The way I understand it, there would be a small number of "socket types", and a handful of crystals which fit into each of them. Some crystals might even work in multiple socket types, but they might be rare, or perhaps less effective.

There would be crystals of varying rarity and worth, for each socket type. It would probably be visualised by colouration, where a blue crystal only supports the blue socket, or something along those lines.

This kind of setup is much more interesting/customisable than 5 simple upgrade stars. I would love to implement it. I've began work on items now, and I'm about 65% through porting the game engine to the new item DB tables and functions. Then, I'll start work on the Item Maker UI itself.

I have left room to drop in support for crystals and item mods, since I know roughly how we expect them to work.

The best plan is to keep discussing it here, and once there is some sort of consensus reached, I'll implement it (and very quickly, since it's already been largely anticipated by the new code).

Prodigy, I'll respond to your post in a minute. I have to go, so I'll keep this brief...

Dual wielding weapons. What are your thoughts? (this question is to everyone).

The idea is, you would be able to equip items into your shield slot (which may be renamed to off-hand), that gave you attack power, but NO HP or Defence.

It would be up to you whether to opt for dual wielding, and getting extra Attack, etc., but sacrificing your chance to get the HP & Defence from a normal shield item.

The attack power you gained would probably be less substantial than that which is capable with the weapon slot, though this isn't final.

I would like players to be able to specialise their accounts, and not just have the same boring configuration. To do this, I've added more attributes to items, and made many of the attributes either/or, so you can't have everything. When you can't have everything, you have to make decisions, and that makes things interesting

The options are:
- Make all weapons (or just ones with Dual Wield enabled) equippable to either weapon or shield slots. In the shield slot, their attack power might be diminished slightly.
- Make some special weapons that are overpowered drastically, but which require "two hands" to hold them, so when you equip them, you can't equip anything into the shield slot. The shield slot/UI would probably change around on your profile to illustrate this, and not just show an empty shield slot
- Make it so you CAN make items for the shield slot that happen to be weapons, but only allow them to be equipped to the shield slot, since they are items FOR the shield slot.

I hope that gave everyone some good ideas

I'll be finalising this stuff tonight, so opinions are welcome (and time is of the essence).

I think not all weapons should have the dual wield attribute, but some different kind of weapons / and or specialized weapons, or have it so you can pay for a weapon to be changed from main-hand to off-hand. (Thought not sure how the paying for a weapon to be changed from a main-hand to off-hand would work due to you saying that they will lose hp and def, not sure if it's possible for once it's changed, attributes get lost, and attack attribute gained)

I find that to be very interesting CK. As you have it right now, that sounds just fantastic.

Thanks for responding

Okay, so we have Dual Wield, 2-Handed, and Weapon + Shield. I like that.

In terms of penalizing based on the method the player opts for, I think that's possible to. In the best case scenario, I should be able to do it all through the item's own attributes.

For instance, in the case where people who Dual Wield should have less defence, that's easy, since they won't get any HP or Defence from their shield slot. So that is simple to do.

We can also a**ume that the Block chance when neglecting to use a Shield will also be rather low, since the likelihood is that the shield slot will be one of the few slots that provides that attribute.

Dual Wield is less accurate, whereas holding a single weapon with two hands is probably going to be more accurate. I agree with you on all points.

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With regards to set items, yes, you will be able to make items part of a set. The bonuses are going to be hard to decide upon, but I'm leaning towards a system that determines the bonuses you can provide via your set, based upon the attributes of the items within it.

It would be almost like a +x% boost on the sum of all item attributes in the set. That would be the easiest way to do it, anyway. Or perhaps you'd only be able to pick one or two attributes to have that effect upon. It's important that I think about this aspect of sets more, but it's not the most vital thing at the moment. I'm keeping it until the end tbh.

Technically, you can have multiple items of the same slot, in the same set. For instance, I use this so that special items I make are compatible with the Devastation set, etc. I may allow players to add some duplicate items, incase they want to add a bit of choice to their set, but I haven't decided upon that yet. It probably won't support that at release time.

Dual Wield should give extra attack power and agility.