Hey so I haven’t seen this mentioned yet but I wanted to give some feedback on how to improve the HWM system from a players standpoint.
Currently each armor slot has it’s own WM. My personal experience with this has been relatively positive where I don’t have too many issues from the armor standpoint. The issue I want to bring up is where weapons are concerned.
Problem:
Each weapon has it’s own WM. This makes it difficult to target your specific weapon of choice and raise it’s WM. The problem is then exacerbated with each additional weapon added to the game by increasing the pool of items to choose from and by extension increasing the time it takes to raise WM due to increased loot pool RNG.
Proposed Solution:
Tie the WM of a weapon to the category the weapon is in rather than the singular weapon itself. So for example, instead of having a spear at 525 WM while your Great Axe is at 570, your Two Handed Weapon WM is now 570. Any additional weapons will fall under their respective category. This solution ensures that there is still a grind players have to go through, but also future proofs the system that will quickly get out of control as new content gets added.
So to reiterate, my proposed solution is to eliminate the WM on individual weapons and to then place a WM on the weapon categories themselves (One Handed, Two Handed, Magic, Ranged).
In terms of Jewelry however, it needs quite a bit of help.
Problem:
Jewelry currently doesn’t have any consistent way to effectively increase the WM outside of dungeons.
Proposed Solution:
There’s a couple of different solutions I could see working for this.
First: Without changing anything else, you could have the jewelry WM increase by higher increments due to how much smaller your chances of getting jewelry are. For instance, you could make it a guaranteed +10 each time one of these items drop to maintain a grind but allow meaningful progression
Second: Allow jewelry items to drop outside of dungeons through elite farming areas. Doesn’t have to be amazing items, just something that will help increase the WM of these items through other means of gameplay. This suggestion would also help smooth over some of the frustrations players have with increasing the difficulty of these areas without increasing the rewards to compensate.
Third: Eliminate jewelry from the WM system entirely and have static gear score drops for these. Honestly not the most ideal nor would it be my first choice.
My goal in these suggestions is to not completely overhaul systems and change everything, but to suggest ways to help flesh out the system the developers have designed to not feel as daunting to go through while maintaining the desired grind for players.
If anyone has other ideas or suggestions that I haven’t thought of please feel free to add them!
EDIT: Added section for Jewelry