Enchanting

Enchanting is not an artisan profession in its own right. Scribes create scrolls that can be utilized by different professions to create enchantments relating to that profession.

• Enchantment scrolls can be sold on the open market.

• Enchanting does not increase an item's level requirement.

You don't really push a particular item's level requirement or the identity of that item. You can enhance it, you can add enchantments to it, but it's still the item it is. – Steven Sharif

Enchantments

A few different professions participate in the creation of enchantment scrolls. Those enchantment scrolls are primarily going to be interfaced on the profession side with scribe, but once that scroll is created then it's in the hands of the open economy and players may utilize them to enchant weapons and stuff. – Steven Sharif

Mechanisms for achieving the safer enchantment routes would mainly be through very rare material acquisition and boss kills. – Steven Sharif

There are two types of enchantments for items: Vertical and horizontal.

• Vertical enchantments are a power progression for a crafted item. More damage or mitigations, added effects or bonuses. Vertical enchantments include risks.
  • Over-enchanting items comes with a potential risk that the item decays or is destroyed if a safety margin is exceeded. This system is subject to testing.

  It's a progressive tier of risk. At lower levels you have opportunities to potentially lose out on the pluses instead of breaking the equipment. But when you reach a certain threshold, there is an opportunity to essentially destroy the equipment, where you get resources back. But that's a risk that the player takes. – Steven Sharif

  • Lower levels of over-enchanting carries the risk of losing bonuses on the item. Over-enchanting beyond a certain threshold carries the risk of destroying the item and gaining resources back.
  • There may be mechanisms for achieving safer over-enchantments, such as difficult to obtain enchantment scrolls, or very rare material acquisitions.

  Personally, I am fine with RNG in enchantment, so long as there are special ways to mitigate the RNG with investment, to a degree. For example, difficult to obtain enchantment scrolls that insure enchantment efforts, and including a buffer of safe enchantment in earlier pluses. – Steven Sharif

• Horizontal enchantments are more situational. This doesn't make the item more powerful, but instead more applicable to different situations, and less so to others.
  • For example: I'd like my sword to do force damage instead of holy damage because the monsters I tend to fight are incorporeal.
  • This type of enchanting assumes no risk, just time and effort.

Enchantment appearance

Enchantments have visual effects associated with them, such as glows and colors on weapons.

• Indicates threat to other players.
• Gives recognition for difficult achievements.

Weapon progression

In-game achievable sword and polearm 3D renders.

Power creep is a balance issue... When it comes to gear progression specifically, the idea is to create an open market that is not heavily dependent on soulbound items; and having many item sinks and gold sinks within that economy that allows for the potential degradation and loss of assets within that closed economy; and not introduce items from the market that companies put in from a pay-to-win perspective or from a pay-to-convenience perspective that undermines the economy that players have built. That is a huge mistake that companies have made in the past and that lends to the imbalancing of what designers maybe have actually balanced well. – Steven Sharif

Weapons have their own progression paths.

• Each type of weapon has its own skill tree that grants passive skills and proc effects and other status conditions.
• The weapon combo system determines special effects that proc based on weapon progression.
• Ancillary effects proc based on enchantment types.
• Gear enhancements (power stones) can be applied to add elemental or energy types of damage.
• Dual wielded weapons will have its own progression based on weapon type.
• Weapon proficiency (based on length of use of a weapon) is not a planned feature.

Ashes of Creation is all about providing many progression paths... The reason why we don't like the term endgame is because with the amount of progression that's available with the amount of diversity and player agency that impacts the world... We want the weapon system [to] add an element of that as well... You can determine special effects that proc from currently the combo system; you can determine ancillary effects that proc based on enchantment types; you can power stone weapons to add different either elemental types of damage and/or energy that play rock-paper-scissor with player defenses ... and then you can skill tree out how those effects that are granted ... you can make them better you can branch them off into a different direction. – Steven Sharif

Gear enhancement

Gear enhancements are possible both during and after an item is crafted.

