Will Our Gear Lose Efficiency With Damage? Should it?

The present wiki page doesn't appear to directly address this - or maybe I'm not seeing it?

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Item_sinks#Item_durability

To clarify, in some games your weapons and gear begin to lose efficiency, when damaged/when their durability is lower. Do we know yet if this will be the case in AoC? Yours truly prefers a system where your efficiency is NOT impacted, until durability hits 0%. This is because it's quite discouraging to continue something like a big raid where the party has wiped 5 times, and with each successive attempt, your gear is less and less effective.

Or SHOULD it be the case that gear efficiency goes down with lower durability, in order to make death penalties more impactful?

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Comments

ariatras

I am all for realism, and this sounds okay. But it will simply turn out a chore and not be conductive to a better gaming experience. It might even be worse.

Vhaeyne

Sathrago wrote: »

I don't see this being a viable way for durability to work and my reason is simply supply and demand.

If that system were in place it would completely screw over players using rare or higher value items. It would make repairing them cost too much. Also, this would require a whole scaling system on damage and effects to persistently calculate the durability of your item in real time, causing it to constantly fluctuate and quite possibly cause a ton of issues on the system's end.

That is the risk vs reward Steven wont shut up about.

Sometimes you have to put on a worst set if you know you are going to be out making YOLO decisions.

McMackMuck

I'm in favor of items taking damage and supporting the artesan economy.

Items should very slowly take damage from use.

here's my contribution / idea...

There should be a band of item durability damage that results in no performance loss.
This might be 70%- 100% of perfect condition.
At 50% and below the item linearly drops it's effectiveness down to zero.

Basic maintenance can put a 10% buffer on item damage, allowing for players to look after their gear, clean, polish, etc. after every battle, without needing crafter support after minor skirmishes. That buffer is damaged first, before any real durability loss is counted.

When an item drops below 70% durability then half the damage it takes below 70% can never be repaired.
So look after your gear!
Another cap would apply that says any repair can't do better than double the %age durability that is left

durability max repair
90% 100%
80% 100%
70% 100%
69% 99.5%
68% 99%
60% 95%
50% 90%
40% 80%
30% 60% consider scrap value!
20% 40% consider scrap value!
10% 20% consider scrap value!

The above also assumes that the repairing crafter has a high enough skill and materials to achieve a maximum repair, which obviously depends on a number of variables.

Songcaller

I'm not down to repair my gear multiple times on a single occasion. The reality of such a method would make the game very unplayable in my mind. I'd have to spend all my time making gold and locating resources (Bidding wars, price wars, resource wars) and less and less time Raiding and PvPing.

Edit: Such a system would prevent over-enchanting too. We do not know the amount of durability loss through over-enchants or if you must be at 100% durability to over-enchant, but, I do not want the current iterations to be changed without tests.

McMackMuck

It depends on how frequently you need to do it.

Songcaller

I do not want a job to maintain my armour to be strenuous. I don't want my armour/items to be individual Tamagotchis. I do not want Ashes of Creation to become Crafters of Creation. I don't dispute crafters will be very powerful in Ashes of Creation but I do not want to bow down to Crafters like Crafters are Gods.

There must be balance between action and crafting. The current system appears fine on paper.

Edit: The Current System.

There is item durability (item decay) in Ashes of Creation.[3]

Item durability loss occurs on death.[1][5][8]
Gear stored in a player's inventory (that is not equipped) does not lose durability when that player dies.[9]
Over enchanting an item comes with the risk of durability loss.[5][10][11]
Materials are required in order to repair restore the performance of decayed items.[1][5][6][2]
Zero percent durability will unequip an item, increasing its repair costs.[4]
The decay system is not going to be some worthless "Oh I'm just going to throw some gold into this and it's a simple gold sink". It's actually going to require some base materials in order to repair decayed items; and decay occurs from death and also the destruction and disable system. For the weapons over the over-enchanting will require those materials as well. So creating that dependency I think is healthy for the crafting economy.[5] – Steven Sharif

There is durability in the game... It's not going to be a trivial durability. There is a potential to destroy gear (weapons and armor), but there is also an ability to reforge that destroyed gear using a portion of the materials necessary as well as finding an item creator who can reforge it.[3] – Steven Sharif

Frostshot1

I hope it doesn't lose efficacy until it is broken, then you need to go repair it. Otherwise people will be stuck close to town wanting to hone up their gear every hour or so. How boring would that be?

WhitneyHagasMatsumoto

In my opinion, as others have said, I prefer the method where a certain percentage of the effect is lost every time the durability value falls below a certain threshold.

This does not mean that you always have to maintain 100% durability value.
I like to be asked to make a decision on whether to take a risk, like when playing a soul-like game and wondering whether you should go further or turn back as your HP is lost.
At what point to repair would be determined by each player's preference.

Maybe there will be some interesting players who dare to play with a battered armament and spend a long time slaying dragons !
I would like to repair my armor while listening to the boastful stories of such players

Khronus

Honestly, I am not a fan of having to repair gear in a game. It boils down to a simple money sink, adds no real value to the reason.

