Devblog: Shadofang Items 2018-08-14 15:00 - [Zeorus]

The last level group (186-200) has close to 250 items – enough to satisfy all builds and all wishes… well, almost. This gave us a challenge for this new Ultimate Boss, find something to make the Shadofang items interesting, attractive and innovative without making them so ultra-powerful that they become the ultimate, unavoidable high-level equipment carried by all players.

This devblog aims not only to let you in on our thoughts and ideas but also to give you the keys to understanding the design process behind this new pack of items.

Overall, most Shadofang items (not all of them are in this new style) will be more powerful than an item of similar level and rarity. But of course, this gain in power comes with a trade-off, otherwise it would quite simply be superior to what exists already… and that's not what we want. This trade-off takes the form of a strict equipment condition, which will force you to manage all of your character's other pieces of equipment, abilities and passives. These conditions will be drastic characteristic conditions to force players to make choices. To better illustrate what I'm saying, here are some examples of conditions on the new items: 5 MP Maximum, 3 Range Maximum, 13 AP Minimum, 8 WP Minimum, etc.

To equip them, the players must therefore meet the conditions of the items they want to equip that are correlated with bonuses they provide. The aim is simple. The equipment condition must be a real "constraint", but the bonus from the item must be attractive enough that players are faced with a dilemma: equip the item despite the constraint or not comply and lose out on the bonus.

Of course, we have made sure that the constraints are opposite from the bonuses they give you. For example, we do not want an item with a lot of Distance Damage to require a minimum Range of 6 in order to be carried since there would be no sacrifice or choice to be made to equip such an item on a Cra. So we've come up with attractive bonuses and corresponding constraints. Here are a few items to show you what this is all about:

I'd like to point out that nothing is set in stone. The items will be made available to you on the Beta server the next time it's opened so you can test them and let us know what you think. Take advantage of this test phase to give us your feedback on them in the forums!