Here are my thoughts for the developers to chew on:
As of right now, the general population goes from Iron to Titanium hammers when mining. They skip Gold/Silver hammers. We need to make Gold/Silver more attractive especially in light of recent mining changes.
Summary of Suggestions to improve both hammers as well as mining
- Tier 1: Improve baseline stats for Gold/Silver
- Tier 2: Slight tweaks to brews and food as it relates to mining, axing, shoveling activities. This serves as budget minded approach for those who can’t afford forged items
- Tier 3: And for those who want the best of the best, buy forged items.
These are current baseline stats
Tier 1 Suggestions:
- Buff damage to Gold hammer. If critical traits is the strength for Gold, then it’s woeful compared to Iron. Because Iron provides a critical damage of 840 (700 * 1.2 crit effect). Whereas Gold does 875 (500 *1.75). So Gold is marginally better than Iron while being 5x more expensive based on current market prices. 840 vs 875? The math doesn’t add up
- Improve durability for Gold so that’s it’s slightly higher than Iron but less than Silver. There needs to be more “bang for the buck” for Gold.
- Improve Flexibility to Silver and Gold so that they are higher than Iron. This makes them a more attractive choice for forging. As it stands now, if I want a forged hammer, I’d rather go with Iron because it has a flexibility of 60 rather than 50 and 30 for Silver and Gold, respectively. Or obviously go with Titanium. Obvious is too obvious.
- Do we need to do anything else to Silver? Dunno. Open to suggestions though.
Those are the baseline changes. Here are Tier 2 suggestions below:
I think the strength of Boundless crafting is the thoughtfulness that is applied to its deep crafting tree and gameplay mechanics. Most people see this as a high-resolution Minecraft. But the more you get into the game, the more you realize this is nothing like Minecraft due to the additional layers found in many areas of gameplay. It’s what drew me to this game because it reminded me of another MMO I enjoyed playing. It allowed me to express my creativity and do a deep dive into theorycrafting. I’d like to extend this thought by suggesting just slight tweaks to brews and food recipes.
The tier 1 suggestions above are just the minimum for your mining efforts. For the player who truly wants to maximize his/her mining efforts, but doesn’t want to pay money for an expensive forged hammer, then food and brew should serve as a cheaper budget-minded alternative. I think the 10 minute buff to strength brew is a good start. I’ve played with an improved strength brew which gave me a 20% damage buff to mining. The difference is incredible when I bomb mine and hammer mine on a higher tier planet. I’m still recording data but it looks promising.
I don’t know what internal analytics is showing and I’m sure the Boundless devs will monitor. But maybe consider buffing the strength brews to 15 minutes if there isn’t enough usage. I don’t think it should go beyond that because it would just be too OP. The recipe is simple to make as it is. Or the other approach is keep to 10 minutes but buff to 15 for non combat activities such as mining and tree cutting. I imagine mining efforts are at least an hour so that’s a reduction from 6 brews to 4 if you extend the duration.
I’d also consider increasing the lean meat loot drop for Road Runners so that more can be used in Criticaling recipes. I haven’t had a chance to test the recipe yet but criticaling recipes with an improved Gold hammer/bombs could prove to be a great use case for specific mining builds or scenarios.
And/or maybe introduce a Swift brew which gives a bonus to speed action. This would strengthen Silver Hammers, Ax, and Shovel.
And last but not least, improve the UI by including stats for Food and Brews. I own a food and brew shop by the name of Deen’s Kitchen (shameless plug) and I sell a very comprehensive lineup of all the food and brews. Not just teaching food. But the majority of the gaming community really don’t understand the benefits to them because the UI doesn’t do a great job of explaining it and showing the stats. Lord knows, I’ve passively raged here and on Discord about how bad the UI is and the confusion it has caused me
As such, most people just end up doing getting into the business of selling teaching food and neglect the rest. But as a foodie evangelist, I think there is tremendous opportunity in some of these recipes if the UI was better. Which, ultimately, would rollover to other forms of gameplay such as mining.
In summary:
- Improve baseline stats for Gold/Silver
- Slight tweaks to brews and food as it relates to mining, axing, shoveling activities. This serves as budget minded approach for those who can’t afford endgame forged items
- And for those who want the best of the best, buy forged items.
- Improve Food/Brew UI
Thank you,
Deen