Guild Wars 2

This has been mentioned a good few times already, but from current set of 168 possible combinations, only a mere handful are available (7 from crafting and a few from dungeon geargrind).

Now, the solution to the thing is rather simple. We have enough types of fine materials that would correspond to attributes (e.g. blood – power, sacs – condition damage, claws – precision, etc.) Instead of making preset inscriptions in form of e.g. (looking at random lvl80 exotic recipe):

5 globs
5 dowels
5 fine materials of the same type

Ramp the requirements a bit up with following template:

7 globs
7 dowels
3 fine materials X (major)
2 fine materials Y (minor #1)
2 fine materials Z (minor #2)

3/2/2 group can be filled with player’s chosen stacks, giving particular bonuses. The resulting inscription would simply have “custom” prefix (or maybe <player name>‘s – if your DB scheme allowed this kind of flexibility), and subsequent final item as well. This doesn’t cause any prefix bloat and shouldn’t require any big modifications (and on top of that – no modifications to existing items).

The example above can be extended naturally to lower level items of course (which allow dual combinations, and so on).

I like the idea. That would indeed be nice.

I think the reason stats are arrayed in very specific combinations and quantities is a designed balance rather than some sort of oversight. The tradeoffs for survival/damage/support stats and the specific numbers on the specific types of gear prefixes are set in stone specifically to balance these stats against one another, which is why we don’t have a more granular system.

PopeUrban.2578:

I think the reason stats are arrayed in very specific combinations and quantities is a designed balance rather than some sort of oversight.

Yea, that’s one possible reason – though looking at what is available currently, I don’t really see that many issues.

Though FWIW, I’d love (and quite a few other people judging from comments) to see all permitted (if that’s the actual case) combinations to be normally craftable. We have 7, and there are at least 6 other combinations completely uncraftable now – with some of those quite desirable – e.g. pow/vit/tough or pow/cond/mfind.