Introductory Rant
The enchanting system released last month to pretty mixed reception, but I’d say it’s skewed towards the negative end of the spectrum. Along with enchantments themselves, we also now have engravings, which apply sets of modifiers to UT’s. There’s a lot of issues with enchanting as of right now, with dust only dropping from endgame dungeons and, as everyone feared, being monetized in the form of purchasable consumables that increase the drop chances of dust. As it is now, obtaining a sufficient amount of dust to apply engravings requires completing endgame dungeons around 50 times. Engravings themselves I think are actually somewhat balanced, having positive modifiers such as increased fire rate offset by negative modifiers such as less damage and smaller shots. I even appreciate the strategy required to make the most of engravings, for example, applying Heavy Hitter to Divinity in order to amplify its core mechanic of high damage over rapid fire. However, I think they are a lot of work to go through for what benefits they provide. I don’t know the exact specifics, but I think it generally takes around 50 endgame dungeon completes to get a sufficient amount of green dust in order to unlock slots for engravings. To put it more simply, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Although I can excuse engravings on their own (minus the cost required to use them), a larger concern I have is with actual enchantments. They can be mixed and matched to have unique boosts on tiered items, but that’s kind of it. They mostly provide flat out buffs. At least with engravings there are some downsides that force players to actually think about what to put on their items, but with tiered items you can almost put whatever you want without consideration. Some enchantments are unique, such as adding or removing boomeranging properties and some on-hit procs that automatically activate part of the class’s ability. However, for the most part, enchantments feel like extra buffs and don’t have enough original mechanics to improve the variety of playstyles right now. It doesn’t help that dust only drops from endgame dungeons right now, making enchantments inaccessible for earlier-stages of the game.
With all this ranting, I’m finally going to give a few ideas to add onto or change the enchantment system as of now to be both more interesting and accessible. And all of that begins with Minecraft.
Minecraft’s Enchanting System
Feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph if you know how Minecraft’s enchantments work. For those who don’t know, Minecraft enchantments cost experience to apply. Some items can be combined to make items with more powerful enchantments, and there are even books that already have enchantments which can be applied to existing items. More importantly, there are also bad enchantments, specifically curses, that affect items in negative ways, such as permanently locking an armor piece onto you when worn until death. Of equal important, not all enchantments for an item can be combined onto said item. For example, you can’t have both Mending, which repairs the applied item with experience, and Infinity, which allows for infinite ammo, on a bow. You have to choose which one to have. You can even disenchant items and gain some experience back for it.
My suggestions are going to take a lot of inspiration from Minecraft’s enchanting system as they make enchanting both more engaging and interesting, which is important as enchanting right now feels a bit stale.
Make BAD Enchantments!
In a similar way to how some engravings have negative modifiers coupled with positive ones, there need to be bad enchantments that hurt an item in some way in order to offset the good enchantments on it, like how dungeon modifiers can lower minion fire rate but raise their defense. Have items with both health increase and attack decrease enchantments. Add a curse that inflicts Armor Broken if you get hit but also gives Damaging. You might be wondering why someone would want to add negative enchantments to an item, and my answer is that they wouldn’t. They’d get it from dropped items, which leads into my next point.
Have items already drop enchanted!
This is sort of an obvious feature, but just have some tiered items drop with enchantments already on them! People already enjoy getting higher tiered gear, so having tiered items rarely drop with some enchantments on them is a good way to bring some variety to item progression. In connection to my previous point, items that do drop with enchantments should have at least one bad enchantment to offset the other good ones.
Disenchantment (no not the show)
Let people remove enchantments from items. Maybe exclude engravings since it emphasizes considering what to put on which item, but for enchantments themselves, there should be a way to remove them. Similar to how you can gain experience from removing enchantments in Minecraft, you should be able to gain back a small amount of dust for removing enchantments. To be more specific, gain back some dust for removing good enchantments, but also lose dust for removing bad enchantments. So if you’re removing two good enchantments and one bad enchantment on an item, you should gain back a very small amount of dust for doing so. This means that it’s both more reliable and costly to manually apply enchantments to items while allowing players to alter items that already dropped with enchantments.
Let us combine enchanted items
As of now, there is only one level for each enchantment so far. Only one level of buffing health and the like. However, gaining higher levels of enchantments shouldn’t remain being the same buffs but more costly. We should also have the option to combine enchanted items. The way this would work is that you have two items with, let’s say Attack Bonus I, and if you combined the two items, you would get one item with Attack Bonus II. As for different enchantments that don’t combine, make it similar to the pet fusion system where the different enchantments on the first item override the enchantments on the second item. This doesn’t come without a cost though, as this would require much more dust than it would to simply enchant an item. However, this would allow an alternate way to obtain more powerful enchantments on items while still requiring more dust to do so.
Exclude enchantments for same items
To clarify, similar to how in Minecraft, a bow can’t both have Mending and Infinity, some tiered items shouldn’t be able to have both of certain enchantments on them. For example, a tiered armor could have either extra health or extra defense, but not both at the same time. This would bring a level of strategy in applying enchantments to certain items in a similar way to how engravings balance themselves out. Do you go for more attack on this wand, or dexterity instead? This is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to balance tiered item enchantments without making them pointless.
Conclusion
Enchantments had a lot of potential when conceptualized, and still do even after its mixed reception after release. There’s still time to make enchantments an engaging way to expand playstyle variety without leaving them as more p2w buff modifiers. Despite my hope for the system, I’m still a bit weary, especially with the potential that some enchantments might be locked behind other dust colors that may also just be alternative ways to milk money out of players since DECA specifically implemented “green” dust into the game. Still, the system isn’t ruined yet. It’s flawed, but there’s still the possibility that the developers can make enchanting more than just another p2w feature. Please leave any feedback in the replies down below, and hopefully we can convince DECA to make enchanting more than just a cash cow.