Editing Weapon Skills Update 2012 (section)

== Loot ==

Due to the changes in the skills section, there will be changes to loot.

Armor, jewelry and other non-weapon pieces will remain largely unchanged. Weapon buff spells will be updated to one of the three weapon skills. Our current plan is to change spells on loot pieces and quest pieces as follows:

How spells that buff weapons skills will change:

* Sword spells on armor and jewelry change to buff Heavy Weapons.
* Axe, Mace, Unarmed Combat, Staff and Spear spells on armor and jewelry change to buff Light Weapons.
* Dagger spells on armor and jewelry change to buff Finesse Weapons.


This will make suits easier to put together since the weapon skill buff spells will be consolidated into 3 options instead of 7.

New versions of the existing Rare Weapons will be introduced and balanced to be on par with each other. As such, the use of all three skills will be distributed among the weapons depending on the flavor of the weapon. Players with existing Rare weapons will be able to trade them in for a melee Rare Weapon of their choice. Sadly this means that experience earned for that weapon will be lost.

(For the one person in game who obtained a name change for their rare weapon, PM me if players choose this option.)

Existing weapons will be changed to use the new skills as follows:

* Existing Swords changed to use the Heavy Weapons skill.
* Existing Axes, Maces, Unarmed Weapons, Staves, and Spears changed to use Light Weapons
* Existing Daggers changed to use Finesse Weapons


Where possible we will try to keep existing weapons competitive within their new weapon category. Existing characters who are more than two weeks old will gain some kind of item that will allow them to move existing slayer, imbues, and other non-tinkering weapon enhancements to new weapons. Our current plan is to give each character the ability to move those enhancements from a current (old) weapon to a new weapon three times.

Tinkering is preventing us from some melee weapon modifications we wanted to do. Tinkers were implemented to mutate weapons directly and only track the total number of tinkers on the weapon. Because of this we have no way of knowing what tinkers have been used on a particular weapon. This means that we can't move tinkers from weapon to weapon, and we can't update the statistics of existing loot weapons since it is impossible to know what the baseline for the weapon was before the weapon was affected by tinkers.

Because of this we will not be modifying existing melee weapons at all. Instead we will be balancing new loot weapons where we can to approximate the damage output of the old weapons where possible. If values need to change for balance, then new weapons that drop will be slightly better than current weapons. We expect this will be especially true for the current 4/4 weapons like Staves and Daggers as they are currently well below our expected values for Light Weapons and Finesse Weapons. Loot Spears will also be better than existing Spears. We are still examining the numbers on other weapons to determine how competitive they are within the new categories.

We will be combating loot dilution by narrowing the various mutations so the low ends will no longer appear in loot. How much this will be changed is still being determined, and will likely be changed based on player feedback on the test server.