You could also have equipment at below 50% durability (or something similar) be somewhat reduced in effectiveness. This would both make logical sense, and address Gyson's concern above. I think the overall result would be a huge improvement over the current system, and sensible enough to be accessible to all players. To summarize the basic idea:
Repair 1 (equipment below 50% durability suffers reduced damage/armor rating, but there is never a permanent reduction in a piece of equipment's maximum durability):
As I mentioned before, a decrease in effectiveness as durability loss increases has been an interesting mechanic in other games, but I worry about implementing it this late in development. As fights drag on we already to deal with a dwindling resource (health). With this change you have your characters growing weaker with every turn as weapons and armor become less effective. It essentially raises the difficulty on every fight in the game.
- Tier 1 Equipment (non-magical) is repaired to 60% Durability
- Tier 2 Equipment (Magical) is repaired to 40% Durability
- Tier 3 Equipment (Rare) is repaired to 33% Durability
- Tier 4 Equipment (Legendary) is repaired to 20% Durability
- Tier 5 Equipment (Super-Awesome) is repaired to 10% Durability
.................................................
Repair 5 (at this level, in addition to the below durability enhancements, all repaired equipment receives a slight boost in damage/armor rating):
- Tier 1 Equipment (non-magical) is repaired to 150% Durability
- Tier 2 Equipment (Magical) is repaired to 130% Durability
- Tier 3 Equipment (Rare) is repaired to 100% Durability
- Tier 4 Equipment (Legendary) is repaired to 100% Durability
- Tier 5 Equipment (Super-Awesome) is repaired to 100% Durability
The rest of this I still feel is overly complicated, where five different tiers of Repair are being juggled with five different tiers of equipment, and the player is expected to remember a list of results 25 lines long.
I like the idea I suggested (it's explained in the original post) not because I suggested it, but because it's such a simple change that can be easily relayed to the player.
When they look at an item with durability damage they can clearly see in the tooltip that it needs X level of Repair skill to fix (it does this now already). Beyond this, remove permanent durability loss from all items except the repair tool. The repair tool simply has to have the following text added to its toolitip
"This tool can not be repaired and will wear out after repeated use.". If necessary, add
"..slows down wear and tear on your repair tool." to the tooltip of the Repair skill itself. And that's it - the whole problem seems resolved and the entire system becomes self explanatory with minimal developer effort.
Is there something wrong with that much simpler setup?
