# Proposal for Progression Changes-
Summary: I noticed within the discord that there was a lot of talk about Horizontal Progression Vs Vertical Progression. I myself am in favor of Horizontal progression and wanted to offer some suggestions regarding the players progression with Gear, Abilities, and Player/Enemy Stats and more (After having played and experienced most of the content). A game I think you may like to draw inspiration from would be The Elder Scrolls Online. This MMO has tons of horizontal progression that helps to keep lots of its content relevant even into the latest expansions.

## **Topic #1: Player Stats**
Currently, player stats are both confusing and hard to interpret. Some lack proper descriptions, such as Poise, Weapon Poise, and Stealth. Many of the numerically displayed stats also record below the decimal which makes gaining new stats overly complex to quantify. 0.036 Crit Power sounds useless. In addition, there are stats such as health that only display above the decimal, but do still record digits below the decimal. This has led to some moments of living on 0 health, and bleeds that tick for 0.X damage. Seeing it tick 3-4 times before the health drops a single digit is not ideal.

My suggestions are as follows,

## Suggestion #1:
Better sorting of the players stats within the Journals Stats page, and allow all of them to be clicked to give an advanced description and breakdown of the stat on the right page. Start the page with the detailed description, followed by your current Total. Include a list below the total that shows each individual item or skill contributing to the stat, along with the amount it is contributing.

## Suggestion #2:
Remove any values below the decimal. I recommend shifting all of the numbers over by one (50.X to 500). Bigger numbers are easier to track, and no value affecting your health should ever be below 1. Elder Scrolls Online takes this to the extreme, with your stats starting at 10,000 and rising. This allows them to add small little bonuses, without having to dip far below the decimal as Veloren does. I don’t think it would be in your interest to go that far, as low numbers do provide a feeling of simplicity, but it is currently far too low.

Players also enjoy gaining bigger numbers, and the skills you can unlock that add more health or stamina will be far more satisfying when you gain 50, rather than 5. I will touch more on the skills in the next topic, and gear in the topic after. I do recommend making the health skill give a maximum of 200 (25, 8 times?) As doubling your health is a bit much for just one skill everyone gets. It makes it harder to balance fairness in PvP also at that steep an amount.

## Suggestion #3:
Change Crit power to being a percentage and rename it to Crit Bonus Damage for transparency (25% Crit Bonus Damage, base).

## Suggestion #4:
Have armor display its armor value directly as a percentage, rather than a decimal. If it stops a % of damage, it will be easier to track if it shows as a % everywhere. It is less quantifiable when you convert the integer into a diminishing percentage.

## Suggestion #5:
Introduce Magic Damage and Resistance (separate from armor). This just allows for flexibility with what each armor is good for, and allows for more diversity. You could opt to add different damage types and resistances, if you are really interested in going super horizontal with progression, but that would be your decision. At a minimum, just one more major type gives heaps of flexibility. Cloth can have the best magic resistance, and hide can be in the middle with both.

## Suggestion #6:
Player inventory can feel pretty small and limited currently. I don’t believe it is due to its size though, but that you have nowhere to store anything you don’t need to carry on you, forcing you to have everything you want to keep to be on you at all times, filling up your limited inventory. Consider other places or methods to store your saved up loot or spare gear.

## **Topic #2: Skills and SP**
Currently, the skill trees fall victim to many design decisions and current content limitations which makes interacting with them generally feel bad. There are far too many options available from the start without any real structure and all of them lack proper descriptions or easily quantifiable upgrades. The decision to spend a Skill Point (SP) to unlock weapon skill trees is a poor decision, as now you need to opt out of spending them on arguably better options such as health and stamina just to unlock more variety. Each skill level costing an additional skill point at each level is also a poor decision, as it reduces the excitement a level should have the further you progress.

My suggestions are as follows,

## Suggestion #1:
Sort skill trees into three categories (General, Combat, Craft). This will make the interface simpler to reduce possible future clutter when adding new skill trees.

## Suggestion #2:
Remove the weapon skill unlocks from the General Tab, and have them unlocked through some different method (after obtaining your first kill with that type of weapon Perhaps). I do like the idea of having them hidden until later, as this both reduces the amount of information the player is initially flooded with, and provides more opportunities for discovery of content.

