All crafts
- All crafted items that had an innate +2 or above saving throw bonus will see that saving throw bonus decreased by 1 point.
This is to address the main concern that saving throw bonuses on crafted items made some of the server content increasingly trivial as one gains in level. The inclusion of new material, and that of crafted hoods and cloaks particularly, kept pushing the boundaries of saving throw levels further over the years. This change scales back the maximum amount of saving throw bonuses to levels closer to what they were prior to the tailoring overhaul.
Can you see where one might read this as "we broke things with our previous crafting overhaul, and so now we have to make another major overhaul to compensate"? That is, what was the goal of the tailoring overhaul? Why add another layer of changes, rather than back out the changes that broke stuff?
Note: These are rhetorical questions, pointing to principles of strategic planning and design, rather suggesting you actually back out the tailoring. But an iterative process such as you describe above does not lend itself to user confidence that the new changes are more than trial and error--with players bearing the cost.
Enchanting
- Armors and clothings to have the universal and other saving throws reduced to +1 instead of +2.
- Ranged/thrown weapons enchantment bonus reduced to +2 instead of +3.
- The extra bonus that only applied upon enchanting armors and tailored clothes is entirely eliminated.
The change to saving throws on enchanting is in line with the point presented above. Most were already capped at +1, it really only impacts armors/clothings here.
When enchanting was introduced, its purposes were: 1) to give 20th levels something more to go for and a way of extending character power arc without raising the level cap; 2) to improve the balance between mundanes and casters. I'll say more about 20th levels in a bit, but does this change indicate that Devs now feel parity has been achieved so that mundanes need nerfing, relative to casters?
The changes to ranged/thrown weapon has them match the bonus increase on enchanted melee weapons. It was left at +3 in the past because of balance issues, but we have since added a number of ranged weapon related feats to improve ranged weapon built and bridge the gap.
I have already expressed my opinion of this particular (archer builds hardly need nerfing).
So to go back to the ostensible reason for all this complicated change, I'd suggest a couple of alternatives that would be much easier for Devs and cause much less player heartburn:
1) If enchanting is too good, raise the XP cost. This would mean grandfathered items could be left alone and no massive reimbursement system would be necessary. The only programming change would be a few variables, rather than rework (and the likely bugs it will introduce).
2) Reimbursing players is not really a solution but making the best of a (self-inflicted) bad situation. The players invested *time* in these endeavors and did so with a specific goal. Imagine someone who wins an Olympic medal, and the committee offers to give the athlete back the cost of their training in exchange for the medal. Such an offer indicates a misunderstanding of what the medal represents.
This, finally, is why I am bothering to post about this, as none of my current PCs has any enchanted gear. I am, consequently, not writing at all out of self-interest in this debate. Yet I have had enchanted gear in the past, so what follows I can speak of from experience.
These changes devalue one of the most valuable prizes of playing the game. In terms of RP, players like to think their enchanted gear is unique to them and imbued with their PC's essence. Should it be a nonesuch? Yes. It's the prize at the end of the rainbow and has to be something worth losing a level over.
Unfortunately, the situation seems to be that Devs think they have given players too nice of things and need to take them back. In my opinion the better way to attack this problem is one that comes up again and again: getting high levels to closure.
crafted items made some of the server content increasingly trivial as one gains in level
As it should be. And when *all* content becomes trivial, the player should be bored with the PC and want to closure. Incentivizing that is a hard problem, but a better use of brainpower and creativity than tweaking and retweaking crafting components in hopes of achieving elusive balance.
The latter is a lot of hard work for little reward and much player disapprobation.
