One of mudflation problems with items in game where they actually matter is that after some point you tend to get increasingly more and more powerful items and little incentive to wear and wield anything else.
Then, dreaded moment where your character becomes fully clad in golden/purple/rainbow/murky green with pink blobs items. Developers at this moment face problem of having to release new item sets that are even more powerfull or rarer. Anything less would be considered “not worth trouble” and at best, it would be bandaid for players who cant achieve top items, but can get shot at getting newly introduced ones.
Not only this tends to upsets more economically minded players which don’t appreciate their loot becoming worthless, it also upsets balance of game and players who can’t reach for them for any reason.
Solution is simple: Put nontrivial costs for equipment. But such costs that would actually make sense. Make them become hard and soft limits on what player can wield.
Example: Player wants to wear heavy armor set. Since it is heavy armor set, he needs Strength to wear it. So far it makes sense.
This player has only 10 points in strength, which equals to having 5 equip-points for “heavy armor” class if items. Each armor piece costs 1 of such points.
Result is: Player can equip only 5 pieces of such armor.
If player adds points from strength he would be able to wear more armor pieces. Player might want to have enough to wear full set to receive full-set bonus ( “interlocking armor bonus”). If he is not class that actually uses strength he has to make build compromise: How many armor pieces I want to wear?
Now, we shall expand this to “blessed” items – these items were blessed by priest-like profession sporting player. They have some interesting bonuses, however, each blessed item has also cost – “faith equip points”, gained by investing into Wisdom attribute. Similary with like with strength, player might want to invest enough to gain set bonus for wearing several blessed pieces (a holy aura).
(Faith Equip Points need some better name by the way)
Now, this is where it becomes more interesting: Blessed piece of heavy armor: as you might guess, this item costs both “faith equip points” and “heavy armor equip points”, which requires anyone who wants to wear several such pieces to have both high strength and wisdom.
Choices have to be made – Am I warrior – is plate armor enough for me, Am I priest – is blessed cloth enough for me, Or am I hybrid alike paladin which can wear more powerfull items, but has spread attributes and thus lower raw power.
(Or maybe you want to invest to Mana attribute and wear magical items too :) )
And now we add one more element: Some equipment pieces cost even more. stronger version of blessed item – a sanctified item – costs 2 “faith equip points”. As well as stronger version of heavy armor or magical enchanted item. And some unique items have, well, unique costs.
Now more choice have to be made – do i go for more but less effective items or few, more powerful ones? Which is more efficient? Or do i build character around that one legendary weapon and wield pretty much nothing else?
Regardless of what he chooses, next batch of items that developers release can be very diverse, because there will be place for everything from weak, but cheap items to uniques with overblown statisctics. To say so, there will be place to “Timmy”, “Spike” and “Johny” items
Player can, of course wear more than he is officially allowed by soft limit. However, that will have combat penalties: slow drain of, for example, stamina, decreased speed of regenerating action points, etc… If someone can handle it, he should be rewarded with more power.
