Farming is just around the corner now, yet I feel myself looking to the next horizon for boundless. What improvements can help the game continue to grow, evolve, and impact players of every caliber in the community? I believe the answer lies in expanding and improving every profession in the game, as well as legitimizing some of the less often regarded roles and jobs players have found themselves doing since boundless hit 1.0
Brace yourselves- Walls of text beyond this point!
Let’s start with the basics, the professions that are most wide spread in game and give them the most love first. Most basic of all, mining could use some real attention.
Mining
Beyond just gathering raw materials to trade for crafting professions, miners lack any real reliable source of income to help replace all of the food and potions and tools that they go through. Additionally, mining is a fairly flat profession with no real use outside of just mining raw materials. You wouldn’t take a dedicated miner on a hunt, would you? I think we can change that.
Firstly, let’s break up the monotony of mining by adding a few interesting mechanics and collectables into the mix. Every so often, while mining, a miner may stumble upon something that is *particularly * interesting in comparison to typical resources they might encounter. Rare drops that have a chance to drop from any resource node and is not detectable by any but the most keen prospectors. (More on my ideas for “prospector” skill later) These rare drops can be acquired by anybody who breaks a resource node. Rare drops would be a pristine or perfect or some how unique specimen of the resource they drop from, and can be placed as a trophy item (prestige!) or exchanged to the central guild (or Crysominter?) for a moderate to high pay out depending on the quality and rarity of the trophy item redeemed. VERY rarely, fragments of a more complex relic can be found and combined for a super rare trophy with a special exchange value! There is room to explore interesting redeemable rewards. Paints, masks, and various other vanity items come to mind.
What about bringing the miner out of the mine, and into a party? Miners need something to contribute to a party that is in line with their profession. Preferably something that benefits the entire party, not just the miner themselves.
In Hunts, the miner may fill two roles. With powerful swings of their hammer, the miner can deal crushing blows that briefly stun even powerful enemies. Additionally, the powerful impacts of a miners hammer sunders the elemental armor of enemies, exposing them to attack even from their own elemental class. This makes the miner a valuable melee support class in pve combat such as meteorite hunts (and other encounters!)
In addition to a support melee combat role, miners will be the only class able to gain rough ores from completed meteors. Don’t worry, other classes will still have adequate (Class specific!) rewards as well.
Miner specific skill: Prospecting (5 points)
Along with a slight rework on skills (more on that at the bottom of this thread) a prospecting skill unlock only for miners. This skill clues the dedicated miner in on where they might find rarer drops from resource nodes. The effect is simple- a resource node that will drop a rare drop has a moderately subtle glisten effect to catch the eye of an attentive miner. Easy to miss if your just plowing through a mountain with your super hammer, but I you’re casually spelunking and exploring caves, it’s sure to stand out. Additionally, replaces the effect of the skill LUCK to increase secondary drops and additional drops from stone or gravel.
Hunting
Of all of the professions, the hunter is arguably the most difficult to master. It’s reliant on both skill points and the players own combat talents to be successful. It has the highest risk, but lackluster rewards unless you group up with huge groups to pursue high tier meteors. How can we improve hunters without having to fundamentally redesign all of combat and pve encounters?
First, lets tackle rewards and loot drops. Similar to the miner, hunters deserve some collectables and redeemables to add intrigue and income to the profession. This a bit differently than with miners though, due to the nature of the beast. Currently, high tier creatures already drop trophy items that are highly valuable as crafting items for other professions, but have little use to the hunter otherwise. Beasts have so much more to give to hunters! On harvest, beasts of any level have a chance to drop a pristine pelt specific to the creature it drops from. These pelts vary in quality based on the level of the beast they drop from, and have three potential applications. They can be displayed in your beacon for prestige, exchanged/crysominted for moderate to high coin value, or used/consumed for a temporary buff specific to the beast it dropped from. The quality of pelt determines the duration of the buff.
Road Runner- (Focus) increases rate that focus stacks are gained
Hopper- (Rage) increases rate that rage stacks are gained
Spitter- (Charge/Rapid) increases the effect of your charge or rapid fire skills
Wildstock- (Kinetic/Crushing Blows) increases the effect of your Kinetic armor or Crushing Blows
Cuttletrunk- (Target tracking) your bombs now attempt to track the target they are thrown at. Great for bomb healers or AoE DPS!
