Devblog: Crafting redesign continues 2017-06-22 16:00 - [Flatops]

Equipment upgrades
 

We started this project in parallel to the Mount Zinit project and the new distribution of resources. Simply put, the professions will allow you to upgrade your equipment. This will increase the equipment’s level and its rarity, and its stats will improve as a result!

When update 1.53 was released, we explained that some changes had been made to the Moon and Xelorium sections in order to switch them over to the equipment upgrade system. A total of 6 monster families and 2 ultimate bosses were modified. For this patch, we took on 41 families and 5 ultimate bosses, distributed over 8 different level brackets. Over 2,000 objects (and just as many recipes) have been affected!

You will now progress step-by-step by completing various activities in the world of WAKFU – not to mention the community aspect that goes along with this new form of crafting. By interacting in their own way with the world around them, each player will be able to contribute essential elements for the progression of other residents of the World of Twelve.

All of these modifications will lead to profound changes in your experience of the game between level 30 and level 200. And [Siu] is here to explain them to you.

What changes are included in this update?

The goal was to continue redefining how players progress through the world. The zones you explore, the monsters you fight, and the dungeon levels were regrouped into “brackets” a few updates ago. The overall objective was to build a coherent system that will structure the game experience throughout your adventure.

And these modifications are felt in different ways within the game:

Adjustable Levels

We’ve revised the levels of a large proportion of the equipment items in the game, and their stats have been recalibrated accordingly. These new levels will provide balanced and interesting challenges for each level bracket. Going through Stasis dungeons will therefore be a much richer experience than in the past. Your character will also progress at a more regular pace, with a better distribution of level unlock thresholds.
 

Harvests

From now on, all harvestable plant resources will have a “rare stage”. Rare resources will add a big XP boost to your harvests when you collect them, and these precious harvests will then allow you to craft even rarer objects, or can be used as a currency for exchanges with other players. No more inequalities between resources!

Rewards from battles

Droppable resources have been switched over to the Astrub model. The boss resource is now acquired from a machine for 30 tokens from the dungeon’s bracket, and the monsters in a given family will have one common resource and one rare resource, but no more than that. It’s much easier to get used to, and that improves the coherence of the game. The drop rates for different equipment have been adjusted as well!
 

Improved upgrade system

A small icon will indicate whether the item you’re looking at is an upgrade of another item. Also, if your object was smithmaged before the upgrade, the resulting item will be too! You’ll be able to progress at whatever pace you like, little by little or all at once.
 

New experience values

We’ve decided to revise the experience values given by each type of craft. Up to this point, completing a difficult craft was not well rewarded, while creating a large number of components turned out to be very profitable. But now, that pattern will be reversed.
 

Have you finished your changes to the professions system?

We’ve got no shortage of ideas for improving the crafting system.

The “big” piece relating to equipment is finished, and that’s the part that led to the most obvious changes. But we can’t rule out the need to potentially adjust and rebalance things in later updates to fine-tune these new recipes.

We also haven’t quite finished our work on professions in general. Baker has gotten a bit of an overhaul, and the equipment-building professions are done, but you may have noticed that there are two points still outstanding. Rest assured, the handyman and chef professions have not been forgotten – it’s just that their time will come a little later.

We’ll be trying to make the creation of decorations for the handyman profession more coherent, and to smooth out progression here and there while we’re at it.

And the chef profession? It turns out that while digging through some old game design documents, we found the outline of a very interesting concept… so now we just have to spice it up for more modern tastes and turn it into a complete system.

One nice thing about this professions system is that we can add a lot of things into it with each patch: new recipes, adjustments to existing recipes, new upgradeable equipment, and more. Now that the core is solid and coherent, we’ll be able to get started on all the other planned improvements that rely on it.

[Siu]