TLDR
You don’t get a TLDR, read the post
Any Arcane Odyssey player is ALL too familiar with the game’s item problem. Chances are that you, the one reading this, have more than 20 items lying around in your inventory collecting dust. They’re probably uncommon tier or lower, or a boss drop that’s been outleveled and can no longer keep up with your player. My question is
WHY?
What point is there in adding this many different gear and armor sets if 90% of them are completely useless for endgame builds, even when modified? (outside of drip, obviously)
Now, you might be wondering, “hey, how come you say they’re useless when they give decent stats? That, my friends, is because of math. Every item in arcane odyssey has an invisible number called its efficiency points. These are a calculation that determines how efficient any given item is at providing stats.
1 Point of Power = 3 EP
1 Point of Defense = 1/3 EP
1 Point of Substat = 1 EP
Mathematically speaking, this is why using sunken armor/lost treasure in your build is almost always optimal and why so much gear is chestslop, doomed to be sold to a merchant.
For example, let’s take the Dark Bronze Chestplate, obtained from the Dark Sea. While this isn’t a treasure chest item per se, it does suffer from one of the worst cases of chestlop syndrome in arcane odyssey.
Dark Bronze armor, at level 170, gives
137 Defense
68 Dexterity
With a total of 113.667 Efficiency Points.
This is REALLY bad. To further exacerbate how useless of a set that dark bronze is, i’ll now show you two gear options that are better in basically every way.
Warrior of Gold Armor (Commander Hathor)
Warrior of Gold Armor, at level 170, gives
268 Defense
45 Dexterity
With a total of 134.34 EP
This, on its own, isn’t a bad piece of gear. That’s until you realize that
Sunken Warrior Armor
Sunken Warrior Armor, at level 170 gives
330 Defense
38 Dexterity
With a total of 148 EP.
Do you see the problem? This is an extreme example, but it highlights how most items in this game, even with modifiers, aren’t even worth sneezing at, either because there’s already a better option or because the EP is so low that you might as well get the stats you’re looking for another way and save yourself the defense.
If this isn’t going to be fixed in some way, then there’s no real reason vetex should continue giving items with low relative EP stats at all; even the people progressing rarely invest in good gear, because
- It’s both annoying and time-consuming to do and
- I’m going to throw it away shortly after I hit max level.
The only way out of this problem I can see is blanket EP buffs to a large majority of the item list (i’ll leave commons & anything below level 100 out of this for now). It would kill two birds with one stone, as it
- Makes uncommon gear useful for endgame armor sets when modified
- Improves the progression experience, as all armor you DO come across without grinding is improved.
I’ve discussed the idea with some members of the balance team, and I was told that the only barrier remaining for them to begin work on the issue is the fact that they don’t have the internal armor values, which is weird ngl (their job is to balance; it’s in the name).
This isn’t in suggestions because it isn’t one
