The Future of Parametric Materials

Hello Inflexion, and hello fellow Realmwalkers!

TL;DR:

I believe Nightingale needs crafting materials with more specific uses and more logical progressions that encourage players to carefully consider their options and make decisions that support not just melee, magic, or ranged in a general sense, but support the specific way that they want to use melee, magic, or ranged.

Long-Winded Version:

I just want to start by saying that from alpha testing until now, I’ve really enjoyed Nightingale, especially the crafting system. I’ve given a lot of feedback before but been relatively quiet for awhile now. Having had time to ruminate over Realms Rebuilt, I think it’s time to change that.

So, with that out of the way, I would like to talk about crafting. I’ve found the concept of parametric crafting to be compelling from day one, and even through a couple pain points where I felt you were moving the wrong direction, I now think overall the changes you’ve made were good for the game and good for the system.

That said, there are three areas I’d like to comment on that I think could make it even better. I’ve personally seen a couple different people mention that stat distributions on existing materials, both when examined in isolation and when examined from a “zoomed out” viewpoint, don’t always make the most sense.

This post (which I would recommend anyone reading my own to check out) summarizes these concerns in excellent detail.

So without further ado:

1. Lack of Build-Specific Materials

One of the most exciting promises of this crafting system is being able to truly tailor gear to a specific playstyle. However, in Nightingale, many materials feel either too perfect, or puzzlingly useless. Pursuit for example gives you 6% Ranged Damage and 6% Critical Damage. In any situation where you could opt for materials that focus more on Ranged Damage at the cost of Critical Damage, (say Magnesium or Einaidia,) the increase in Raw Ranged Damage is too small for the loss in Critical Damage to be a worthwhile trade. If I am not mistaken, for Raw Ranged to begin to compete with Pursuit, a material would have to offer a 17% increase in raw damage at minimum.

Weapon performance is one way you might compensate for this gap (like using raw ranged materials on a weapon that fires faster or doesn’t rely on crits) but with the current selection of weapons that might be used this way such as Lever-Actions, Slingbows, and Shotguns, the difference still cannot be made up. Especially on higher difficulties, they simply do not scale effectively with enemy jumps in statistics. This leads to a situation where one material is king, and all others are either ignored or accepted at a steep cost in performance.

Then you have materials like Titan’s Fingernail or Star Ruby, where the available stats are contradictory to one another because they have no synergy. Crit is useless on Magick builds, yet these materials offer Magick and Crit together.

Or materials like Brass, which offer mediocre bonuses in Ranged and Melee that for a moment give you hope for hybrid builds, but end up having no higher tier variants whatsoever.

Suggested Improvements: Introduce and fine-tune material stats to align more logically with their expected uses and archetypes;

• Melee/Crit for those who wish to be knife wielding assassins.

• Ranged+ for gunners who want to spray and pray rather than aim true.

• Magick/Stamina or Magick/Stealth for casters rather than Magick/Crit.

• Movement Speed/Health/Melee for those who wish to be vanguards.

• Health Regen/Melee for those who wish to be barbarians.

• Etc… etc...

Material choices like these would make crafting more intuitive and interesting, but by itself none of this is enough, which leads me to my second point of contention:

1. Lack of Negative Stats

At present, all materials offer purely positive stat outcomes, which makes crafting decisions feel too safe and straightforward. Adding negative stats would make the crafting process much more compelling. Players would have to make more strategic decisions about what trade-offs they are willing to accept to bolster their specific build and how those trade-offs benefit or hinder them; particularly when stacking multiple instances of the same material and thus compounding BOTH positive AND negative stats. If a negative element existed on some materials, it would provide additional justification for huge positive payoffs, because the two can balance one another appropriately if carefully considered.

Suggested Improvements: Introduce materials with exceptionally high bonuses that are accompanied by negative stat effects, encouraging more tactical crafting. Below are some basic ideas, which need work, but they convey the idea, why not:

• A raw material that grants +20% Melee Damage and +10% Stealth but -100 Maximum Health (opens an avenue specifically for players who like assassin style builds that act as glass cannons?)

• A material that grants +15% Melee Damage and 80 Health Regen/sec but -30% Fire and Maleficium Resistance for berserkers or barbarians?

• Or if a material offered +30% Ranged Damage and -10% Critical Damage for the aforementioned spray and pray types?

• Or perhaps +15% Ranged Damage and +15% Critical Damage but -25% Ice and Poison Resistance, making certain enemy types extremely deadly to you in exchange for a big boost to damage output?

• A raw material that offers 10% in two combat stats but -20% in the third?

Furthermore, because compounding these materials can have tremendously negative effects, it also opens up the opportunity for scarce usage, where only one or two components in an item are made from a particular type of material, rather than using one material across the board.

1. Lack of Elemental Stats

While poison, fire, ice, and lightning exist as damage types in the game, right now, we only see materials that impact elemental resistances. It seems like a hugely missed opportunity that no materials currently affect elemental damage output in crafting and that magical ammunitions do not scale well with the Magick stat.

By not allowing players to craft weapons or gear that enhance specific elemental damage types or influence their performance more readily, it further limits build diversity and the ability to fully optimize for certain combat strategies or the exploitation of enemy weaknesses.

An obvious example might be the arcane gunslinger build which attempts to leverage a high magic stat in conjunction with a ranged weapon in order to greatly amplify the magical effects of elemental ammunitions. Sadly, they find themselves disappointed once their build is complete because those effects barely scale at all. You would need a rate increase on the order of 10-25x in order for it to be tactically useful.

Similarly, people who like the Hermetic Flame or Immolation spells find that the damage does not scale on a level that keeps pace with the expanding health pool and damage output of enemies. However, incorporating materials into your clothing and weaponry that amplify fire damage would be one possible route to alleviating that problem.

Of course, it would then be appropriate to either add elemental spells of other natures, or else make it so that weapon can be imbued with elemental damage even without spell or ammunition by using these materials. It could be a fiber with low elemental damage stats for a minor compounding effect, an enchanted metal with moderate elemental damage stats or an extremely rare gem with high elemental damage stats, to allow for specialized weaponry at the Mystic Tier and higher.

Suggested Improvements: Add materials that provide positive and negative modifiers for elemental damage types (fire, ice, lightning, poison, etc.). This could extend to both raw and refined materials, allowing players to better tailor their gear to match elemental damage preferences or to exploit certain enemies' weaknesses. And of course, these materials could have downsides of their own as previously mentioned.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I believe these changes would make crafting a more nuanced and satisfying system, and I hope you’ll consider it carefully. I recognize that you have a very complicated balancing journey ahead of you, but I trust you to make a fantastic game, regardless of whether you think these are good ideas or not. Be well, and have a great dev cycle!

Regards,

-CyanicEmber