Increasing Item Repair costs

Reforging items like this might cause some items to never be abandoned so that they don't show up as loot on monsters.

However if a Town's Armory NPC gives people item order deeds (similar to the current UO bulk order deeds), then all those items created by players will become loot on monsters after they turn in the items to the NPC.

That will also create all the items in the games, not just the popular items. The Order Deeds, will create a wide variety of items useable as loot.

 

I'm only on board with reforging if its sole purpose is to retain item history. It should require the same or more skill, the same or more ingredients, and the same or more extraneous conditions (like using a special forge for example) to reforge any item IMO. That way several things happens:

1) You can continue building the legend of your item ad infinitum, until you lose it.

2) Crafters who might otherwise make replacements for that item still have a market, since they're the ones who have to reforge it.

3) Doing it this way creates a lot of opportunity for leveraging the mystique of broken item parts. They'd need to add enhanced tooltips to items to display this kind of information, but how cool would it be if you defeated a powerful Lich Lord and recovered as loot a:

Strange Broken Sword Blade​

This blade's edge has seen better days,​

partly corroded and chipped with obvious​

signs of combat. The damage is too extensive​

to make out the blade's finer features.​

It hums with invisible energy.​

​

It could be anything, cursed, blessed, imbued... But you have to gamble on reforging to ultimately discover the blade's true history.​

 

AMEN. I whole heatedly agree.

 

This is really cool. That would be very interesting to see happening.

 

Yeah, I'd started to say this but, there's just a huge pile of "we don't know" associated with items.

What does the power curve look like? i.e. if I only care about stats, what's my ROI look like on "best gear."
Is there some sense of strategic resources or something like because I own castle x or because I just killed dragon y or because this city has access to mine z, I can make a certain sword.
Is there some gear that's earned, e.g. through a quest, or by killing 1000 enemies. These things might have been BoP in some other game...what would I do in this game?

My feeling is that a blacksmith should be viable even in a game with zero other players. So I could always have some level of NPC supply and NPC demand. There's no reason we must have some artificial pull on players so that the game needs blacksmiths. If the player market works, great. But it shouldn't be make or break. People should feel useful in any profession even with single player offline.

 

This could mean the crafter might not only have the skill level to craft this item in the first place, but they also need to have learned the recipe for this item. They have to have crafted an exact same item to be able to reforge an existing one.

That's awesome, because it requires crafters to actually learn the recipe to reforge an item (created the exact item from scratch before), and not just be some alt character that you built up to act as your own personal crafter.

This has win written all over it.

 

Not just the ability to craft the sword but also possibly the requisite level of "Enhance" skill that would be required to add whatever tier of blessing or curse is on it if you were to create it yourself. The main benefit of reforging should be to reacquire the history element of the item, not the item itself. In other words, in every case it should be cheaper and easier to just have a new item crafted than it would be to reforge the same item.

This would create a niche market for people who combine specializations in Enhance and a particular weapon type as well. It could add a legitimately deep and totally awesome element to the crafting game. I so hope a dev reads these posts. It would completely awesome to have that kind of mystery and persistent player-made lore in the game while at the same time creating a legitimately viable strategy for crafting specialization.

 

That's pretty easy to work around. Just add NPCs that can reforge items to the offline game, whereas in the online game those NPCs are absent, requiring other players to do reforging.

 

Single Player Offline - yes
Single Player Online - no

Once offline the character can never go back online so the NPC can not be used to circumvent the economy.

 

That's what I meant. Sorry, I thought it was implied by the content of my post.

 

I was sure you meant it the way it was implied. Just wanted to point it out for those that don't always pick up on things when they read this stuff.

 

That's a great point. I think this part of what you said will actually still cause some people to recycle their items rather than reforge them. So people can still find items with cool histories.

However I think the reforging price should never continually increase either. Let the additional cost of resources be fixed. It's the continually increasing prices that should also be eliminated not just keeping the item history. The continually increasing repair cost needs to be a fixed fee or people will still swap gear to fight trash mobs.

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On the topic of finding items on monsters, let the items that were recycled not require a reforge, but just a standard repair when they are found as loot. That way the looted item is cool to find.

Also along those lines, if an item is found that was created by some Bulk order deed, there could be some generated fake NPC history on the item as well, like previously owned by Slick and purchased from (NPC who issued the bulk deed), then looted from his corpse by a balron or something like that.

 

I too am very worried about ever increasing repair costs, it seems to contradict the whole idea of players building special item histories. Reforging for an increasing, but capped, repair cost seems like a win-win. The economy is still stimulated and crafters gain business, while players are able to pay a bit more in order to keep their favorite and history weapons.