The game requires too many item sets - How to fix it

[invi]

I like the variety of different items that everyone can collect in this game, and that so many of them have a use for us. But the crazy amount of item sets we have with us and have to keep equipping doesn’t feel good. I mean, right now I need a set for every refining and crafting skill. Each gathering skill also needs its own set and if you want to kill enemies in between, they should also have stats that match the weapon. Then we might need PvE and PvP items for each weapon we want to play, and with the mutations coming soon, we might need gear that fits their style. Yeah, that’s a lot of different item sets we have to manage. And it doesn’t feel good to manage them. So how can we improve it?

Let’s start with the refining and crafting sets. The best solution that comes to mind would be to allow us to store these items in the refining/crafting stations. The perks would then be applied to the crafting station that the items are placed in. That way we wouldn’t have to equip these items before crafting them, but we would still have to bring them to the city where we want to craft them.

For the gathering items, I think the best option is to link them to the gathering titles. The idea is that we have to equip the title to get the bonus. There are different ways how to exactly implement it, but I would like to present one of them. For this, I would introduce new furniture like mannequins for each gathering skill, where we can add a set of gathering clothes. It would be possible to only have one of those for each gathering skill across all houses. Once the gatherer title is equipped, the bonus will be applied to our character.

Once that is implemented, it would also be very easy to implement more mannequins where we could store our other item sets. I think that would already reduce the burden of managing our equipment by quite a lot, and also solve some of the storage issues a little bit. It’s also very easy to go back to your house to get the right items you need.

Further, I would implement the option to carry around a piece of full secondary equipment, that we could easily swap by one click from our inventory, as long as we are out of combat.

I think there is a lot of freedom around how to implement the changes that I proposed. In the end, I believe it’s just a question about how much QoL you would like to grant us.

[ZoltarMacRoth]

I agree with you, and I’ve suggested something similar for weapons in a recent post I made. I don’t know about the titles and mannequins, but it could work.

I just hope if it ever gets implemented it won’t be like GW2. The build system they went with is rather cumbersome and awkward.

[IHateYouse]

I’m glad you wrote this. I had been thinking how ridiculous the current setup is. I believe that ideally, the devs want to believe we are out wandering the world doing different things, but the current system of storage and need for specific armor, jewelry, food, etc is just too much. Ideally, at the highest level, you really want that clothing on every time you are at a node. You might be in a certain great area and swapping your sets and food out every 10ft. It’s just kind of stupid.

I think they should change the Trophy system honestly. I think all the trophies should be mannequins that you apply your most recent clothing onto to increase the buff. Then if I walk up to whatever node, I can choose to eat the right food, but the act of taking that node would see all my applications to the trophy and give me that buff

[invi]

Yeah, I thought about combining the trophies and mannequins as well and would probably even prefer it that way. But I mainly tried to propose ideas that would easily fit into the current state of how those things work, as we currently can place three trophies of each type and we wouldn’t want to insert a set of gathering luck into each of them. New furniture with new restrictions wouldn’t interfere with that.

To expand on my last point of the first post: For multiple sets of equipment to carry around, the cleanest solution to easily switch them around that comes to my mind is the one that I experienced in Runes of Magic. A simple button that switches between first and secondary equipment (which was later on expanded to a simple menu where you could select one of three equipments):