It would be interesting if gear gets "dirty" over time (weapons covered in blood, armor dirty) and if we want to clean it we can. Maybe the dirt/oil/blood makes us a little brighter and easier to be seen on the battlefield. We would have a tactical advantage to stay clean lol. Even then it is just a time sink. There are new and unique ways to keep us in the game than just a natural waste of money over time for playing the game IMO.

Songcaller

I played EQ2 with my first girlfriend. She'd never played an MMO before. I repaired my gear, and, she didn't repair her gear. I only found out in a dungeon when her toon was stripped naked lol.

Tyranthraxus

Yours truly is still in favor of a lack of efficiency-degradation via equipment damage - but if we do see it in AoC, some of you have some good ideas in regards to loss of efficiency only after a certain point of damage; I much like this idea or notion, versus any formula that reduces efficiency that matches the present durability of equipment (i.e. efficiency loss after something like 50% durability, versus a system wherein 94% durability = 94% efficiency).

Thanks for the insight into other systems, gang! Too many MMOs out there to have played them all. Most of them have some good aspects or ideas behind them, and Intrepid is really in a position to get to cherry-pick the best ones!

Honshu

Before the spergy supporting argument, in short, hell to the fucking fuck no. Durability decrease = less item effectiveness is garbage because it will be annoying, but more deeply it will be bad for the proposed interconnectedness of the economy and the game, because it will incentivize self sustaining characters to the point where anything else would be foolish.

Consider the following; by creating a system where durability is linked to performance in a granular (performance steadily decreases) instead of a binary way (durability goes down but doesn't matter until it suddenly matters very much), you make players want to be self sufficient. You make them want to repair all their own stuff, because they are going to need to repair their own stuff VERY often to maintain optimal effectiveness. In fact, I would argue that an inability to repair your own stuff (which will influence your class/tradeskill/gathering choices to an extreme degree) will make you so much less effective that there will be basically no other way to play.

Picture an average adventuring day with this granular system; you're all repaired up, you have all your gear ready, you have any consumables or materials you may need, and you head out from the most local town or node or whatever and start doing some quests and killing some monsters. You kill a pack of monsters, then you repair, because if you don't, you will be noticeably less effective (and if you aren't noticeably less effective, if it's barely noticeable, why would you have this system at all?). Then you do some quests, then you have to repair. Then you may notice you're starting to get low on raw materials you need to use to repair your gear or not. If you run out, your effectiveness becomes reduced to the point where you can't really quest and fight effectively anymore. You go back home, start gathering or otherwise acquiring the materials you need to repair your own gear again, and rinse repeat tomorrow.

Contrast this with a binary durability system, where effectiveness is not reduced based on durability. Suddenly, you do not have to have those skills and materials ON HAND to maintain combat effectiveness. You can probably save that repair work for when you're at the end of your adventuring day, and maybe when you get back to town you can go through the market system or something to get your gear repaired. This difference means you now FEEL like you have the freedom to pick the tradeskills you want instead of just the ones that will most effectively keep your character at maximum effectiveness, and are therefore more likely to outsource your gear repair needs.

TLDR: A system that directly incentivizes self sustained play (and durability being linked to gear effectiveness DOES incentivize self sustained play, because the desire to be at peak effectiveness at all times is VERY STRONG) will actually hurt the interconnectedness the devs seek to achieve. If a full adventuring day can be achieved without necessarily having to worry about repairing (but obviously maintaining it as an "eventual necessity,"), you remove the desire/requirement for having those skills necessarily be on your character, therefore a player is actually more prone to outsourcing his repair needs to other players, allowing people who desire to focus on that gameplay to have their skills and efforts desired and rewarded, and therefore increasing the chance of interconnectedness.

Songcaller

To be blunt, if there is a PvP Spiral other than Corruption (Namely, stat dampening based on item durability) the crafters will find less people willing to protect the nodes, the crafters and the supply lines. If no-one is paid to protect the nodes, the crafters and the supply lines then why the hell would they risk 100% Effectiveness to protect other people.

WhitneyHagasMatsumoto

I see!
I've never played an MMO, so once again, I've got a better idea of the sort of "game experience philosophy" regarding MMOs!

So what Honshu-san is saying is that "imposing a certain level of restrictions on the damage system for weapons and armor will inevitably encourage interaction between players"!
(If I'm understanding this wrong, I hope the translation AI evolves lol)

Damn, I was slow to understand! The logic should be very easy to understand once you put it into words, but I tend to rely on my senses too much and lose sight of the essence ……

Constraints that encourage other players to help me.
And not too stressful. ......

Wow, this is a tough one.

As a matter of fact, a big reason I don't really like systems that don't affect efficiency until durability reaches 0% was because I feel uncomfortable with the sudden and drastic loss of efficiency.
"It was doing so much damage just now, why is it suddenly like a twig?!

" And so on. ...... lol

However, I realized that it's not that simple a problem.
This will need to be carefully considered based on a series of game experiences, including supply and demand in the alpha test.

Now I'm more motivated than ever to get into alpha testing!

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