Update 1.25 Major Rebalance

After months of adding new content I had planned to take this update real easy fixing bugs, tweaking and polishing some stuff and adding a few simple sub-zones. While I did do a bunch of odds and ends type stuff, I also ended up going down the rabbit hole of rebalancing a significant amount of the equipment and drop system.

After making the pretty major changes described below I had to play through about 20 complete runs and so ended up tweaking the balance on a whole lot of other stuff along the way. Some of these changes had a lot of thought behind them, others were just seat of the pants, gut feeling type things so please let me know if you think I've done something really dumb :P

EQUIPMENT REBALANCE:

OVERVIEW:

For the last few months I've been giving a lot of thought to the way I'd like the equipment to function in RF-IV. Previously, your character was defined mostly by your talents with equipment performing only a supporting role. At a rough guess I would say we had a 75%/25% impact between Talents/Equipment. Also, each new piece of equipment did not tend to change the way a build would play in the same way that getting a new talent would.

I've being trying to shift this emphasis to a more even 50/50 split between Talents/Equipment by making each piece of equipment both more interesting and impactful. Equipment drops are completely randomized between runs so having equipment play a more prominent role creates much more diverse builds from run to run.

PROBLEM:

One major place I figured could use some improvement was the way that equipment is broken into tiers and dropped throughout the dungeon. Previously we had 3 + 1 tiers of equipment:

• Tier-0: The equipment that characters start. This gets replaced with the first drop that comes along.

• Tier-1: Drops in the early game and is by design very weak. Exists to fill slots until being replaced.

• Tier-2: Drops in the middle game. This is where the equipment gets more impactful and interesting. Many of these pieces have interesting effects, abilities or at least solid stats. This is where attribute points start showing up.

• Tier-3: Drops in the late game. The best equipment in the game with the most interesting and impactful stats and effects.

So 2/4 tiers of equipment existed with the soul purpose of filling slots until something better came along. They were, by design, supposed to be uninteresting and unimpactful. The way that drop counts worked, we dropped a lot of this stuff in Zone1/Zone2 with the idea being to help the player fill out all of his item slots but with the assumption that he would then quickly replace them with something better.

So we had a lot of items dropping early in the game that really didn't have much impact on the player. When he would eventually find another item of the same slot, it was almost always an upgrade (since it would be from a higher tier), but the amount of upgrade was smaller since he was going from Tier-1 => Tier-2 equipment.

SOLUTION:

The idea I'm testing out with this update is to:

• Remove the entire Tier-1 equipment list by increasing their power and merging them into Tier-2.

• Begin dropping Tier-2 equipment right from the start of the game.

• Decrease the total amount of equipment drops, especially in the early game. One way to look at this is that we removed the old Tier-1 equipment