So either way you guys are going to cram a update to forging to us. Would you mind actually talking with some of the people on test testing this out so we don’t get another system that you end up unhappy with at the end of the day?
I know you guys care about your game but history has proven that you might need to actually talk to us to know if this is fun vs so hard that no one wants to do it!
I really do want a use case situation of where/when/what level you expect someone to start forging and what benefit they will get from it over using unforged equipment.
I’ve done no forging. I still use iron hammers. I’ve mined a few diamonds, but not enough to be useful. I just made some gold hammers after running the numbers on unforged gear, but haven’t gone gathering with them yet as we were expanding our base to add more machines and working on other personal build projects.
I had set up an alt with some skill points that say they affect forging. How do they really affect forging? I don’t know yet. I look at the list of items I need to make forge ingredients and go out to gather the lamella with my alt that is geared for enviro protection and gathering. I’ve done nothing with those lamella since getting them. After looking up low level forging on the forum here, it looked like it wasn’t worth the effort, that’d I’d only be getting defective product that wouldn’t help me since my stats, and the initial stats of the tool, wouldn’t give me the ability to make something cool.
I dont think this is new. They were going for 40-50k at a point yet many people were just trading for them instead of paying for them.
It’s not going to be an issue if they go to 100k instead of 50k. People will still trade for them because resources are the king of all, no matter if there is a currency or not.
Oh I was under the impression you could place a forge item after the boons were set and remove everything and get the items back. Is this not true? (I’ve never use it myself)
you have to choose the 8 items in your rack before you click start. you cant change them until you use a resin.
So I can put a forge item back into the forge and remove the boons?
If so I would like to make a suggestion to make this a thing.
The Forgemaster would like to weigh in…
I am 100% on board with a Forge overhaul - this is the right thing to be doing.
Here comes the “However” …
HOWEVER… I think you are going about it all wrong. The Forge doesn’t need to be nerfed in this way. You are 100% incorrect about what is good for the health of your game.
Let me explain: Had this been the way it worked from the beginning, with regards to the draining boon compound changes, then there’s no issue. But the fact is, it isn’t the way it has been, so without any doubt what you are doing is nerfing endgame Forging. Why is that a problem, you might ask? Because of a simple and incredibly important fact: Your players who are at the endgame are your biggest fans. We’re the ones who have worked the hardest, spent the most time and effort, bought months and months of gleam club, maybe even cubits for plots for our cities! And by directly nerfing the things that we rely on to keep the game fun, you are going to drive away your endgame players. Players like me and most of the Forgemasters. I know there are others. Merlin has been getting on less and less. The Shadow Dragons as a whole have been waning in membership too
So you’re intentions might be good, but you need to look beyond that, is what I am saying. Your balance choices might be logical, but think about what you will do to your playerbase.
What’s the point in having a well balanced game that no one plays?
On to the constructive part of my response -
The Forge should be ‘nerfed’ in an entirely different way. Here’s how:
Add more boon possibilities to EACH gum type, for every tool. The issue we have that allows us to make insane gear is that we can almost ALWAYS get exactly what we want with gums. If you add a bunch of new boons, you will make that harder, but not impossible. That’s good balance, and should be safe from huge backlash.
The Forge has for a long time BEGGED for new boons, and NOT simple stat reshuffles. Give us some personality for our tools!
Examples:
New boon for tools that allows the tool to eat whatever raw material (stone, wood, dirt/sand, based on tool) that recharges durability. It would be a chance on hit, scaling up per boon level. Maybe 5% per level up to a level 4 boon for a total of 20% chance. This would be extremely handy in some cases!
New boon for slingbows that makes shots pierce
New boon for slingbows that makes shots bounce or chain between enemies
New boon for bombs that removes block damage entirely
New boon for grapples that debuffs enemies while they are attached
New boon for anything that makes it regenerate health slowly while held
New boon for anything that makes it regenerate hunger (max energy) slowly while held
You could introduce hybrid boons as well that do like 60% of two boons combined, so while its worse than the normal boon, if you combine them right its worth even more for min-maxing
These are simple examples of the RIGHT way to nerf the Forge. Give us MORE boons! That’ll reduce the rate of ‘perfect tools’ but it’ll do it in a way that makes everyone HAPPY to have variety rather than ANGRY at direct nerfs to the endgame
You can’t forge an item that has forge effects on it. If you remove all the boons BEFORE you set the item, you can forge it again.
I was just thinking of a jelly hammer but yeah, yours works 
This would be awesome. Aridhol for Viceroy 2018.
The nerf is too much…
Could you just half thr nerf and buff the other compunds instead?
