an Orb of Range Damage would equal the value +0.01% Range Dmg. For example, if I disassemble a bow with the only roll being +5% Range Dmg and choose to obtain orbs instead of materials (idea taken from task rewards), I would get 500 Orb of Range Damage.
In order to roll a specific roll type that hasn't been rolled yet, I need to spend the equal amount of orbs as the maximum potential is valued. For example a bow with max 10% RDMG needs 1000 RDMG orbs to roll RDMG at a random value. Price can be multiplied with a global constant.
As for increasing the value, we already have reroll orbs, and the roll minimum can be raised by spending the stat orbs, up to a maximum of the minimum.

Back to issue #2. Disassembling should also give the choice of level orbs. If I disassemble a lv30 item, I get 30 orbs (or x0.5 or any other factor if you want a penalty). Adding one (or x2 or ...) level orb to an item raises it by one level. Since stats are stored as factors, stats will grow with the level.

EDIT: I also forgot about element factor and rarity.
Rarity should be updated the same way as level, using rarity orbs. With their own global constant multiplier which should be much higher than for the level, because rarity is updated only once or twice per item (also, don't value blue, orange and gold at 0, 1 and 2, but at x, y, z where they accurately represent the rarity to obtain the rarity).
Element factor should simply be rerollable with some price, such as materials, etc.

Please don't forget about Rin's suggestion of naming items. It is something that could be done with CP (but one should be able to see the equipment of other players to make naming items worthwhile).

A few things to note based on my experience with the game:
- Crafting should only include upgrading, not creating fresh items. Loot is abundant, therefore getting the right type of upgrading base to work on is not hard. Though there should be a guaranteed way for newcomers to get a specific item type, because for example, I got my first orb only past lv10. Your idea of overworld chests could solve exactly that by guaranteeing the item type on each chest.
- Crafting should not include appearance change. Instead one should be able to purchase permanent appearances via CP (but allow multiple purchases which are choosable after purchase!).

This is what I got planned. Each equip can be disassembled in one of the following ways:

-Sold to shop for gold.

-Converted into materials

-Extract stat bonus:
Give 1 stat orb (ex: Range Dmg Orb) for a particular stat of the equip. (You choose which one.)

-Extract power orb:
Give X power orb. X = equip lvl

-Extract level orb:
Give X level orb. X = equip lvl

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Normal rerolls and original rolls will have same possible values.

You can reroll equip power by using power orbs + materials. Using them can result in power higher than the maximum original power.
Normal Reroll: Only cost material, possible roll = 0-100%
Orb Reroll: Material + X Power orb: possible roll = 0-125%. Guaranteed to be better than current roll by at least 3%.
X = level of equip. #Material = level of equip.

You can increase equip level by spending X level orbs + material on an equip.
X = (level of the equip)*5. #Material = level of equip.

Using stat orb (ex: Range Dmg Orb) on an equip that already has a Range Dmg bonus to reroll its value while keeping same stat.
Normal Reroll: Only cost material, possible roll = 0-100%
Normal Reroll and keeping same stat: Cost material + orb of reroll, possible roll = 0-100%
Orb Reroll: Material + 1 Stat orb: possible roll = 0-125%. Guarantee to be better than current roll by at least 3%.
#Material = level of equip.

The new crafting system has been added to the game!