I have after some testing succeeded to create a Rift and a blink slingbow. And With these I went to my centraforge and was soon a bit frustrated because of the extremly low flexibility of these weapons. I have gathered a overview of all slingbows and build a small (colored) excel spreadsheet which shows some of my reasons that I feel that this is an area for the devs to “balance” the game.
Just a short summary:
- Blink and Umbris seem to have very low damage (see also the small graph left side “rank / damage”
- The flexibilty of rift / umbris / blink is (in my opinion too low). Looking at the 2nd graph “rank / flexibility” I would like to see something around 30-50.
- I f I look into the future for further materials, the current graph indicates that a next better material would have MAXIMUM 0 flexibility !
For all numeric values: green is nice, yellow/orange is not so good (for me).
Any comments?
I agree it could use more balance. I think the loss of flexibility should have been occuring all along. After all stone, wood, copper, iron, gold, and silver tools are basically worthless and pointless to forge compared to clearly superior in every way titanium. Ditto for most of the gems as compared to diamond tools. But it’s hard for the devs to weaken something after the fact. It would cause an uproar. So now we have a meteoric drop in effectiveness between one tier and the next. Maybe in the future the devs will raise the effectiveness of rift/umbris/blink when they introduce a new lower flexibility tier.
I still don’t understand why gem items have different flexibilities to begin with, they are the same tier of item after all. On top of that, amethyst and topaz are the bows that deserve decreased flexibility the least.
I wouldn’t mind if it was all changed to 75 so all gem items would be 197 effectiveness which wouldn’t be a big nerf to diamond and emerald forging.
Changing it all to 80 would work too because we are currently bypassing it by putting emerald and diamond first in the forged stack anyway.
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Hi again, here follow some additions from my side:
@ToneZone: I do not see any reason to “weaken” (your wording for nerf?) any settings, I definitely want to create unhappy players. First, I think the basic physical weapons follow a good path with their dmg/crit/dur etc which can be seen if you try to put a line in the graph. These slingbows are good progression tools for the new player starting from stone (which I did not show) up to titanium when you reach t4/t5 planets. I for example used iron stuff (and skipped silver/gold) until I got to Serpensarindi and found some decent titanium seams. The following gem weapons seem to change the path but they also introduced that additional dimension of element affinity. I was also like @Pfiffel wondering about the larger variance in some of their attributes but I did not dig into the possible reasons as I did no find docs from wonderstruck beyond caustic = Corrosion or toxin, Volatile = Blast or burn, Potent = Shock or chill as well as mobs distribution except going to a planet and be surprised by “no damage done and die fast”. If you take these element pairings, each planet may need quite the same weapon quality but you have to take TWO weapons with you when going for a small hunt - or you like gambling for your life 
The final “new” materials are a totally different thing as their range - as shown in the graphs - is really strange (is this the right wording?). The damage spread is not to be understood and the flexibility is (my suggestion) best to be “raised” to make the rank / flexibilty graph LINEAR and allow room for the next material. BUT: I think we do not need to wait for the introduction of a next tier (too long to wait and certainly unsure) but a slight balance of flexibility for the new ones raising the value would not break things or cause “uproar” !?
@Pfiffel: yes I did notice the “different” range of gem tools values but as I stated above, the element attribute MAY be a reason. I have changed some of my tools use from titanium to gem tools but in most cases I stay away from them and use them for coils instead …
So, increase damage of umbris/blink, and increase flexibility of these lucent gems.
Does the added elemental effects of the lucent gems justify the damage difference or the low flexibility? And that’s solely for slingbows. As of right now, there would be no use for most lucent tools of any kind.
