More Highly desirable loot through Cannith Crafting

[Cyr]

Okay this is the third in my series of loot suggestions in the past few days all building off of some basic premises.

In this thread I will spell out another one of my basic premises for raid/epic loot design which is the Three Item Policy. Basically I believe that every raid/epic series should have at minimium 3 items that are highly desirable per build. This does not mean that all three items must be desirably by the same builds, but three items per build in some combination at the least. This is because with only one item (which seems to be the current pattern) people earn the loot they want and move on or worse become annoyed at never pulling that loot and quit running the content in disgust due to the requirements of having very low drop rates on the 'good' loot. By having three items at least being highly desirable per person you end up with allowing for systems which make it less painful to get at least one of those items and still retain a decent lifespan on the content.

So with that preamble done here is a suggestion to make this more easily accomplished.

Have items with specialized designs also have a recipe drop (eat it once per toon to have it forever through TRs) that creates a BtA "Shard of X" (X = item's name without the slot description) which can be applied to a wide variety of craftable items (using up ~potential to match ML's if on a blank) as either a prefix or suffix (each item would be determined independantly). This recipe would require a 'essence of X" (X = item's name) which would be a BtA ingredient obtained by putting the named item in one of the crafting alters and disjunctioning it, a certain number of essences/dragonshards/purified whatevers depending on the item. The Shard created would add most/all of the powers of the named item to the craftable item.

This would make this specialized loot more highly desirable by a wider variety of toons making more raid loot more valuable to more people and additionally adding extra named items to the loot tables that were desirable in the form of recipes. Weapons designed to be good against certain monster types are prime examples of where this sort of thing would be very effective at increasing the desirability of loot.

A quick example of how this premise would work using existing loot...

Epic Shard of the Silver Slinger : +12 Potential, Postfix, Applies to any weapon, Grants +6 Enhancement Bonus, Weaken Undead, Blunt Damage in addition to any other damage, Undead Bane, Holy Burst, Base Damage*2

Recipe Epic Shard of the Silver Slinger Requires: Either Epic Silver Slinger Item, 200 Lesser Holy Essences, 20 Greater Holy Essenses, 4 Purified Dragonshards, Holy Burst Shard

Shard of the Titan Shield: +5 Potential, Postfix, Titan Shield Clickie Effect, Applies to any armor or accessory, exclusive tag on this power so only one item made with this effect per toon

Recipe Shard of the Titan Shield: Docent from Titan Raid, 100 Lesser Body Essences, 10 Greater Body Essences, 1 Purified Dragonshard

Epic Shard of the Red Dragon's Spirit: +10 Potential, Applies to Helm, Ring, Gloves, Belt, or Bracers, +7 Strength, Magma Guard

Recipe...Dragon Helm from Von6 other junk...

Epic Shard of the Scrag's Body: +11 Potential, Copy paste of greatclub of the scrags powers, applies to any weapon

A short list of other items that could benefit from this sort of thing (by no means exhaustive)...Ancient Vulkoriim Dagger, shatterbow, Elyd Edge, many items from u13/12, Souleater, Hellfire Crossbow, Hammer of Life, Marilith Chain, Bloodstone...the idea being that alot of items with different slot options suddenly become much more valuable for more people.

[Cyr]

More examples focuses upon Sentinals epic loot assume recipe requires the epic whatever item the modifiers come from plus some other sundries...

Shard of Chimeria's Mind: +10 Potential, Prefix, Applies to any accessory, armor, or shield, Lesser Dragonmark Enhancement, Minor Greater Dragonmark Enhancement, Spell Resistance (25), Natural Armor Bonus +5, Chimera's Vitality

Shard of Chimera's Bite: +12 Potential, Postfix, Applies to any weapon, Keen, Shocking Burst, Destruction, Shatter +10, Chimera's Ferocity, Base Damage*2, Disintegration, +6 Enhancement Bonus

Shard of Elyd: +13 Potential, Postfix, applies to any weapon, +6 Enhancement Bonus, Charisma or Str to attack and damage, Charisma +7, Superior Devotion VI, Screaming, Cacophony, Inspiring Echoes, Anthem, base damage*2

Shard of Midnight Strike: +14 Potential, Prefix, applies to any light weapon or rapier, Improved Deception, Finesse, Disintegration, Assassination +2, Improved Paralyzing, Assassin's Training, Clever Strike, base damage*2, attack and damage may be str or dex

Shard of Tet-zik, The Enlightened Change: +5 Potential, Prefix, applies to bracers, gloves, helm, or ring, Tet-zik, The Enlightened Change (note recipe requires basic bracers but recipe is an epic recipe dropping from epic sentinals content)