## Suggestion #3:
Make all skills use 1 Skill Point ALWAYS, even if it has multiple tiers which is fine. You should instead modulate progression through how low down a skill is on the tree.

## Suggestion #4:
transform all skill trees into actual skill trees. This will immediately give deeper progression, both horizontally and vertically if designed well.

## Suggestion #5:
Provide choice skills, where you must choose between 2 different options. This allows for diversity among players, without leaving them feeling like they missed out due to not completely unlocking the tree. World of WarCraft is currently redesigning all of their classes with new extensive skill trees, so that is a good fresh example to draw inspiration from.

## Suggestion #6:
Make passives that actively change the gameplay of your skills, rather than just somewhat boosting your stats. Anything the player can pick should always be interesting, with either trade offs or progression to a given weapons fighting style. Passives are great for doing just this, and for adding more content to weapons without actively adding additional skills to compete for your limited 5 skill slots.

## Suggestion #7:
Add more crafting skills. Since we will have mining, consider adding skill trees for other things such as Beast Hunting (Extra monster materials and bonuses when fighting beasts), Herbalism (For plant gathering), Tailoring, Leatherworking, Smithing, Alchemy, and so on. They don’t need to be too deep to start with, but everyone loves being able to hone their desired crafts. It will fit right in with the direction you are starting to take with modular weapon crafting.

World of WarCraft is also doing a massive profession overhaul right now for the next expansion.
Note- I have seen this is planned.

## Suggestion #8:
Diminishing EXP gain from content you are very over leveled for. This is just to keep players from being incentivized to grind lower content to level up just because it is easier. For example, I could struggle clearing a dungeon my level and gain 40 experience per mob, or I could just quickly wipe out a dungeon one level below me without any hassle and still get 20 EXP a mob.

## Suggestion #9:
The icons will have to be expanded on eventually. All of them looking alike is confusing.
(Currently happenning)

## **Topic #3: Gear**
In order to achieve Gear feeling like an improvement or an intentional gameplay style choice, rather than a mandatory massive stat increase that must be achieved, I have to get into specifics with the details. Understand the following are only examples and not intended to be taken as exact numbers to use.

## Suggestion #1:
Have the colored tiers of gear only denote the rarity of the item, rather than strength. (Though rarer items will often have more crazy and out there effects or desirable stats.

## Suggestion #2:
Have the armor value be decided by the type of gear ONLY. Rarity would have no effect on armor, only what is decided upon for a given gear set. Rings and Necklace should not give armor.

Armor values would be as follow (as an example)
Cloth: 10% - 20% (Shoulders, Chest, Pants at 2%, and Boots, Gloves, Belt, and Back at 1%)
Mail/Hide: 30% - 40%
Plate: 50% - 60%
Armor cap for other bonuses: 20%

## Suggestion #3:
have all gear come in sets (except gray tier gear), with each set giving you a unique bonus when you have 5 pieces from the set worn. There will also be rings, necklaces, and weapons for each set (2 handed weapons counting as 2 items for the bonus). There could also be unique 7 piece craft sets that only have pieces within the primary armor slots. Here are some examples for sets and set bonuses.

Mechent Clothes- (Wandering Trader 7) Increases carry capacity by 20
Black Smith Attire- (Sturdy Hands 7) Makes improving crafted gear 10% better
Green Tier Sets that start you off- (Fledgling Adventurer 5) Increases the amount of XP enemies give by 5

This Idea is taken from Elder Scrolls Online, but I think it would work amazingly here too. The benefit is that you can go super wide with gear, keeping more gear relevant. You are also able to introduce new and fun equipment at any time without having to make the old gear obsolete. The downside is that it can make balancing tricky if you are not careful about introducing unforeseen combos. This would also make creating new gear a little more complex as you have to create a gear set bonus each time.

## Suggestion #4:
Hats remain the one unique outlier item, but now also always feature a unique effect all of their own for wearing them. For example, the pirate hat could increase gold dropped from enemies by 10%. Lastly, I also recommend you make some of the hats drop rates higher, as a rate like 0.01% is brutal. I would say not to let any go below 1%, but the fact that enemies can be continually respawned with the chunks reloading changed my mind on that.

## Suggestion #5:
Any dropped gear is labeled as Dropped, so that it does not benefit from the benefits of crafting the same gear. These benefits will be better described within the crafting topic.

