Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26172435-20151221114104

This deals with the way experience orbs could be used to improve combat or labour effectiveness. I feel it is important to distinguish between 2 different conversion 'purposes': 1) improved character traits and 2) magical/ intelligent gear.

The vanilla MC mechanism to collect experience orbs is fit for both purposes and I think players should be able to choose between converting their experience orbs for both purposes. I see no need to adjust this basic mechanism for acquiring experience (= gathering orbs).

Main aspect of my suggestion is to create a dual system for conversion of experience into either character traits or smart gear. This follows the actual discussion and speculations on the announced 'new enchantment system' (see Mevans' blog). I hope this suggestion adds to the ongoing discussions/thoughts and maybe even opens up new perspectives.

1) Experience => Character Traits : expressed as improved character traits / capabilities. This is a generic rpg feature and should be predominantly player dependent afaic, while minimizing grinding / exploit possibilities. This should only affect player attributes like hardiness (health level, regeneration speed) and agility (fall damage, dodge chance).

In line with the excellent plugin 'Character_Stats' I would like to see Mevans implement a system that enables the player to convert experience orbs to improved player attributes. This shouldn't necessarily be restricted to mentioned traits, but might also weapon dependent attributes like 'swing speed', 'reach' and 'cooldown time', provided they are not influenced by magic/intelligence. Any character traits affected should obviously not conflict/interfere with the aspects mentioned under 2).

Experience conversion to character traits should be expensive. Thirty experience levels should be able to get you an improvement of just 1 level (corresponding to 5-10 % of maximum achievable improvement) on any of the defined character traits.

Ideally, the maximum effects should be limited to ensure players do not become overpowered. In my view, maximum effects should therefore be limited to an order of magnitude of 20-50%. Examples: max. 24 to 30 hp at maximal experience level versus 20 initial hp; dodge chance limited to 5-10% at maximal experience level versus 0 % initial dodge chance; fall damage may reduce to up to 50% as your agility increases.

If possible, racial dependency of initial and maximum character trait values may also be implemented, but that would require a 'race' attributed to the player.

If implemented this system may also be used to strengthen hired units: their experience (# kills) may be converted into improved (race-dependent) traits. Examples: hired elves could improve their dodge chance and hired orcs will enhance their hardiness or get a trollskin hide and reduce impact damage.

2) Experience => Magical / Intelligent Gear : ways to infuse weaponry, tools and armor with magical energy and specialized features. This should be lore-friendly and faction and alignment dependent.

The considerations that come with this purpose are already broadly discussed in this suggestion thread. I agree with most posters there: enchantment tables and possible enchants can be faction dependent and the ability to get enchants should be dependent on the players alignment.

A major concern is that both converting experience to trait improvement and magical infusion should not be too easy / cheap and grinding/exploits should be prevented/discouraged as much as possible. Also, the total effect of improvements on both traits and gear should not be excessive. Players shouldn't get typical vanilla 'God-gear' effects from combined maximized traits and gear infusion, not even nearly. Therefore I suggest to: a) increase enchantment costs, b) enable storage of experience in bottles at a cost (of 5-10 % of stored amount), c) reduce the maximum enchantment levels and disband a few very strong ones (like Infinity, which may be replaced by a chance of arrow retrieval) and d) limits the number of enchants to 1 per item (weapon, tool or pice of armor).

Ideally, many aspects will become configurable for server owners/admins to enable them to tune the system to their servers needs.

I may edit this post as my insights may improve. 