Greetings legionaries!
I know that some of you are probably going to be upset by the news that I'm
going to share, but let's hope that in the future people find this more
interesting and a worthwhile change. As you already probably know, the
bladesmith system has received some criticism that there's not too much
you can do to affect what kind of blade you're going to get. Some people
have also been giving some criticism that it's not possible to make proper
two-handed swords. Most of the criticism is quite accurate and I have never
denied this. It has been mostly a problem of resources as I haven't had a
good idea or time to implement changes to the blade system before and I
never viewed it as a top priority.
I'm doing something a wizard should never do. I'm going to share some
spoilers. Why? Because I'm going to describe how the old system worked!
I won't go into details about the new one, but in the old version the quests
mostly affected blade's hit/dam qualities and it was mostly the sharpness
(dice) which couldn't really be affected very well.
The biggest problem that I see in the old system is that basically you bring
the material, money, set the hours and wait. While it still remains basically
the same in many ways, there is something new as well, hopefully to your
liking:
1) The trinket quests have a bigger effect now. They will affect all basic
blade qualities (those 5 mentioned in manuscripts)
2) You may now give advice to Deria Falha what kind of sword you would prefer.
So how does the part 2 work?
When creating a sword, you need refined material and a model sword and you
may bring optional items and hope that they evolve into something useful
in the chaotic evolution process. This is all old news, right? The new
thing is that you may put an (optional) manuscript into the forge (notice,
TO _forge_ and not Deria himself) and that will become instructions for
the smith. What this means is that when the smith makes your sword, if your
manuscript has 25% sharpness and 5% strike accuracy for example, your sword
is likely to hit harder, but it might have a low hit bonus. You probably
got the point from here. If a manuscript is not put in forge, it will
be 20% everything.
One more notice: When a manuscript is put in forge, it is used to modify
the potential abilities of the blade so it works differently to what you
have gotten used to. When a new sword is bought, it will always start
with 20% everything and if you want to control your souls, you use the
manuscript after buying the sword, just like you have used them before.
So what happens to the manuscript? Manuscripts that are put in forge will
always vanish regardless of the amount of uses it has left. So it is
more encouraged to use manuscripts with only one use, but if it's difficult
to find a suitable one to sacrifice, maybe then you need to buy one with
more uses. While sacrificing manuscripts might increase the total expenses
that you need to pay for the blade, remember that manuscript is optional
and not mandatory.
Then maybe another, not so nice note: I have tried testing this system a
bit and I have bought like 20 megs worth of swords today to test this out
to see what kind of swords I get with different values. However, every
player is a little bit different even though I've even used some real
players as my testing dummies, I think it's fair to say that it is not
entirely easy to find a perfect formula for this system. Since the swords
are expensive, I would understand your frustration to test this now. So
just in case you're short on cash, I'd advice you to perhaps wait that
some money tycoons have tested it for a few times. I will be collecting
debug information and trying to look that the system and if I see
that there's more need to balance it out, I will do my best to tune it
to better direction.
If you have questions or find bugs in this, you can let me know.