All right ... here are some very preliminary thoughts just to let you know what kind of ideas are floating around in my mind at the moment.
First, progression.
Clearly an issue. We did deliberately change the progression with T8 because, frankly, some of the stats and stuff on lower level weapons made no sense at all. Voulges, for example, were designed to be a two-handed weapon and the art department (aka Lotus) was horrified to discover our voulges had been wielded one handed till now, so various reasons like that resulted in changes in T8.
What I would like to do is look at the selection of weapon types, damage types, and stat combinations available in T8 and identify and fill any any obvious holes where there's something clearly needed. ("Needed" meaning actually a reasonable proportion of the customers might want it -- while there might be some crushing-damage-melee-tank-spec'ed-illusionists out there somewhere who would really like a weapon statted specifically for that, I don't think that kind of thing is an itemization hole that we really need to fill in this discussion.)
Once we can identify any clear flaws or entirely missing items in T8 and get those addressed, I'd then like to take the T8 set we end up with and simply scale it backwards down to level 1. So we'll always know that a ritual dagger is a 1-h piercing weapon with mage-desirable stats, for example (or whatever we end up with). Damage type and delay general stats and name will be consistent all through.
Second, effects.
Fyreflyte did an awesome job itemizing new and cool effects on the treasured and legendary loot. Unfortunately, he didn't have a hand in the itemization of crafted weapons, which just followed the same progression pattern as in lower levels, and received only the same old imbue effects. While those effects can be nice, it's not out of the question that we could add some different effects too. What kind of effects would be desirable, without making MC weapons disproportionately desirable, is another question to discuss. Fyreflyte's very busy, as always, but if I can lure him out to lunch or something I may be able to pick his brains and see whether he has any spare effect ideas that are sitting unused. If there are particularly desirable effects on the treasured weapons that anybody has seen it's possible those could be scaled up or otherwise borrowed, so feel free to list those. I'm not sure if a set bonus might be possible (e.g. use two MC weapons, get a set bonus effect) but I could check into that also.
Prior to RoK weapons didn't have nearly so many cool effects so I'm not sure to what extent effects like this could be scaled back down to lower tiers, but one can always enquire.
Third, recipes.
With the mastercrafted armor upgrade, armor was always a lot more consistent and cookie-cutter than weapons so the existing armor was simply upgraded. The weapon changes suggested above however would significantly change the items if they are applied as suggested above. Someone's crushing weapon might change to piercing, stats and even 1- or 2-handedness might change. I don't think we can simply change the stats on existing weapons because of this, customers may be left with totally unusuable weapons, or weapons that don't do anything they bought them for. So this change would require a new set of weapons to be created (excepting 70-80) and recipes from that point on would change to make the new weapons, but the old ones would remain the same. (This would be similar to when the mastercrafted armor was changed by Beghn around the KoS expansion.)
Fourth, ammo.
It is indeed my intention to add the recipes in for weaponsmiths in all level ranges, just haven't had time to do it yet.
There's a lot more to think about and a lot more that could be said on this topic but that should at least outline four big areas regarding weaponsmiths, and my thoughts about the best way to proceed. Comments on the above, in particularly the first one, are welcome.
LINK
(DominoDev) Re:Requests from a Master Weaponsmith
