I want to introduce you to a new crafting and equipment system.

There are multiple reasons to overhaul the current one.

The current equipment system is functional and customizable.

It has some serious downsides.

• Passive effects are present in talents and essence combinations, which makes it hard to keep track of them.
• You cannot use different talents and essences on the same weapon.
• Essences allow you to easily overpower your character through stat-stacking.
• It is tedious to add bots to a raid and most of the time you end up with the same armor, trinket, and boots on all.
• There is no identity connected to your chosen build. This one is a bit fuzzy, to be honest.

The new system was inspired by Warframe.

The story of Raiding.Zone is, that we are all prisoners of a computer simulation.

To create a character we compile all information about it to form a new entity.

You can imagine it like a character creation wizard.

You choose a weapon, armor, trinket, and boots. Then you choose talents and mount essences. After that, you start the compilation. The process takes resources and needs some time to complete.

That will introduce grind to the game. You will need to farm these resources at the new world levels. I want to keep it low. I might need to start higher than needed. Nerving the cost is more popular than increasing it.

The talent tree is now a circle.

There will be some new talents and some talents are dependent on each other. There are also anti-affinities between talents. This means you can only choose one of two or three talents. All passive essence combination effects of the weapon will move into this talent tree.

Additionally, all trinket and armor essence combinations move into a role-specific talent tree.

Currently, I don’t have a solution for the boot essence-combinations. I will tell you soon what happens to them. You can try out the interactive demo for the talent tree here: Staff of Burning Souls

Essences are now ability-specific.

That means that you don’t mount essences directly into the weapon. Instead, you will assign them to an ability. Buffs, pets, and area effects have at minimum one ability from whom they profit.

I also changed the effects of the essences, and we now have two per color:

Blue

• Enthusiasm (Cooldown Reduction)
• Continuity(Lifetime)

Yellow

• Spell-Cost Reduction
• Multi-Hit (Versatile CB Multishot hits additional target)

Green

• Critical chance
• Effect range (TargetZones, AE-Effects get bigger)

Red

• Power Scaling
• Ambition (Critical Multiplier)

Violet

• Cast Time Reduction
• Tick Rate

I’m especially looking forward to the effect range and multi-hit essences.

Essence-combinations grant base attributes.

Avatars, weapons, armor, and trinkets have essence combinations. You fulfill them by mounting the required colors somewhere in your equipment.

For example, if you mount four power-scaling(red) in Blast and three ambition(red) into Fireball, you get seven power.

Nobody will lose their progression.

I haven’t figured out how to do the migration yet. The current plan is to convert all items into blueprints. I plan to provide enough material so you can easily craft your first character.