An Explanation
As of writing this, weapon-based classes have no purpose in having less than three weapons of equipped. This clutters their hotbar, makes their outfit look worse, forces them to farm for weapons of their level (warriors have to slaughter atlanteans), and increases the difficulty of fighting (savants having it the worst).
In the meantime, NPCs remain powerful even if they only wield one or two weapons. Why is that not an option for players? They’re a terrible example to follow, yet some may wish to do so for their character’s design or could find it to be a better option when lacking equipment of their level.
This suggestion seeks to remedy this issue by providing advantages to using less than three weapons.
Problem Ⅰ: Skills
What does wielding less weapons do? It lowers the amount of skills available in your kit, decreasing your battle prowess as you would have less options to choose from and more cooldowns to wait for.
Going further in our reasoning, each weapon class belongs to an archetype: guns zone, polearms all-round, swords mix-up, and so on. By decreasing the amount of weapons that you wield, you also lose out on the utility of weapon-based classes: versatility.
Solution Ⅰ: Skill Requirement Scaling
Making wielding less than three weapons decrease the stat requirement of weapon skills based on the amount of empty weapon slots.
This would benefit all weapon-using classes by allowing them to invest into weapons of higher level, stronger skills, ultimate arts, and higher skill tiers.
Add-On: Semi-Exclusive Skills
Depending on how the skill requirement scaling change is implemented, it could allow for the addition of skills with extremely high requirements that are virtually unusuable without making use of this mechanic.
This would serve as a greater incentive for warriors to wield less weapons while also promoting the usage of weaker ones to gain access to them normally—striking two birds with one stone.
Solution Ⅱ: Unique Content
Variant Ⅰ: Locked Skills
Adding locked skills that are available to the player only when they have empty weapon slots. They would be bound to the weapon, unable to be removed.
Their addition would allow players who decide to use fewer weapons to stand out and have their own identity, serving as a way to counter-act the lack of skills from wielding less weapons.
Variant Ⅱ: Dedicated Weapons
Adding weapons that occupy two or more weapon slots as their usage requires more than the mind can handle.
These weapons could be of a quality higher than ‘good’ (providing them with more skills) while having unique gimmicks and skills that further encourages their usage, essentially having the same effect as solution Ⅱ:Ⅰ.
Solution Ⅲ: Increasing Skill Count
Allowing weapons to have more skills the less you have of equipped.
This would successfully counter-act the lack of skills if all weapons had an equal amount of skills to choose from, but that isn’t the case. A prime example of that are bows, the weapon type unable to have any modified skills aside from rare variants, rendering this solution conditional.
Solution Ⅳ: Strengthening Statistics
Improving the statistics of weapons when less are used, effectively resulting in players trading skills in exchange of stats.
List of Statistics that could be changed (and how)
- Affinity increase
- Post-Affinity increase
- Cooldown reduction
- Tier increase
- Energy consumption reduction
- Really anything that’s worth being changed
This would be the most vanilla of all proposed choices, but could still manage to work (at the cost of the balance team’s sanity and health).
Problem Ⅱ: Implementation
All of these are decent solutions, but how does one implement them?
This section will cover the implementation methods of these changes.
Implementation Ⅰ: Scaling
Picking one above-mentioned solution and scaling it to the amount of empty weapon slots.
This would automatically empower weapons without needing player-input, allowing all players to benefit from this.
Ironically enough, this isn’t all too good for players as not all may recognise that wielding less weapons makes them stronger.
Implementation Ⅱ: Menu
A menu accessed from clicking on empty weapon slots.
This would allow for all solutions to be implemented and could be balanced further by applying them to all equipped weapons or only one. Contrary to Implemntation Ⅰ, users would be aware of this ability as it would likely be directly in their face.
This option could direct one to the weapon info page and add a panel to choose/modify the bonus from.
Specifically for Solution Ⅲ: This could make use of the recent change to using multiple of the same weapon by creating a clone of it and allowing players to slot in skills into it before it is equipped.
This allows the aforementioned change to not be completely overriden by this suggestion if implemented.
Closing Words
It’s true, this is a problem, even if it’s only a minor one.
Warriors need to go through an ungodly grind to be at their best, outfits are made worse with three weapons of equipped (which people complain about), the amount of items that you can have in your hotbar is decreased (reducing its usefulness), and fighting is made a tad bit harder depending on the class.
I have been working on this suggestion for nine days and tried to come up with the best solutions that I could. If none are added to Arcane Odyssey, so be it, but at the very least I hope that it allowed these thoughts to take root in others’ mind.
Post-Patch Note edit: This change, while similar to this suggestion, is not the same as what it proposes. You will still have to grind, it will not be viable on weapons with smaller skill sets (like bows and muskets), and it mechanically is the same thing as wielding three different weapons.
Thank you for reading this suggestion, the first that I publish.
Yes, I have copied fartman1314’s ‘Purging Artificial Difficulty - Making NPCs More Fair’ format.
Dropdown of Future Edits
Responses to feedback will be given here.
It really only solved one problem: the appearance of having three weapons of equipped, hence why I’ve stated that it is mechanically the same thing as wielding three different weapons.
It’s still going to clutter the player’s hotbar, it’s going to need much more farming than equipping three different weapons as you would need to get the same weapon thrice, and it’s also going to make fighting harder than it is with three weapons as you wouldn’t have any visuals telling you which of your tools has which skillset without equipping them.
