Gear enhancements

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).

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.

Tempering

Tempering allows gear to be enhanced post-crafting.

• Tempering kits along with deconstruction resources are used to improve gear.
• Tempering kits are crafted by the Arcane Engineering profession using materials obtained from deconstructing gear.
• Tempering kits must match the rarity, type, and grade of the gear being tempered.
• Only unequipped gear may be tempered.
• Gear tempering was released in Alpha-2 phase-2 patch 0.8.3.

Tempering, this is how you improve the item stats. – Steven Sharif

Gems and sockets

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

PvP seasons

Performance in various PvP systems (such as Caravans, Arenas, Guild wars) is measured over the course of ~6 month PvP seasons (season duration is subject to Alpha-2 testing). At the end of each season, a player's cumulative score may unlock various rewards.

• Gear enhancement rewards.
• Achievement ranks.
• Purchasing power (Currency).
• Potentially more granular player health bars.

The goal there is obviously that players can rinse clean the history in the season and start fresh. Whether or not those will be six-month, I think that's the goal of Alpha-2 is to help test that. It might be shorter than that, but the intent is to have a system that provides ability to track your wins and losses and to have those wiped fresh on some cadence. – Steven Sharif

Arena ladder

Pre-alpha Arena UI.

The arena ladder system records a player's progress within PvP seasons based on their arena win/loss ratios.

• Titles can be received from arena play.
• Other rewards will be revealed at a later time.
• Arena points that can be used to buy gear is not currently in the design.

Guild ladder

An inter-guild ladder will rank guilds based on their performance within competitive activities:

• Guild wars.
• Castle sieges.
• World bosses.

When the guild participates in guild wars or they participate in sieges, you'll be able to climb the ranks of your inter-guild ladder as well so you get bragging rights amongst your friends. – Steven Sharif

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

See also

• Enchanting
• Crafting