Shard of Deneith Training: +11 potential, Postfix, applies to shield or armor, +6 enhancement bonus, Life Shield, DR 5/Epic, Superior False Life, Vertigo +15 (either epic blademark's docent or epic denieth chain required for recipe)

Shard of Charismatic Striking: +2 Potential, New weapon modifier slot used, applies to any weapon, your weapons use your charisma or str for attack and damage modifiers whichever is better (recipe requires any item that has charismatic striking which would be any weapon which does the above and the recipe itself drops from epic sentinals content)

Shard of Dexterous Striking +2 Potential, as charasmatic striking except with dexterity instead of charisma

Shard of Improved Charismatic Striking: +5 Potential, Prefix, applies to trinket, bracers, gloves, or goggles, power as charismatic striking (recipe requires any epic item that has charismatic striking and recipe drops from epic sentinal content)

Shard of Improved Dexterous Striking: As improved charismatic striking except applies to dexterity and has the additional text that if you have the Weapon finnesse feat the power adds an additional +1 to hit and damage to all your attacks

[Krago]

So this is like Epic item crafting?

Step 1) Find Epic Recipe (from Epic Quests?)
Step 2) Take already Crafted Epic Item
Step 3) Gather crafting essences
Step 4) Transfer stats from Original Epic item to New Epic item

Where the New Epic item does not have to be of the same type. So I could transfer the stats from the Dragon Helm to a Ring, Gloves, or Belt?

WOW!

[Cyr]

So this is like Epic item crafting?

Step 1) Find Epic Recipe (from Epic Quests?)
Step 2) Take already Crafted Epic Item
Step 3) Gather crafting essences
Step 4) Transfer stats from Original Epic item to New Epic item

Where the New Epic item does not have to be of the same type. So I could transfer the stats from the Dragon Helm to a Ring, Gloves, or Belt?

WOW!

Yes, that would be the idea with emphasis on having this applied to items that are really specialized in nature. Stuff like giant beaters, undead beaters, devil beaters...you know stuff that you look at and go ohhh that is really sweet then you realize it is on a dagger or a club or whatever.

The nice thing about this is some items could have the distilled parts which make them specialized isolated off like my dragon helm example above where half the normal epic item is really a caster item and the other half a melee item...that example would allow you to have the nice melee stuff on a wider variety of slots with a little crafting potential to spare to put something else on it, but you do lose the epic slots.

Lots of variety is possible with this and multiple recipes could be made from a few items (like dragon helm could have a caster varient recipe also)...

Oh and yeah these would all be recipes gathered from epic quests, epic raids, or just raids for some raid item ones like the titan shield clickie.

Note, my specific examples are less important then the basic concept of taking chunks (most in some cases) of a named items powers and putting them on another item. The balancing and such is something the developers would have to weigh carefully in some cases and my numbers are first blush numbers.

[Krago]

Yes, that would be the idea with emphasis on having this applied to items that are really specialized in nature. Stuff like giant beaters, undead beaters, devil beaters...you know stuff that you look at and go ohhh that is really sweet then you realize it is on a dagger or a club or whatever.

The nice thing about this is some items could have the distilled parts which make them specialized isolated off like my dragon helm example above where half the normal epic item is really a caster item and the other half a melee item...that example would allow you to have the nice melee stuff on a wider variety of slots with a little crafting potential to spare to put something else on it, but you do lose the epic slots.

Lots of variety is possible with this and multiple recipes could be made from a few items (like dragon helm could have a caster varient recipe also)...

Oh and yeah these would all be recipes gathered from epic quests, epic raids, or just raids for some raid item ones like the titan shield clickie.

Excellent idea!

Just special care would need to be taken in what types of equipment the stats could be transferred into to prevent unintended powerful artifacts from being created. My main thought is weapons.

[Cyr]

Excellent idea!

Just special care would need to be taken in what types of equipment the stats could be transferred into to prevent unintended powerful artifacts from being created. My main thought is weapons.

Yes, I think the big worry points would be in transfering the generally uber against everything weapons (so might just avoid those as recipes all together) such as the Sword of Shadows.

[Krago]

Yes, I think the big worry points would be in transfering the generally uber against everything weapons (so might just avoid those as recipes all together) such as the Sword of Shadows.

With your system, fairly easy as there would be no Epic Recipe for Sword of Shadows.

[Cyr]

With your system, fairly easy as there would be no Epic Recipe for Sword of Shadows.

Amusingly they could make one later also and have it require lots of potential (higher ML which will matter come the expansion) and drop from some crazy level 30 epic raid or something