Thoughts of Material Balance

[was_fired]

After playing a fair number of games with the current essence system I think I've fallen into a rut when it comes to materials. It seems like the Tier 4 and 5 materials are REALLY not created equally and end up falling into the following rough tier list:

Top Tier:
1. Wood: This is the easiest of the top tier materials to get, it gives weapons poison and it pairs with stone which lets you use Gods Branch for a ton of your crafting needs. Crystal Wood and Life Root also always drop when fighting higher level light bringers so there's a TON of this.

2. Stone: You're always going to get tons of stone late game because every time you destroy a light bringer village you get a load of Tier 2 stone that you'll either throw away and turn into Obsidian. This ends up meaning you have a lot of Obsidian so why not turn it into Pure Stone or mix it with the endless Ancient Wood you've gotten from killing yet another group of Light Bringers to get some Stone Wood. What's that, time for some more God's Branch to save weight? Yes please.

Mid Tier:
1. Metal: Not much drops top tier metals so if you want to get these you'll need to create a village on the dwarf island and that place is ROUGH. That said the stone pairing is required to get the strongest heavy armor in the game, but it's been ages since I've even bothered.

2. Gems: These are next to wood which is great, and they're light which is also great. Unfortunately it's better to just research crystal wood to give a bonus when crafting Life Root and skip out on Earth Cores since Life Root and Crystal Wood are both dropped by Light Bringers at high levels and almost nothing drops Grand Gems or Earth Cores.

3. Leather: Not much drops these, but they do pair well with metal and can be used for medium armor if you ever find enough. Killing high level enemies on the goblin island can give spiked leather which is Leather + Bone, which is useful when crafting a Codex, but honestly it's not really worth the effort.

Bottom:
1. Bone: Poor bone, Rune Bone and Spiked leather only really drop on the goblin island against werewolves. I don't think anything drops top level leather equipment consistently enough to craft anything using it. Enchanted Bone is slightly more common since there are some village events that drop it, but not many enemies do. On top of that the bonus for weapons is Life Leach, which is almost always worse than stone's Shield Leech which is a far easier material to get.

[Stormfrenzy88]

Yeah liferoot and other wood resources are currently the most common among high tier materials because most common enemies you face in the late game are Leshys. They also result in pretty good and lightweight armors.

The other T5 materials are not worth messing around with at the moment because there aren't so difficult enemy's to face in the game which require it.

[iacs]

However, if you find a good spot on dwarf island and dare to settle, than tier 3 metal, mythril, is diggble here. And obsidian you can buy from dwarves in any desired quantity. They combine in armored stone and later secret alloy. You can make a lot of good things from tier 5 metal-stone. As you said living root is given by lightbringers. This way you have both gem-wood and metal-stone, who together allow you to make anything you want.

Just about only exception is chain lightning codexes, but you realistically need only one of theese for your main elven spellcaster and gathering forgotten essence or materials for it from goblin island one time is not that hard.

Yes you have to settle dwarf island to get metals, but it is not only mythril you get, it is full scale tier 5 material if you settle near coal+mythril and dwarves. Mythril is everywhere, coal is rarer but can be found without to much problem, so really only thing that limits you is proximity to Earthbound town - you want it close.

This is example for perfect settlement
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1754567400

[Lorska]

I think you are mistaking drop balance with power level.

While wood is accessible, its usefulness outside of poison and making boats is fairly limited. Recipes often have low to average amounts on them and there aren't really any wood demanding ones.

Stone is a fairly strong material, it maximizes idols earlier than other means, leads to the desirable shield leech and can be used in a variety of weapons and armor at high essence amounts. Really the main reason wood is good is because it naturally combines with stone.

Metal is a very versatile material that has high essence amounts on a bunch of things, most notably armor. Its true damage is also comparable to poison as it frontloads damage instead. T5 metal composites also offer very strong material combinations that you can use on pretty much anything.

Gems are probably one of the weaker resources. Their main benefit is that recipes involving them are really restrictive, so you can create very light things from just using one resource. The downside is a horrible weapon effect, and recipes that don't use almost exclusively gems use them in very low quantities. On the flip side, their bonuses are tailored towards magical prowess which is always needed in some way.

Leather is a weird one as it combines properties of the last two. It can be used on a lot of things in average amounts but has some highly specialized uses for armor and books. The ability to easily offer red properties in most recipes that don't include (much) metal is quite nice and the only downside is that you are restricting yourself to elemental level weapons because added damage doesn't scale with rarity. In other words it's a fantastic mid-game weapon material, and late-game its other uses become more meaningful.

Bone suffers from the fact that it's underused in recipes and seemingly appears randomly in some of them. Its leech effect is almost on par with shield leech but is more specific in its applications due to the health cap. For things you can't use gems for in a decent amount, this offers another way to get the purple bonuses. It's probably the only resource I would consider on a lower power level, which is probably why you get it on the easiest island.

[dergefata]

Originally posted by Lorska:

While wood is accessible, its usefulness outside of poison and making boats is fairly limited.

Really the main reason wood is good is because it naturally combines with stone.

