This is going to be a long post so if you don't like a wall of text, see tl;dr at the end.
As we know there's thousands of different weapons in AO but only a small fraction of them is found useful for actual combat. When 80%-90% of weapons are useless junk, then something has gone wrong in the design process - expansions did make previous weapons obsolete and that's ok but there has been also huge amount of weapons that were useless right when they were added to the game (f.ex. many SL weapons have minimum damage 1 or they're insanely slow, which makes them useless in SL).
Something is also wrong when a player (froob) starts using his end game weapon at level 60. He'll have to use the same weapon for the next 140 levels without any real weapon choices - this is one of the boring things in this game, why bother to level up when there's nothing left to achieve?
Shouldn't we have incrementally better weapon choices becoming available as we level up? Weapon content that is tied to game's difficulty? Weapon content where all weapons are useful at some point of the game? Weapon content that supports sandbox gameplay style ie. there would be good weapon choices in all game areas so that it doesn't matter a lot what path the player takes on when he's levelling up his character?
So I suggest total rewamp to weapons - it's lots of work but if done right, it would make AO a lot better gameplay wise. For starters I made this diagram where I placed different weapon choices into tiers (columns) and separated them by different expansions (rows). The picture doesn't show current situation but rather a situation that could be achieved through balancing process (not the only possible way to do this). Also the diagram is meant to show one weapon type and how each type progresses throughout the game, it doesn't mean that all weapons should be equal - there should be different weapon damage between professions and between melee/ranged but all weapon groups should follow the same progress principals.
The balancing process should change weapon damage, speed and special recharge values. Now in my diagram I've colored the weapon groups with green, yellow and red to represent the difficulty to use the weapon effectively:
- Green group means weapons that froob with maximized init skill can use at full def with maximum attack speed.
- Yellow are weapons that require maximized init skill and some items that buff init skill to reach weapon's max speed at aggdef bar's full def setting.
- Red groups are weapons that require both maximized init skill and pretty much all init buffing items to reach weapon's maximum speed at full def.
- making weapons require higher init skill gives a choice for player: do I want to have a weapon that's easy or hard to use at full def?
- the weapon choice should be different when player is soloing, teaming, pveing, pvping etc.
In current gameplay there way too many weapons that can be used at full def without any twinking effort. Make the init skill mean something! There should be weapons for all professions that would be impossible to use at full def but that would cause more damage at full agg than some other weapon that can be used at full def - this reason would make players team up more because if you want to go for max damage and that would mean to use weapon at full agg, then you'd be more vulnerable to received damage (less defense at full agg) and thus you might require more healing.
Another thing is area difficulty and weapon rarity. Currently there are many weapon drops in difficult places (f.ex. SL catacombs) but those weapons are often useless. So the balance should look into this problem as well by changing hard to get weapons to be better than weapons found easier. New weapons should be added to various places to fill up the loot tables and to give reason for all professions to enter different encounters (for froobs to high-end RK raids and for expansion chars to APFs/Dreads etc). Some weapons could be changed to be levelling items, like turn spirit weapons, due to rarity of ql300 turn spirit weapons and since it's weapon class that froobs can use - they could twink their skills and level up the weapon stats.
This process would turn some weapons to be worse than what they currently are so some players might get upset, but overally the weapon balancing would benefit us more in the long run by making the content more fun and giving players more goals to achieve.
tl;dr Weapons should be balanced by making all useless weapons useful and by balancing the weapon stats. See diagram and discuss.
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Originally Posted by omegahealer
Currently, just about everything used is capped at 1/1 at full def.. which makes full def the norm with little to no trade off except for 1 or 2 professions (ahmagad doctors who can't fill up their HP bar instantly with one push of a button?)