I think that’s a great idea to rebalance the forge without nerfing it. That would feel like things are being added rather than taken away, which is very important for player retention.
As usual I agree with Aridhol as he puts things eloquently that I could never. My main problem with this and the bomb mining nerf and your other dev activity is this: at a glance you seem to be analyzing data from outside of game at what things people are using heavily and taking that as a sign that objects are OP instead of taking it as a sign of what it actually is. The forge has like 100+ ingredients to use and only like 20 of them are any good value and worth using. So what do you do? You nerf the one thats being used most? NO FFS make the rest of the unusable ■■■■ usable. You have dozens of system in this game that are filled with dead unusable ■■■■ just like the forge. Potions, Food, any consumable really. Nerfing things that are used heavily and leaving 90% of the things totally unusable is terrible development I’m sorry. You did the same thing to bomb mining now its totally useless and everyone has just shifted to the only alternative which is 3x3 mining. Stop breaking ■■■■ and spend your time making all the dead areas in your game functional for heavens sake.
James or anyone reading this! Aridhols idea is 100 times better then the one you came up with. Your idea of quirks and boons is less helpful to the rest of us. You need to also give us a 100% way and maybe lose all the mats or 50% of the mats vs having some item that is worthless to even try and sell.
To Aridhol’s point you need to attract more people to the game this talk about making doing end game things harder instead of giving us more content? Maybe make the next content endgame harder?
What you have might need some tweaking but come on guys don’t make the game more painful we all are already dying for some bigger content additions and no a table and chair and signs is not exactly content?
This is a fun MMO right?
I have limited forging experience myself, but with what little I do have, I agree with all these points if for no other reason than it’s clear to me the majority of forge ingredients are pointless and having more possibilities from forging would be really fun.
Yes. This.
Here is a repost of what I posted a month ago, when they started talking about hammer balance… Sure enough they just changed a few stats in their spread sheet and calculator again.
Maybe this time the devs can read it and use some of this alongside your new boons idea. Many of the same issues still apply.
This is plainly obvious to me. Let me go through my list when I buy a tool (or craft one).
Will it break the armored block ? 100% Damage
How often will I need to replace the tool? 50% Durability 50 % Damage (number of swings)
How long will it take me to break said blocks? 50% Damage (number of swings) 50% Speed
So if we do some simple math Damage is 200, Durability 50, Speed 50.
Working backwords, Swift tools would need 4x more speed to make up for their lack of damage. Balanced tools would need 4x more durability. Currently neither of these is true.
There are some other points too:
There’s ton’s of ideas. In order to keep things fun, I think you should avoid “balancing” the hammers with each other. IF you try to just do a stats adjustment, you’ll force us to make a boring decision, and if they are all relatively similar in function, we will just buy the cheapest one… at the moment it would be diamond because they are so easy to mine, but in the future it might be some other gem. We will just buy whatever is cheapest and not even think twice.
If on the other hand there is a reason to use a certain hammer (for example, I mine with a diamond one, to do lots of damage, but then switch to a topaz hammer to mine ores with increased luck). Look at that! That’s pretty cool. Maybe I go to collect sand and I use a ruby shovel, cause it doubles the amount I gather. Maybe i hold a ruby slingbow because it doubles my health. A blue grapple makes me run faster, but a green one shoots farther… Who knows. Make some cool and fun changes and please don’t get into the mindset of “Let’s reduce the damage of diamond 5%, or buff the speed of sapphire but 5 pts”. We don’t like numbers, they don’t mean anything to us. We like cool things, things that already exist in the game, like luck and radius. If we have to choose between these, it feels more fun.
Editted for formatting.
Let the forged tool hording begin!!!
BTW, love this change.
I think I said something like that on stream as I was learning how to forge. It seemed too good to be true. “Wow, its this easy to make these tools ppl sell for 50k? Something is wrong here…”
The last patch buffed every single tool…The next is christmas, dealing with creature drops, and a whole new mob. Do you really not see anything good from the devs? Do you only see the negative?
I see an opportunity with this patch. Low end tools, easier/cheaper to forge. You only see the doom and gloom because of an oversight mistake
I’m sorry Jiro… but it was
They were never meant to exist! Those tools you (and I)are hooked on.
Anyway. I’ve got a game to play, mats to farm. portals to keep open. But I am excited for the update! Any hints as to numbers would help us theory-crafters btw @rossstephens
Calling this an oversight is misleading. This has been in the game for months and months (even before release).
It’s the same thing as them saying that adding new and completely different ingredients to recipes was somehow fixing a “bug”, even though no one with 2 braincells to rub together would ever use the word bug to describe it that way.
I don’t know if rubbing your brain cells together is good for you. Sounds painful.