Short recap of the current durability situation for those who joined us only after Early Access.
During the first beta, we had big issues with the durability system, with crafting mastery levels that gave huge amounts of extra durability to items and no durability loss on knockdown/Death. This led to a quick saturation of the market and death of the economy. Ranged characters in particular had eternal equipments.
To address this, the devs have correctly applied 2 changes in this new Beta:
- Halved the bonuses to durability granted by mastery levels.
- 5% durability loss on knockdown, and another 5% if you get executed.
With these 2 changes, the equipment has now again a limited life, and what matters the most, pvp finally causes an effective durability loss, while previously it was a pve only thing.
As many have experienced in these first days of Beta, the life of an equipment can now be as short as a 2 days if you really go at it. Also, the coming raids will be impressive durability grinders.
In my personal opinion this is a fine situation, it is an improvement over the previous system, and adds to the depth of the game. It doesn't come without issues though, and the elephant in the room are clearly the poor t1 warrior equipments.
It was already a VERY harsh experience for warrior, discovering that to get a metal armor he had to take days of work between mining and smelting. The fact that he is now likely to lose that armor in 2-3 days has been the cause of some rage quitting from the game.
In fact, I believe that for this system to work, there must be some rebalancing of materials needed for the crafts, and in particular for the craft of t1 metal equipment.
I would propose the following:
- Chain armor 5 ingots (2 -1 - 1 -1 )
- Plate armor 5 ingots (2 -1 - 1 -1 )
They are t1 equipments that don't even require a recipe, they can't require the concerted effort of a city to be made!
- Leather/Hide armor 50 hides. No changes.
- Common clothes 50 fibers. No changes.
The crafting effort for these t1 armors is the correct one given their low durability.
- Scholar/Assassin 125 fibers. (50-25-25-25)
- Rogue/Warlock/Ranger/Hunter 125 hides. (50-25-25-25)
The T2 cloth and leather armors have always had a frankly risible cost in base materials. Since we are talking about rebalancing crafting efforts, I believe that they should be addressed too.
- BattleMage/Cleric 15 ingots. No changes.
- Slayer/Knight 20 ingots. No changes.
The crafting effor for these t2 metal armors is already considerably high.
As for the weapons:
- Metal weapons. No changes.
- Wooden light shield 3 planks
- Wooden medium shield 5 planks
- Quarterstaff 5 planks
- Shortbow 5 planks
- Longbow 5 planks
- Club 5 planks
- All trees (except the ones which reward only hardwood), yield only one plank of the specific wood of that tree and the rest of the planks are hardwood.
- Remove hardwood plank as a material (hardwood logs are still usable as building materials)
The difference in difficulty between making a weapon in metal and one in wood is light and day. While metal weapons have lower durability and should be easier to make, the difference is just too much. These changes would make it still easier to craft wooden weapons, but would give at least a little bit of dignity to the wooden materials.