Gems are probably one of the weaker resources.

Oof. No way.

Crystal Wood elemental heavy armor is probably the best armor for your support characters. You're gonna get 60-some rainbow shielding in a light enough package for almost anyone to wear. It's also easy to get a lot of crystal wood, so you can also make amazing elemental shields to go with that armor. Match it with a good elemental one-handed sword and your support characters are sporting near on 200 rainbow shielding. Ain't nothing gonna kill ya.

Again, I'll evangelize the joys of crystal wood. It mixes with wood with gems, and it makes amazing lightweight boats, excellent heavy armor, the best shields you'll get, several of the best town building designs, and even a really good codex. If you're just mixing your wood with stone, you're missing out.

And no way are gems one of the weaker resources. You crank out the pure T4 gem and make your crafting and gathering tools out of it; those tools are amazingly light, the gathering ones give a big boost to carry capacity which is always nice, and both types max the skills of the wearer so you can gather and craft in no time flat. You slip them in jewelry to keep from having a ring that weighs as much as a metal mace, you slip them in tomes and artifacts. And you mix them with bones to get the ligthweight and versatile crystalline bone which is even better than crystal wood for boats. Nah, gems are great. And you get *so many* of them.

Plus, if you ever find yourself with so much crystal wood that you don't even want to think about what to do with the rest of your gems, you sell 'em. They're very high value for their weight, so you can carry 100 second-tier gems in every group just in case you run in to a trading opportunity.

[Mc]

Yes, wood is probably most versatile resource and T4/T5 drops most often, so definitely top.

Bone is not that bad though. Except starting island, goblin island is easiest to settle (or send expeditions), so you can have lot of dragon bones relatively easily which can be also turned into T4 bones. Not as versatile as wood but still good and perhaps easiest to obtain by gathering/cooking.

[Lorska]

I guess you conveniently ignored the most important part I said about wood...
I'll state it again.

Recipes often have low to average amounts on them and there aren't really any wood demanding ones.

This means that pretty much anything you wanna craft with wood you can craft with something else and use more materials.
I actually thought I mentioned lightness but that probably got lost while I typed all that out on my phone...

Really the point everyone loves to bring up again and again is that it's so easy to get. Amount =/= Power level. Other materials are EASILY more powerful but are harder to obtain. Hey it's like common items are more frequent than legendary ones... /snark

Now what I'm not gonna say is that other materials are so much better that it warrants that scarcity. It doesn't. Resource drops should be more varied.

As for gems, weaker doesn't mean weak. I won't rehash the rarity argument I just stated. Gems just tend to be extremely focused on one thing, if you have a recipe with gems, you often have 2 or even more slots of those in total. That just makes these kind of recipes quite tedious to assemble. Gems definitely have strengths, especially the lightness which I mentioned too, but ultimately end up being very niche, even more so than bone because they have the worst weapon effect, limiting them to a very small subset of equipment.

Imo it's completely fine for gem and bone being so restricted in application, because the whole game pretty much revolves around getting strong magical users, so anything that is focused on that aspect can take a small hit.

I guess I shouldn't have said "weaker" because people assume me bashing on it. I thought I stated sufficiently precise what I mean by that but I guess it got lost...

[was_fired]

I have to admit that some of my bias for materials come from the fact that I consider Axes, Spears, Javelins and Codexs the best weapons in the game. Everything besides clubs has their place, but I tend not to focus on them much anymore since damage multipliers, speed and specials win the day for me.

Spears and Javelins benefit tremendously from a wood / stone pairing since if wood if your primary you end up with a legendary weapon that gives you 100% of your damage as additional shielding before the battle starts and can work in social encounters. It also does an extra 60% damage to any enemy which is already damaged which means if you have multiple party members equipped with these you get to up the first strike multiplier by 60%.

Axes have the highest damage multiplier in the game and decent speed. So a legendary stone axe can easily grant more than twice your strength score in shielding every time you attack. If your secondary is wood and someone else hurt the enemy first that jumps by 60%.

Piercing is a fair bit worse in this regard since few enemies have much armor.

[dergefata]

Originally posted by Lorska:

I guess you conveniently ignored the most important part I said about wood...

I did not, but then you apparently need everything spelled out.

Because heavy armor recipes for wood do not require a lot of it, and Crystal Wood is light, you get a good essence yield, from a high-essence type, with low total weight, and you can make more sets of it with the same total amount of resource. That's why it's good for support characters, especially with lower strength. Shields however using wood take a lot of it (for shields) and thus end up being as good as you can make - assuming you're crafting high-tier equipment with 3/3 for the essence boost. And since Crystal Wood is Wild-type, it carries a lot of essence for its tier. All you need to do then is make sure your primary crafter(s) bring(s) enough skill to keep the fail rate minimal.

There are several highly useful village buildings that unlock much better subtypes if you use wood essence. If you've got enough Life Root/God Branch to make buildings, great; go for it. But in the mid-game, when you simply won't, you can get just as good results if you luck out and pull a high quality roll on the building; and even without it, you'll be 90% of the way there.