## **Topic #4: Ores, Plants, and Animals**
This topic will be a rather large one, but will mostly cover the acquisition of crafting goods.
Ores are far too random with how they spawn, being just randomly cluttered one node at a time within caves. Mining them is not satisfying since you spend little time interacting with the nodes, there are no nice effects, and they only drop a single item. This repeating theme of only dropping a single item was pretty annoying for my whole playthrough.

## Suggestion #1:
create bigger nodes of ore as well that are about the sizes of the crystals scattered throughout the cave. Then, make the old small nodes + these new big ones take multiple wacks to break. Make the ore fly off the node in little arks as you are breaking it, and the final hit will send multiple ore flying to the ground.

Small nodes would take 3 hits, making 4 ore drop (1 on the first two hits, 2 on the last hit)
Big nodes would take 4 hits, making 6 ore drop (1 on the first three hits, 3 on the last hit)

The benefit of possibly having an extra ore drop could proc on each hit, so consider reducing the percentage chance during the skill tree rework.

## Suggestion #2:
Remove Cobalt and Blood Stone from caves. Optionally, the importance of the associated gear could be lessened, since these resources are currently not that rare or hard to find.

## Suggestion #3:
Create unique locations that have more densely distributed nodes with very obvious types being present. Perhaps it is a crystal cave only containing gems, or mines being controlled by strong enemies. This is where Cobalt and Bloodstone can come back in, and I definitely could see Bloodstones being coveted and guarded by a vampire faction. The reason for this change is that you can now have rarer ores be properly defended by enemies of a corresponding difficulty, rather than having super strong enemies randomly scattered throughout caves just because all of the ores are there.

## Suggestion #4:
Add an Orichalcum ore that needs to be mixed with the gold and silver, so you can control that ore's acquisition behind appropriately strong enemies.

## Suggestion #5:
make crafting ingots more expensive to account for the increase in the ore dropped. Everyone likes bigger numbers and seeing loot fly, so it’s a worthwhile change.

## Suggestion #6:
Freedom to add many more ores to the game as you see fit, but you also have the freedom to continuously re-use ores within different armor sets. Plan new ore additions in advance, so you can account for the kinds of trials to acquire it.

Now, onto Plants.
This resource is very abundant, which is nice, but falls into the same problem as ore with each and every node only dropping one. Plants also severely lack in variety, with many things I think I should be able to harvest being non-interactable. My recommendations for plants are as follows:

## Suggestion #7:
Have certain plants such as reeds and cotton drop up to 3 of the given resource, in the same fashion as new ore nodes would fly off as you are harvesting. They would not have a final burst at the end like or nodes.

## Suggestion #9:
More, more, more. I know more variety will come with time, but there are already many assets littered about that could become harvestable. To save time from having to create a bunch of plant types, most of them can fall under a generic plant color. These could be used later for certain colored armor sets or possibly for dying.

## Suggestion #9:
Rare plants! All plants within the game spawn in large clusters, but it would be awesome and good for multiplayer to include some that seldom spawn and in small groups of only 1 to 3.

Lastly, let’s talk about animals.
Despite being the best delivered of the three in my opinion, animals and their resources still fall into a few of the same problems as the other two. There have also been many disappointing times where I find big creatures that seem amazing to spot at first but let you down on both the combat and loot side. Let’s dive right into my suggestions:

## Suggestion #10:
Or course this would be the first thing I add. Make animals drop more loot. What I recommend is to have each animal drop 1 of their respective hides and 1 meat always, at a minimum. Extre’s such as fangs and tusks can be left at only a chance of spawning. This small change will go a long way!

## Suggestion #11:
Still allow many small animals to be tamed after the rework, specifically for possible livestock at your house (If and when we can get houses).

## Suggestion #12:
Better BIG and SCARY Beasts, and new beast categories! I have always thought that having some big scary monsters to find and face just out roaming the wilds would be perfect for open world randomly generated games like this (Think monster hunter levels of big). The large beasts that currently exist need to become a little stronger, and their drops need to be increased some as well just like the rest of the animals. SUPER big beasts could act almost as mini bosses, and drop a TON of their resources on death along with having their own unique armor sets associated with their parts.

