Seals to prevent QL loss / enchant decay / shattering (not the animals)

[Davih 1,340]

So, this probably the last suggestion i'm going to post about this kind of things, it's a very specific one, but it can be changed in pretty much every aspect, i will just write a bunch of ideas all at once, and it's not "everything or nothing" so feel free to say what parts you like and what you don't, or what you would change.

Issues this suggestion is trying to address:

- Moonmetals (and also steel) items are becoming obsolete because with recent changes they will be too expensive/stressful to mantain
- Improving tools to a very high QL is often punishing and leads to extreme waste of time which can't be avoided, the only solution is to keep them under a certain level of QL, negating the efforts of even trying to imp above a certain point
- Enchant decay mechanics are extremely punishing in an extremely random way (losing from 88 to 87 woa on a regular shovel is fine, losing a point from a 109 woa supreme item would be a very-unlikely yet absolute tragedy)
- Shattering mechanic is still very punishing in a very random way, and the only way to prevent it is the metallic liquid, which is a pretty rare and too specifically obtained item, we would like to have more of them, and we end up not using them anyway because we can't even find or "produce" them and give up to the change of a random punishment anyway.
- There is no realistically useful current use for high QL gems in the game


The Idea: 
The idea is to add 3 new kind of rune-like items called seals, or maybe in some other way.

They will work similarly to imbue potions, but they will be crafted with gems or other items. the QL of the seal will help to "imbue" more of that effect into the item that is used.

One is already there, and it's "shatter protection" , two new buffs would be added, working in a similar way: "enchantment protection" and "quality protection"

The seals will be created with recipes involving different gems and/or other items, an idea for a recipe(feel free to add items) could be:

Shatter Protection Seal recipe 
2 Ring
1 Chain
4 Emerald
2 Opal
2 Diamond
2 Sapphire

Enchantment Protection Seal recipe 

2 Ring
1 Chain
4 Sapphire
2 Opal
2 Diamond
2 Ruby

Quality Protection Seal recipe
2 Ring
1 Chain
4 Ruby
2 Opals
2 Diamond
2 Emerald


The resulting QL of a seal will depend on the average QL of gems (working similarly to any multi-item crafting recipe) and the skill used to create them (could be Channeling for all of them, or maybe 3 different skills - difficulty could be around 40)

How will they work
Using a seal on an item will add from 1 to X (20-30?) to the respective imbue , depending on seal QL and the skill roll for imbueing, exactly like imbue potions.
Any of those 3 "imbues" can go up to 100, like shatter protection is now.

- Shatter protection will keep working exactly as it's working now, this is just a new method to obtain it (or replacement?)
- Enchantment protection will work like this: everytime an enchant is triggered to decrease by 1 point, it will instead consume 20 (or more, even 40-50) points from the "enchantment protection" or remove the protection if it's lower than 20.
- Quality protection : Everytime you repair an item, instead of losing QL the QL loss will trigger a chance to decrease the "quality protection" by a flat amount, i'm not sure if imbues can have decimals, in that case it's easy, otherwise it could just roll a chance to lose X points from the imbue, with increasing chances depending on how much quality should have been lost, on average luck, a 100imbue should cover somewhere between a total 5 - 10QL loss.

My hypothesis are pretty raw, but they should be balanced in a way to be more expensive than re-imping and generally a bad investment if used on a regular 90QL iron tool, but a good investment on a 98QL rare one , or a 90ql moonmetal one.

Notes :
- This will not make repairing useless, high repairing means your "quality protection" will last much longer
- This will not make enchants market engulf, it's not aimed at working efficiently on non-rare skillers and such, it should be too expensive to be used on let's say, a 97coc normal shovel. and it's not like when your coc on an imbued tool decreases from 105 to 104 you can get it recasted, anyway, it should be specifically aimed to be worth it only on at least rare 100+ casted tools, or should be balanced accordingly
- This should be aimed and balanced only to provide better QoL on very-high end stuff, and is not meant to replace the middle-high end tool manteinance. Because there is a point in the game where you never change your tools anymore anyway. (i.e. having a supreme 97ql 103+ casted tools) if it goes down to 96 ql, you either imp it back yourself, or you're not going to look for somebody for that 95-96-97ql improve, even more for casts, if you have a 106, even if it wears down 3 times to 102, it will just cause frustration, because you cannot even improve the cast back to 105+ (cause of how +5 recast enchanting works), so it doesn't really affect the  market but just the player being pissed off by the fact that his tool isn't as good as before, but not really making him look for another one.
- As said above, constant reimping of tools to 95-97ql iron/steel is nothing more than a chore for high skilled players who will only do that for themselves, so it would be better to have a sink for gems or other high value items than having this chore, making everyone happier in the process, and with moonmetals, the money sink would be just too big, so nobody will use them at this stage. This valuables-sink would be the same for every materials, making them all viable (also a choice, you can always re-imp if you want)

Edited March 13, 2020 by Davih

[Tobari 11]

I'm not a priest, but I am a terraformer who has run more shovels and picks down to QL1 than I can remember, so I support this 100%.

[CreZ 284]

Maybe this would be a good use for one of the gem types in my previous idea:

A certain flavor of vesseled gem could give a timed protection to reduce ql/enchant loss during use.

[Davih 1,340]

7 minutes ago, CreZ said:

Maybe this would be a good use for one of the gem types in my previous idea:

A certain flavor of vesseled gem could give a timed protection to reduce ql/enchant loss during use.

Ah, i remember talking about this i GL, but i never noticed that you actually made the thread

[Etherdrifter 2,518]

Not that insanely overpowered, I like it.

Only...  Maybe have these seals be activated by casting a spell on them?  So make the seal, enchant it, apply it.

[Davih 1,340]

1 minute ago, Etherdrifter said:

Not that insanely overpowered, I like it.

Only...  Maybe have these seals be activated by casting a spell on them?  So make the seal, enchant it, apply it.

Sure, why not, it would be just slightly more complex to code, but if they did it for transmutation liquid, i guess it's viable

[Ecrir 887]

Perhaps require fully vesseled gems in the recipe instead of normal gems? They could probably also tweak the difficulty of the recipe in such a way that only high ql gems (say 50+) would have more than 0% chance to be added when crafting this stuff, so that you can't get around spending such an amount of favor on the vesseling.

 

Perhaps also sprinkle in a moon metal requirement into the recipes, probably the rings. There's 3 types of moon metals and 3 seals, so you could add seryll to the shatter protection recipe, glimmer to the enchant protection and addy to the quality protection. Perhaps require the chain to be made of steel?

 

All that combined it's quite some effort, but feels balanced to me.

[Davih 1,340]

Just now, Ecrir said:

Perhaps require fully vesseled gems in the recipe instead of normal gems? They could probably also tweak the difficulty of the recipe in such a way that only high ql gems (say 50+) would have more than 0% chance to be added when crafting this stuff, so that you can't get around spending such an amount of favor on the vesseling.

 

Perhaps also sprinkle in a moon metal requirement into the recipes, probably the rings. There's 3 types of moon metals and 3 seals, so you could add seryll to the shatter protection recipe, glimmer to the enchant protection and addy to the quality protection. Perhaps require the chain to be made of steel?

 

All that combined it's quite some effort, but feels balanced to me.

+1 on the full-vesseled requirement , if that is easy to code, not sure if we need the 50+ limit, since using lower QL ones would result in lower QL seals anyway, so it's already designed to be punishing
+1 on moonmetal requirement for rings, could also be steel chain for QL / Bronze for enchant / Brass for shatter