Itemisation Gaps

[Faluzure]

Hi,

I posted the request to Andy in Discord, but I thought I should also flesh out the extend of the question here with some analytics done using the item database.

There's some well known gaps in the gearing that has resulted in it being very though for people new to the game, other casual enough not to have a lot of gold lying about to buy some critical pieces of gear.

Example 1: Reinforced Construction with Line of Sight:


These are critical to watch towers, along with lookouts which, by comparison, have a much wider availability:


And finally in the line of sight category, scout specials:


Another important stat is Bonus damage protection, and it seems to be highly isolated to cloth and light armour, these both having >25% options, while Medium is capped at 15%

Note: Tunic of Actaeon has 65% health, while Chimera's Leather Hide and Legion Enforcers's Breastplate has 61%. Yes the Tunic is legendary, but I don't see why Leagon Breastplate should have less BDP than Chimera's Hide.

Finally, the following image is a distribution of items in the game with +damage affix on them:

You will notice that Holy Staff comes 4th for number of items with the damage affix on them.

So a question for a future blog is your thoughts on what, if anything, can be done to tidy up gaps, mismatches and illogical gearing in the game. I was surprised when Lodi awared a legendary bow that had a small bonus to train rate on it, meaning it's aimed at Fortresses and Town Centres. Meanwhile New/Casual players are looking at the Marketplace at a level 19 Lookingglass for upwards of 20k gold, and the only other option is a legendary for 150k+

 

[Jeinx]

(Reinforced Construction with LOS)
As early as level 19, you can start using the games (prior to Celeste) Highest LOS walls available. These drop from level 19 clear to 23 most common being level 20.(Thanks Moe) The level 23 version boasting a whopping 52.2% LOS. If you are in a pinch, you can purchase level 15 LOS walls from Argos, have a buddy craft you some green LOS walls, or have a player with some left over stone reinforced walls from buying level 35 moes chests, or get some thick brick walls from his level 10 moes purchases. The LOS isn't huge, but paired with the construction addition slot, which has LOS ranges from level 10 all the way to 40 available in Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and even Legendary.
(Line of sight scout)
The original Devs never gave us an epic version of the lense, maybe it had somthing to do with players after beta having access to level 40 looking glass, and the odd place between a rare looking glass and a legendary lense. We do not have that issue in Celeste, so that is not to say we couldn't one day have one. As of now, players can get lucky finding a friend buying level 25 Moes chests and get a Level 25 Looking glass. These are available from level 7, clear to 27, with the max 27 version coming in over 52% LOS. It is pretty amazing going from the 52, to over 70 that the Lense gives us.

There are many different stats that have not been available to many different types of gear. Project Celeste has added many Of these alternate options so far, and who knows what the future holds. We do have many concept gears now, but also many that we yet to have.
We brought a range stat to medium armor for the first time, Train rate reduction to a bow, snare to arrows, and ship damage to arrows to name a few. The number of examples that still remain open are enormous, and leave open opportunity for many new gear pieces in the future.

The general trend seems to be that the players are far more excited to find the last tier end game items. Moving the bar around in the middle isn't necessarily getting us any cheers. We have filled a few gaps in level gearing with a region store, and no one seems to notice. In other words, adding a bunch of mon level 40, not legendary items is not exciting to most folks. The fact that some of these place holder gears are not as available as they should be, is that we took many of the reasons players had to buy moes chests. That generated a lot of these mid way gears. We used to buy level 35 chests for Hammer of construction, level 30 Chests for Dionysus Arms, level 25 chests for Food Chitons, level 20 chests for LOS walls, level 15 chests for los swords. With the lack of pkayers opening these chests, all of the great mid range placeholder gears are not in the supply they once were. We have some ideas to change this.
We definatly do not want to over emphasize players reliance on the best gear. We have new players that believe they need all of the highest tier gear you get from doing the highest tier quests to do the highest tier quests....we know this isn't the case, we have had players beat legendary quests with no gear on at all. (Not recommended you try that lol)

Thank you for your interest in the gear of the game, taking the time to research this, and write this out. Its nice to get little confirmations about certain concerns we have as developers. The lack of availability of mid range gears has been on my mind.

 

[frogs.poison]

Hrmm. Speaking of gear, what of the ultra-niche gear that you find? Things like the +100% melee-infantry cloth armor, the +130% building bonus damage bow, or the +120% crush armor, +40% pierce armor building armor you can make? Are those fine just being niche with the occaisional build in the occaisional quest?

Some of them would have extremely high stats as a legendary equivalent. The +100% melee-infantry cloth armor would need to be +200% as a legendary version.