Here is an example for a super big beast loot table:
(5 to 12 hide)
(3 - 8 bones or meat of the appropriate size)
(2 - 6 secondary item such as claws)
(1 - 3 of a rarer third item)
(0 - 1 of a super rare part used for the weapons of their sets)

## **Topic #5: Crafting**
I am not sure if anyone on this project has played minecraft with the mod Tinkers Construct, but the modular weapon system has me thinking of that and I will be taking inspiration from it. Some of my recommendations will also be for expanding on the crafting system, and the resource requirements. I know it could be pushed much further to become really customizable, flexible, and enjoyable.

## Suggestion #1:
Add the forging of all custom gear within one new UI (Can create a mockup on request).

## Suggestion #2:
For weapons, you first select what kind of weapon you want to make, which then gives slots to input all the kinds of materials you want to craft the weapon with. Let's go with a sword for an example.

There would be the blade metal, blade modifier, handle material, handle wrap material, and maybe a gem slot right at the base of the blade. The blade material and modifier would determine the damage and offensive modifiers, as well as which gear set it belongs to. The handle and wrap materials would affect a bonus to durability and weapon handling. And lastly the gem could let you decide on a secondary bonus stat to add that is not already on the weapon from its set's chosen stats. This extra bonus is set at a flat amount decided on by the kind of stat added, regardless of the weapon type. Really want to have crit damage? Now you can ensure your gear has at least some. Additionally, the crafter could swap out only one aspect of the weapon by taking it back to a crafting station, rather than having to build a whole new one from scratch to change one part.

## Suggestion #3:
In addition to being able to craft higher rarity gear as they progress in the skill tree, you could add a bonus known as Crafters Improvement. This bonus would increase the base damage and stats of the weapon by a small flat amount that increase as you become a better crafter and advance down the skill tree. Any crafted item can be taken to a forge to increase this bonus if the crafter has a higher modifier. A good end game choosable skill could be whether you focus on weapon crafting or armor crafting, and you get more bonus to what you choose specifically.

## Suggestion #4:
Armor can follow suit, using the same UI that allows you to select the armor piece and define it based on the materials used. Armor can also take advantage of the Crafters Improvement. I would keep armor a bit more precise with the crafting recipe in comparison to weapons.

## Suggestion #5:
Crafting stations should only show what can be crafted in the station, and not every station possible. Seeing everything gets a bit confusing. You could opt to add the seeing of everything at once if the player enters a search mode, which would be a slight expansion on the existing search feature.

## Suggestion #6:
Crafting regents should always take a few of any given resource, rather than being 1 to 1. Why add the step to craft silk cloth when you only need 1 sticky silk? It just adds pointless button clicking. If all of the drops are buffed up some as mentioned in the prior topic, then this will mostly just balance things out again. Here are just a few examples:

5 Sticky Silk = Silk Cloth
10 Copper Ore = Copper Ingot
1 Hide + 1 Tanning Oil = Leather
5 Small Hide + 1 Tanning Oil = Leather

## **Topic #6: Towns**
Currently, towns have little diversity within the buildings that comprise it. All of the crafting stations being smashed together in a hut is very clearly a remnant of early production. The NPCs have little purpose and all of the traders wear exactly the same outfit. The economy of the traders is way unbalanced. And lastly hitting an NPC makes fighting anything that enters the town such as cultists and extra tricky task. My recommendations to improve towns are as follows:

## Suggestion #1:
Have a crafters square and traders square. Cube World had this and it was really nice and convenient, but I feel we could do it better. This would allow us to make some thematic buildings to the crafting stations and shops within. We could also ensure traders the focus on relevant materials to that crafting station are available within the same house and look thematic too.

## Suggestion #2:
Make town NPCs take only 10% damage on the first hit received from the player and give the player a warning, rather than immediately attacking.

## Suggestion #3:
A total rework of merchants and the economy, (I will happily volunteer to plan it out). All green quality gear should be removed from all shops, as it allows entirely skipping levels of gear very easily. Many prices need huge nerfs as it is super easy to amass wealth. Only merchants of the relevant type should buy your items, (cloth to the tailor merchant and so on). Their buying price should decrease based on the quantity they already have.

## Suggestion #4:
Each town has different hot items that are in high demand within the region that merchants will pay a premium for. These items will be added within a top row, separated from the rest of their inventory. This row shows the item even if they have 0 in stock.

