Unique and Modified crafted gear

Today I am going to touch on Unique and Modified gear. I feel these things are pretty closely related. Unique gear can come from modifications or it can stand alone. Either way it gives crafters the ability to create gear that can perform particularly well for certain people.

So what makes gear unique? If everyone has a +3 mace of smiting why would anyone want a +1 or +2 mace of smiting. Well, if the +1 mace of smiting had an increased attack speed or maybe did more damage, I'd buy it over the +3. Why? Maybe I'm not a priest, so the +3 doesn't help any of my skills, why bother, i just want something that works better than my last weapon.

As a crafter it is up to us to make items that other players want to use. SWG did a great job with their experimentation. I could experiment and get additional points put into the damage that a particular weapon did. Sometimes you could craft over and over again and get a spectacular boost to an item. You could save the recipe as a blueprint and crank out hundreds of the item to make better weapons with.

Ok, so uniqueness, or an ability to modify the base stats of an item. This is also the primary concern of Mods placed on gear. Lots of single player games have this component. You have Item X, and you have this Mod Y. Lets say that Mod Y increases the attack speed of an item by making it lighter or more balanced. Why not have the same thing in crafting. Certain recipes are given to players as "Mods". These items can be placed after the fact, such as additional plating for armor, or something like a sharpener for making a sharper blades, i.e. more dmg. Other mods can be placed into recipes. SWG had this, you could make a food mod, such as a flavoring agent or something else, and add it to the drink at creation, this enabled better foods to be created with specific enhancements.

Both of these options lead to more people enjoying crafting because there can be competition between crafters for who can make the better type of item.