Interesting Items: I'm Happy to Help!

[Kjsharp]

I love designing items (and Magic cards). Because I started playing OctoWoW in August, I'd be willing to invest some time as a side project to making items feel more interesting, fun, and special.

I. Why do this?

1) WoW itemization is uninspired. Very few items you find in the wild or in a dungeon are genuinely unique and do genuinely unique things. Generally they all add to the core stats, and that's about it. And as you level up, you generally just replace items that give +X to certain stats with new items that give +(X+2) to certain stats; all the way up to 60 and beyond!

There are exceptions, of course -- Strike of the Hydra comes to mind. Items like this show that WoW does have room for unique, interesting items. Diablo 2 does this really well -- I remember finding the Shadowfang and the Patriarch Great Sword, both of which do very unique things; the Shadowfang added a cold effect to your sword and decreased your light radius, and the Patriarch blinded enemies. OctoWoW should venture more into this space: it makes the game more fun, makes for special memorable moments, and if done well can lead to more unique and more personalized gameplay.

2) It allows for more horizontal progression, which can extend the life of the server. If you allow items to add to your fire damage, or increase the damage of your pets, or add a stun effect to your Mongoose Bite, items can enable new builds and gameplay styles. Vertical progression is obviously important, but having a more diverse set of stats and abilities on items can give some added breadth to each vertical progression level. Instead of skyscrapers, we can have pyramids.

II. A few examples:
1. Algae Fists
Hands
+4 Stamina
+8 Strength
4% chance to cast Entangling Roots when struck.

2. Pendant of Scarlet Rage
Neck
+9 Strength
+4 Spirit
Abilities that generate Rage generate 2 additional Rage.

3. Level 25 Uncommon Cloth Gloves
Hands
+2 Intellect
increases the damage of your instant cast spells by up to 18.

III. Proposed Path
If the OctoWoW team wants me to, I'd be happy to work on this. I would start with (i) level 25 and under dungeons and (ii) capstone quests, storylines, and elites in the level 1-20 zones. This I think I could finish by December 10th. Then I could likely tackle level 25-40 dungeons and zones level 20-40 by February 10th.

In the next post, I will address a few potential concerns.

[Kjsharp]

I would like to address three concerns that some might have.

1) The items will be too powerful . I have a few responses to this. First, the goal isn't to make items inherently more powerful, only more memorable and special and unique and immersive. Some items in WoW do this nicely already; we can have more of them do this. Some items might become slightly less or slightly more powerful, but it won't dramatically change the power level of leveling characters. Second, my focus would be on dungeon items, rare drop items, and capstone quests and elites from each zone. Most items won't change. Third, my first main focus would be on items acquired during the leveling process, for which power level concerns aren't as important. I am aware that changes to level 55-60 items must be more conservative.

2) If items are more unique, they'll be less ubiquitously useful, and therefore are more likely to be sharded instead of used . This concern is valid and to an extent is true. An item like Thunderfury is powerful in a raw way -- its abilities are equally useful for warriors, rogues, paladins, and melee hunters. But some items, like the pendant item in my examples above, are more useful for some classes (warriors and druids) and less useful for all other classes.

A few responses to this. First, fundamentally, this is a tradeoff that I would be willing to make, in moderation. I would want all green items and most blue items to be useful for multiple classes. The examples I made above were intentionally crafted to be useful for multiple classes. But it is true that there would be a modest reduction in the number of players interested in many rare items. I would be content with that trade off, but if the OctoWoW devs wanted to, they could slightly increase the drop rates of blue items in dungeons and add an additional reward option to capstone quests to compensate. Second, my intent would be for the majority of rare items to be interesting not because they're rawfully OP powerful like Thunderfury, but because they enable the player to do or experience unique things.

3) If items are too powerful, cool, or useful, too many people would farm them. This is a concern I have. I hope that WoW, like Diablo, enables different loot tables for first-time kills, as that would eliminate this potential problem. If WoW doesn't have that capability, then it's something to be concerned about.

I have a few responses to this concern. First I think this is more a concern for open world encounters at level 55+. If I created a blue maul that had a 3% drop rate from Old Icebeard in Dun Morogh -- one that gave you access to Old Icebeard's Icy Grasp spell --, I think some players might want to kill it a few times, but few would sit there and kill it over and over until the item dropped. Still, I would design open world items more conservatively, as they don't require the same time investment to farm that dungeons do. Second is that some of this might actually be good for fostering grouping and community. Grouping up to kill elites is a great part of WoW. I've noticed on the hardcore server that many elites get skipped -- this would give players an incentive to take up these challenges.

My goal would be to design items that wouldn't change players' leveling behavior. Diablo 2 was like this -- I didn't sit around waiting for a certain unique item to drop. I would keep going and make the best with what I had, only farming for items once I had reached Hell difficulty. Finding a super special item, though, was always exciting and made me very happy, and occasionally would change my build or playstyle. That's what I want in OctoWoW.

Happy to address other concerns in replies.