## Suggestion #5:
If you want certain gear to be purchasable, it should be inferior to the crafted variations. If you go with my suggested crafting system, then the bought version would lack being able to have gems and be labeled as purchased so it can't benefit from the Crafters Improvement.

## Suggestion #6:
Opt to sell a lot of gear as recipes instead, so you can continue with crafting as the source for the best gear.

## Suggestion #7:
Add a black market / special trader for rare, purchasable only items. Just another coin sinker for all the hoarders. Do not include anything here that affects combat. Here is an example item. Thrifty Golden Cap. Buff- Midas Touch: increases selling cost to merchants by 10%.

## **Topic #7: Dungeons**
Currently, dungeons are all over the place in terms of balancing and the loot acquisition is rather poor and very random. Bosses dropping one item is not ok, since you are more than likely to get something either entirely useless or undesired. With the economy broken right now, and there being no resource sinks, there is nearly no point to getting things to sell either. Nearly everything dropped in dungeons has most likely been gathered outside of the dungeon anyway as well. I know there is a lot planned for dungeons, so I am not too concerned.

## Suggestion #1:
Bigger, thematic dungeons with more room variety.

## Suggestion #2:
Consider other forms of gameplay to be implemented aside from just killing mobs.

## Suggestion #3:
Rebalance dungeons to have a more horizontal progression, where their difficulty is more decided on rarity rather than some game gear stage you should be at. This will make every dungeon relevent when you find it regardless of what gear stage you are at, as each dungeon should still provide some difficulty and worth while loot.

## Sugegstion #4:
Make enemies run back to their positions and start to heal whenever the player tries to leash them super far from their respective spawning rooms or when the player dies.

## Sugegstion #5:
Change the structure of dungeons to provide a more balanced experience. The current save point at the entrance and gauntlet to the boss is fine, but dying and running back through everything every time you die to the boss both feels bad and is pointless since they don’t reset. If they do reset as I suggest, then this will become extra tedious as well. I recommend changing the experience in the following ways. Add a fireplace to respawn from just outside the boss room, and make the way into the boss room a one way entrance so it is a fight to the death. Have a treasure room past the boss room that the door only opens to once you defeat the boss, and have all of the more average loot such as crafting materials come from the chests inside rather than from the boss. The boss will now only drop the relevant and thematic gear you come to the dungeon hoping for, meaning you always look forward to what the boss drops. Finally, provide a warp pad that teleports you back to the fireplace at the entrance of the dungeon that is located at the end of the treasure room.

## **Topic #8: Rewards and Goals**
This section is just here for me to add a few additional ideas to help round out progression with more options for rewards and goals. Anything added here is not a serious suggestion for immediate change, and would be at the very bottom of the production list if considered.

## Suggestion #1:
AirShips. These would act as a big resource sink, allowing the player to find schematics for different parts to mix and match their own airship and then sink loads of resources into it. You can also include the labor cost to sink some coins into its crafting process as well. If the airships follow a similar modular system to gear, you can swap out specific parts any time to customize your airship without rebuilding a whole new one.

## Suggestion #2:
Houses. I know they are on the way, so here are just some things I wanted to note. Make building them also modular, and be a big coin sink. Allow for the making of furniture with crafting professions, providing an additional resource sink. Finding rare furniture and decorations is also a splendid reward. Lastly, you could have gardens and pastures to provide easy basic resources to help fuel said resource sinks.

## Suggestion #3:
Artifacts. These unique items could require having to retrieve multiple pieces before restoring them, giving you an amazing goal of finding the remaining pieces once you acquire one of them. It helps you look forward to exploring the world more. Artifacts should be extra special, and could give the player minor a unique bonus that lasts forever. This bonus and an achievement would be given upon crafting the artifact. Make the bonuses useful, but in an interesting and fun way. Here are a few, for example. (You can not get a bonus more than once)

Goblet of Flames: Increases the effectiveness of healing potions by 10% and causes you to leave a path of small flames on the ground for a bit (visual only) while also increasing your movement speed by 10% while you drink them.

Gloves of the Thunder God: Permanently increases your base carry capacity by 9.

Deck of Not Enough Things: gives a 1% chance that none boss enemies will drop1 additional random item from their loot table.

## Suggestion #4:
A record player and records for your house. There is a lot of great music in this project already, so collecting them would be a nice little extra.