Convert all IO sets to attuned

I don't see how that compares to live where SOs don't get any stronger. You're just replacing the same thing over and over again. If they were static at least you could put enhancement boosters in them. Or maybe combine them like live up until +3 to maintain a potential growth, then use enhancement boosters beyond.

I apologize. MajorDecoy has reminded me that this is the wrong thread to even be talking about this in. I'm just going to drop it.

The point was, you either have this or you either have that. What I was trying to say is, our powers don't get replaced, they just get stronger so no replacing Fireball with Fireball II and Fireball III later. Same with weapons, you don't later find an upgraded Impervium Katana that does 10% more damage than a Steel Katana, your Katana attacks simply scale with your level and stats.

What you're doing with enhancements is 'maintaining'. I never played one of the popular MMOs where you had to repair your equipment so it continues to work properly, but that's basically what it amounts to.

It'd also replace the need to maintain enhancements. You get a dmg SO enhancement, plot it into an attack and forget about that slot forever. I suppose if your perspective is that you don't want to micromanage enhancements, then of course you're going to prefer the attuned everything route. I wouldn't blame you.

But that's the draw of IOs, that there's less maintaining but one has to craft them/buy them off the market. You want to use IOs because it requires a different kind of micromanagement. They don't expire and wear but then there's the whole side issue with exemplaring and how the bonuses are affected by them...origin enhancements, to my knowledge, don't have issues with exemplaring...they always provide whatever bonus they do as long as the slot they're in is available at your level. If you want the same thing with IOs, you have to micromanage the levels of your IOs.

It's just another aspect of RPGs, IMO. Some will not have a problem managing their enhancements a certain way. Personally, I have no problem with SOs and their corrode and the levels of IOs. What I don't really manage is exemplaring. I just go with whatever power/value I have during exemplaring and be done with it. Others, on the other hand, have no qualms tweeking the particular levels and bonuses of their inventions to get max benefit up to [X] level down. That's just busy work to me.

Now if we're trying to quell busy work with enhancements, I've got a lot of ideas that mainly have to do with the buy/slot interface. Don't really need to reface the enhancement system to make it less clunky.

You say that like it would be a bad thing. Removing even a tiny element of pay to win is a bonus IMO.

They exist in game already and people have paid for them. And since they are in super packs, there's a lot more of them out there. They can't just remove them and pretend they never happened, they would have to make it so boosters would work with attuned enhancements.

Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha ...I have the patience of a coffee-fueled flea...

Interesting point, Leo... but assuming you did play one of those RPGs with item decay, you'd remember that there's a "repair all" button that essentially accomplishes the impossibly tedious 'maintenance' SOs require. It's press "repair all" vs squinting at an ugly menu for half an hour every 5 levels, full of similar stuff with unintuitive names and mutually exclusive origin types. Plus, when gear decay actually starts to make sense (at level cap), it stops working...

There's a big difference between what's happening here and what happens in other games. Upgrading the Buster Sword to an Ultima Weapon isn't the same as replacing a lvl 40 Awakening with a lvl 45 Awakening. There's no new graphics involved. No extra materia slots. No actual accuracy increase. No incentive to do so at all. To make matters worse, the Buster Sword stops working once you ding 45, so you'll actually find yourself fighting empty-handed midfight. And if things couldn't get any worse, the Ultima Weapon will barely work at all against a pair of low level street thugs when you're exemplaring in Sector 6 Slums. Needless to say, I haven't slotted a single SO since IOs made it to live servers.

As for the OP suggestion, I'll /sign it, mostly because attuned IOs would solve the problem of set bonuses disappearing when you exemplar, which is a bummer when most of the new content being released is non-50.