Well, alot of people seemingly had the issue with the fact that 5 crafting/blacksmithing meant that it was exceedingly rare to have random loot meet the same standards of crafted gear. As in, crafting gave a definite expected high value item for your skill level, but random loot generally fell on the median value for their level and thus making them worse.
Yeah, it's a tough spot to balance
- randomized looted items
- crafted items
- unique items
in a way that everybody is happy.
Personally, I'd like a system in which the follwing order more or less applies for items of the same level, in order of item stats and power (with possible blacksmithing and crafting abilities always maxed out):
uniquely
upgraded unique items (with a unique ingredient like in BG2)
>
upgraded unique items>
upgraded epic/rare randomized items>
unique items>
upgraded crafted items >
epic/rare randomized items >
upgraded normal randomized items
>
crafted items > normal randomized items
(upgraded here means crafting better items by using normal ingredients (like essences in DOS1) to increase an item's stats.) Hmmm, this scale looks good, except add uniquely crafted items, upgraded uniquely crafted items, and uniquely upgraded uniquely crafted items.
Where the rare ingredients is used to make an item, upgrade an item, and/or used to both make the item and than upgrade it.....I'd imagine this would then make the final mentioned items the strongest in game as it'd involved maxing the skills, finding all the items, and then waiting till you had everything and spending it all to craft a small number (1-2/3) objects vs using the rare ingredients to upgrade the best found unique items in larger quantity for the party and other such concerns when dealing with a super rare/limited resource of crafting materials or story related crafting materials (ie buffalo sword from D:OS)
....Or I guess unique in this case could refer to both those found and made. Which works :P but uniquely upgraded still needs to be worked in.
All in all, even if say an epic/rare loot is better than a crafted item....I'd say that the fact that you can directly have more control over what you craft is an advantage on it's own so there's some balance. In fact, while say the best crafted item and the best epic loot might have the same damage (as in D:OS) the epic gear would have bonus that require unique ingredients to make or add onto an item (knockdown chance or set burning)...
There's more than just numbers in order to differentiate the various types of items.
- Damage
- Reach
- Elemental Bonuses (added fire damage)
- Inherent Buffs/debuffs (set burning)
- Ability bonuses (added warfare skill points)
- Skills the item can give (vampirism on rings)
- Durability
I think I got them all?
