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Personal/Unique Weapons

shadowraze96shadowraze96 Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
In the discord, I posted a question about creating a weapon for the player. This idea came from a video that KanonXO did as a interview with Ghostcrawler.

In this interview, Ghostcrawler was talking of weapon progression in WoW and Lost Ark, where in WoW, you get a drop of a weapon and that will be your stat stick until you kill something at a harder difficulty and get a better BiS weapon. In Lost Ark, players start with a weapon that you just use materials and upgrade that weapon until it gets harder and harder to upgrade it. He talks of how he loves the idea that legendary figure have their personal weapons, such as King Arther has Excalibur, or Sun Wukong has Ruyi Jingu Bang.

Here is my idea of such a thing, and I will base this off of what is currently known about the weapon and crafting systems in Ashes of Creation.

In Ashes, there is a artisan system that allows crafting and gathering. Using this system, you can create a weapon that that is unique in its name. When you gather more rare resources, you can eventually upgrade this weapon that will keep its name (whether that name is given by the player or is generated by whatever materials you use), and increase stats based off the materials you use ( like if there is crit, you have to use a material that would implement this to the weapon). However there is a catch. Just because you use this material does not guarentee a 100% that it will upgrade. I believe this adds a sense of accomplishment when you are capable of making a unique end game weapon for yourself. Also, depending on the materials used, you may need to level up your smithing or even hire the help of another, more experienced smith to create or upgrade this weapon. I would even argue that you can skip tiers for this weapons upgrade system by just having the more rare materials at hand, although it may be more fair to start from a base and build it up.

With what we know of the current weapon system, we know that there is material sink to repair weapons (gold cost I assume is included in that). These unique weapons would function in the same matter. Another concept could be when you upgrade this weapon, you reset its durability to max, or even keep its durability at 0%, or even just give it a preditermined portion of max durability so that a player can use it right away, but still has the urgency to repair this weapon before hitting 0 again and not be able to use it for a bit. A fellow discord user even named that once the weapon hits 0, you could destroy it for some materials back to recraft it or even use it as a catalyst to creat a different weapon.

With these unique weapons could come unique names. Nobody wants a short sword called "Short Sword". There are two major ways I can think of at this moment to how these weapons can be named. One, players can name thier weapons how they please as lon as the guidlines are met. So no offensive slurs, or curse words. It could even use the systems for naming PC's and when a unique weapon is generated in that worlds server, it becomes locked for other players to use that name unless that player destroys his unique weapon for materials or as a catalyst for a new weapon. Another idea is that materials have a hidden pool of letter combinations that an AI would use to create a unique name based off of the materials used and what race the character is. This would only work if there is, in lore, a language that each race speaks, but when that player speaks that language and examines the weapon, they get a description of the english (or whatever language region the player is from) translation for thar weapon. Along with this, I still believe having a unique name that no one else has is a better solution to give the player a sense of "this is my weapon". So implementing the same AI mentioned above for the naming process blocks that particular combination of letters from being assigned to another weapon. (A side note is that maybe the weapon is a ??? Name until equipped, that way the name is given when the player who will own it equips it.

The final thing I would like to add is tradeability. If you need a higher level blacksmith to create or upgrade this weapon for you, this weapon would need to be tradeable so a smith could give the weapon to the correct player. I also think that interperson trading of these weapons would be a cool thing. Like you are out in the world and meet a player who acts as a merchant because he has a few unique weapons. You trade them for the weapon you want and now that weapon is yours. You obviously dont get the specialness of naming it yourself or seeing the ??? Turn into a generated name, but you do get a unique weapon that could have been owned by the leader of a specific well know guild, who does not play anymore so he sells or gives his weapon away, whether as a prize for a contest he held or as an heirloom to a fellow guild. Maybe add flavor to the description of every player who has weilded that weapon.

I feel theres more I can pitch out here on this specific topic, but I would love to theory craft this idea and even hear what Intrepid devs think of an idea such as this.
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