There is a combination of systems that take an item to its max potential. Players will need to contribute in a certain number of these systems to reach max. Some of the systems are an either/or situation. – Kory Rice

• Crafting recipes can be enhanced by adding higher rarity or different crafting materials into their selectable crafting slots at crafting stations.

• Enchantment scrolls and tempering allow gear to be enhanced post-crafting.

• Gems and sockets enable the addition of additional waterfall stats to items.

• The bulk of a weapon's power comes from its crafting recipe and the materials used in its construction.

The contribution of materials to crafting an item results in advancing the rarity of that item. Now, that doesn't exclude players who don't have the legendary or the higher quality contributed resources from progressing their common item up the rarity tree through enchantments such as scroll enchanting or through tempering the gear. Both of those can affect the quality and the rarity of the gear that you produce, but by contributing the resources during the crafting process you are getting a head start with the higher quality item and now are less dependent on those other avenues to achieve that, which might be again a different vertical space of progression that you don't have as good of access to. – Steven Sharif

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• Runes/Power stones are potential methods for enhancing weapons.
• Enchantment stones are potential rewards for performance over six month PvP seasons. These grant temporary PvP-focused benefits to gear (via a socketing system).

Scribes

Desk 3D render.

A few different professions participate in the creation of enchantment scrolls. Those enchantment scrolls are primarily going to be interfaced on the profession side with scribe. – Steven Sharif

Scribing is a crafting profession in Ashes of Creation.

• Scribes create scrolls that are utilized by different professions to create enchantments relating to that profession. Enchantment scrolls can be sold on the open market.
• Scribes can also write freehold building blueprints with specific unique looks.

Player stalls

Player stalls are scheduled for release in Alpha-2 phase-2.

One of the key components of a functional economy is the ability to trade and not having that predicated just on chat. So, player stalls we prioritized to make it in by the 20th. These will be in a functional state to begin with. There will be an NPC within the market area that you will be able to list your goods at and other players will be able to interact with that NPC take a look at the different player shops that are listed and make purchases at those locations. So, this is something I think is very necessary. It's not quite an auction house and the reason it's not an auction house is because you basically have a little bit of a storefront: You go through this list of other players' stores and you can click into that store and you can see a number of different items that they have and you can make transactional purchases on a buy order basis for what they've listed. – Steven Sharif

Player stalls (also called Kiosks and rental stalls) are rentable locations near the unique building in an Economic node, in Marketplaces (the constructible building available for placement by mayors of any Town (stage 4) node or higher), or as business buildings on freehold plots.

All nodes do have the ability to spawn player stalls. If you're not an economic node and you don't have a market- that's essentially your unique building- then you can construct essentially what is I guess would be called a... marketplace; and that marketplace will then come with certain services and it will come with a certain number of stalls. The economic node as I recall has the ability to construct an auction house and the auction house serves through the economic means the ability to list and sell items and that comes with additional stalls as well for the players. – Steven Sharif

• Players list items for sale at a NPC within the node's market area. Other players can interact with this NPC browse and purchase from player stalls in that node. Player stalls do not require the attendance of the character or for that character to be online.

• Player stalls are rentable by node citizens.
  • The number of player stalls available are dependent on service building upgrades chosen within the node.
  • Player stalls may be utilized for a period of time based on the price paid to rent the stall.

• Player stalls are linked to a player's warehouse.

• Player stalls may still operate during node siege declaration. This is subject to testing.

• Player stalls are scheduled for release in Alpha-2 phase-2.

Some of the following information has not been recently confirmed by the developers and may not be on the current development roadmap.

• Player stall NPCs may be an "image" of the seller.

• Renting a player stall enables players to provide repair and enchanting services, even when they are not online.
  • Players are able to input required items for repair and also purchase required materials for that repair.

• Players are not able to be attacked or robbed while occupying their player stall inside the limits of a node.

• Bulletin boards that list the items available in player stalls can be accessed from anywhere in the region.
  • These give the location of the stall so players can travel there and purchase the items.

• Stall sales are also listed in auction houses.
  • This may no longer be accurate.

See also

• Crafting
• Scribes
• Economy
• Item repair