Material Scarcity for Repairs.

Sathrago

So naturally we don't know the full details on the material/gathering/crafting process, but I foresee a potential issue that would cause problems for repairs and crafting in general. If materials and certain items are region based exclusives, this will really impact the crafts and repairs for people who move out of their native region. An example of this would be you finally make the rare craft sword in the desert node, and travel away from it to do what you want. One day your sword is low on durability, but in order to repair it you will either have to hope that the items have been shipped to this region or travel all the way back to that desert region for those specific materials.

I can see this causing a major time sink where most games just let you walk up to any town and repair the items so you can go on your way. If we just take the fact that Bosses will be dropping high quality resources as well, If the items are unique to those bosses it causes the same situation.

Now I understand that this adds movement for both players and the economy, granting merchants an avenue to use the caravan system for greater profits. My question is this, is it worth the extremely tedious increase in time and effort to repair items? Assuming that there are material "exclusives" for different regions.

To be clear, I don't have a problem either way. It was just a question that popped up for me while reading another thread.

Ludullu

This was one of the reasons why I made a post related to the crafting system (the post itself was about OE). I'd personally prefer a "time-based" decay system rather than a "through use" one. If you craft a sword and see "this item will completely decay in 60h of equipped time" and you know that one instance of repairs restores, say, 20% of the decay bar and costs a particular amount of resources - you can plan out your gameplay around that.

Intrepid wants us to be super loyal to our nodes so, in theory, you should spend most of your time within or at least around it. So if your weapon used mats from your node - you'll be fine. And if you used items from a far away node, you might want to contract a merchant to get you those items in a timely matter and agree upon the fee for doing so. This way you have your repair mats and the merchant gets an assured income.

And the "equipped time" thing would also allow you to only use your superior weapon in special situations, while you could be using a mid-tier weapon for everything else. This kind of design would also level out the pvp playing field a bit, cause not all players would be willing to use their best weapon in pvp because the risk of speeding up the decay might not be warranted, while people with "regular" weapons would be closer in power to the "elites" with the cool but unusable toys.

P.S. I can definitely see how this kind of system could be seen as tedious to a lot of people, so it might be far from the perfect solution. But one of the later L2 updates had super cheap timed weapons that allowed poor people to go up a gear tier w/o going completely bankrupt (if they even had the money) and people used those weapons in exactly the manner I described. It didn't really feel tedious there, which is why I suggested this in my original thread.