Hunter/Wraith- (Innocuous) dramatically reduces your threat, making beasts less likely to notice you.
Hunter Specific Skill: Animal Spirit (5 points). This skill has two main effects. In combat or when you have a meteor life, you see the outline of all aggravated beasts. Higher ranks . This will better help hunters track down those tricky wildstock hiding under water or in trees! Second part increases the likeliness of quality drops from mobs, and replaces the effects of LUCK. (again, see my skill rework for more details)
Farming & Gathering
Rounding out the professions that deal with acquiring raw materials, Farming & Gathering is really two professions rolled into one. The upcoming portion, farming is largely unchanged. The Gathering profession that we currently see in the live game deals with gathering surface resources that can not be farmed like Glowcaps and Desert Sword.
As before, lets look at what makes these professions tick, and how we can make them more worth while. Gathering is terribly underappreciated as a profession, and is often looked at as inefficient and time consuming compared to other methods like regen farming. Only the most devout collectors really bother with collecting all of the new and rare color variants of plants and fungus that exo worlds provide us, and to my knowledge, there is not really even a market for those players to actively participate in. To that end, I’d like to see gathering have a similar trophy system, but based on collecting a spectrum of colors of plants and fungus. Rarely, prismatic specimen may drop from a normal plant drop. These Prismatic specimen can be placed to permanently gain a random color, crafted into a trophy (make a prismatic arrangement for prestige?), or traded at market.
Farmers are anticipated to be very important after the upcoming farming updates, and the systems in place are already pretty good. The only concern I have is that farmers may struggle to make income if they can’t find a market to sell their crops at. To help with that, I’m proposing that food crops rarely drop “prize winning” drops that can be redeemed instantly for coin. Fun little stuff like giant earthyams, golden wheat, fancy rice, what ever. These can not be consumed or traded, they just give the farmer a little extra coin every now and then. Prestige crops (farming part 2) will adequately reward dedicated farmers with prestige and coin on it’s own.
Farming & Gathering Specific Skill: Green Thumb (5 points) This skill replaces both LUCK and GATHERING EPIC skills. Increases drop rates of wild plants, 5 points enables you to scoop up surface resources with a shovel and obtain prismatic items.
Crafting Professions
Crafting professions are not for the feint of heart. These lean heavily on skill points and a number of skill exclusives prevent a single crafter from being able to craft all of the things with a single skill page. Therefore, crafters often spend most of their time at a home beacon in their work shops and neglect their attribute skills. This means that playing a crafter can be fairly dull, with few opportunities for compelling game play. Furthermore, Crafting can be terribly expensive unless you are gathering your own materials with an alt or selling your wares at a market at a high markup. Crafters need an exciting mechanic to shake the profession up. What if we make crafters feel a bit more… inspired?
Crafters have a terribly flat play style. You get the skill points, gather materials, and make an item. It’s simple, predictable, and… boring. Let’s add a little bit of inspiration to the mix! When a recipe is completed, it has a chance to generate inspiration! If you craft an item while inspired, the recipe to craft that item is slightly modified, yielding unknown* results! Unknown results simply mean that the items is not reproducible without the same Inspiration effect and the end result is not listed in the knowledge tab. You can choose to act on your inspiration, or ignore it to craft normally. Some examples of randomly generated Inspiration recipes are:
Food (Spicy/Bitter/Sweat) Adds an (or extra) bean to the recipe making the dish have additional effects.
Weapon (Augmented) Adds a random rank 1 weapon augment to the crafting recipe. The weapon now permanently has this augment effect. Can stack with additional consumable weapon augments.
Brew (Reactive) Adds a reagent that reacts with the brew to add unusual effects, or combine the effect of another lesser brew.
Tool (Embellishments) Adds embellishments to the tool of precious metal or gems. Improves stats of the tool based on the rarity and type of embellishment.
Tech (Utility) The tool picks up a free rank 1 forge boon. Can be stacked with other boons in the forge.
Decorative/blocks (Glossy) Adds wax (or extra) to the recipe, makes the block extra shiny. Adds 1 prestige.
These Inspired items can be sold, used normally, or turned into a patent that can be exchanged for instant coin. The higher the value of the added ingredient, the more valuable the patent when exchanged.
This thread is a work in progress, I’ll post edits as I complete each profession! Enjoy!