Guild Wars 2

After spending quite some time on my own scrounging for materials and desperately avoiding the ridiculous inflation of low-mid tier components on the Trading Post, I’ve found myself wondering if there could be an alternative to the Do It Yourself approach.

This isn’t to say that we would side-step or otherwise replace the crafting mechanic, but offer a means by which to empower a player without relying entirely on producing your own equipment, purchasing it or finding drops, or using upgrade components.

(Admittedly, I really like the crafting system — even if the farming can be such a pain!)

What is Tempering?
Tempering is an alternative to the need to replace equipment every few levels to maintain combat superiority, and allows players to improve upon their equipment beyond the use of upgrade components and sigils. It is intended to extend the “life” of an item by allowing a player to use it longer without a decrease in performance — assuming they’re willing to spend the coin to do so!

What Will Tempering Do?
Players would be able to use their crafting materials and other resources to strengthen items, improving their properties and value. Similarly to how crafting works, materials will be consumed during the tempering process. The result is an item to which bonuses to its attributes have been applied. These bonuses would only affect the base attributes of the item — applied upgrades such as sigils and upgrade components would not be changed.

How Will Tempering Work?
As this concept is quite theoretical at this time, this model is designed to closely match a sample.

Let’s begin with two weapons:

Berserker’s Darksteel Sword

• Damage: 483 – 533
• Power: +41
• Precision: +31
• Critical Damage: +2%
• Required Level: 60

Berserker’s Darksteel Sword

• Damage: 571 – 631
• Power: +53
• Precision: +38
• Critical Damage: +3%
• Required Level: 65

Ideally, we would want to, over time, be able to ensure that the first weapon could come to match the second. The match comes out to be a difference of approximately 20%, or ~4% per level, using damage as a guideline. If the item can be tempered, we should expect approximately that 4% increase to each of its base statistics.

Using this, we can extrapolate a simple model which claims:

• Any item can be tempered up to 5 times.
• Each time an item is tempered, it should get +4% additive bonus to its stats.
• This number should be represented to indicate an item has been tempered, as well as the use of text within the item description.

After some tempering and a good pile of materials, we have our result:

+5 Berserker’s Darksteel Sword

• Damage: 579 – 639
• Power: +49
• Precision: +37
• Critical Damage: +2%
• Required Level: 60
• Tempered
• Soulbound

The tempered item is close to being on par with its Lv65 equivalent, albeit with lower attribute bonuses. Additionally, like Masterwork and better items, the weapon is now soulbound.

PART 2 FORTHCOMING …

PART 2

What Does Tempering Require?
A fairly simple set of steps.

1. The player must have the proper crafting discipline to make use of tempering.
2. The player collects the necessary crafting materials to temper the item (these are shown when placing the item into the Tempering sub-window of an applicable crafting station).
3. Once the item is placed into the Tempering sub-window and the necessary materials are either on-hand or in your storage, you can click the button to begin the process.
4. After a few seconds, you have a newly improved item!

Material Costs of Tempering
As I can’t give a proper estimate that would help keep this balanced, I leave these numbers blank for now. The objective would be to ensure that tempering would be a viable alternative without unduly straining resources (so never more than would be required to craft the item again).

Why Would I, as a Player, Want to Do This?
It’s pretty likely you’ve found yourself sitting on a few materials gathered from nodes for your Daily or by completing missions, maps, and other things. You might even have extras lying around from trying to salvage gear for your crafting. In addition to making “old” items usable again, tempering means being able to use more materials.

Not to mention that being able to improve your gear would be pretty awesome.

What are the Limitations on Tempering?
Obviously, not everything can be tempered, as this could introduce some pretty serious imbalance into the game.

• Legendary items will never allow tempering (they’re already legendary), and unique items as well.
• You must have the proper crafting discipline! This ensures not only that the player will be capable of producing the required materials, but also helps to enforce that the character has the knowledge to perform such refinements.
• Tempering can only be performed 5 times, based upon the model described above. While this means that no item could exceed a +5 (20%), it also ensures that the item will still be phased out within a reasonable expectation.
• You still need items to do things, meaning there will always be a market for materials. Without the materials or the ability to make them (such as having too low a rank), players will need to rely upon the Trading Post and the community.
• If tempering grants Crafting Experience, this value should be a percentage of that normally gained by crafting a new item. Furthermore, a bias for the current rank of the crafter should prevent the use of tempering as a workaround for doing things the hard way. As has been stated: tempering should not be a replacement to making new items — it’s an alternative.
• It is HIGHLY recommended that, like transmutation, tempered items be SOULBOUND. This will prevent a lucrative market from springing up around tempering.
• Tempering Bonuses would be ignored during PvP gameplay, to keep things nice and balanced.
• For those of you familiar with Guild Wars 1, you might recall the +10% damage bonus granted by the Personalized status for weapons. This is a similar concept.

I’ll admit I haven’t read it all but I think your suggestion is wonderfully outside the box and a good possibility, if not for GW2 then some MMO out there eventually!