So at the end of our content creation project, we needed to talk about how our items had a durability rating, a repair rating, and what repair cost is. Durability rating, which effects the somewhere between 12-999 durability and expands on how much damage the items take. This also applies to how much damage the items take on death beyond the standard 23.33% rate. Some items will take only 18% from dying while others suffer more than 35% durability loss on death. The same statistic effects the monsters as you fight, when equipment gets ground down faster or slower over time.
We had also added a similar status to the monsters themselves, where different Hardness of monsters cause more or less duability breakdown. We started with an averaging of 1, 1 being a normal Hardness, and determined variables to apply ranging from 0.85 - 1.31. Now, Hardness isn’t an armor type. It is a rating assigned only to the relative durability spent on fighting different monsters. Hardness also doesn’t apply to monster level, or scale by Normal->Torment modes. It is a simple derived measure, but lets different monster packs have different values to fight.
In a similar stucture, the repair rating further effects how much your durability costs to repair. This obeys several factors, based on how much durability the item has, between 12-999, the durability rating the item has, a separate repair rating, and the item’s level, which is considered with repair cost. These factors can play out differently. This addresses various flaws or imperfections in the materials found, so there can be, say, a sword with 755 durability, with low durability rating, but high repair rating. The sword will burn through its 755 often, but it can be inexpensive to fix. If there is an axe with 130 duability that has a high durability rating, and a high repair rating, the axe will need fewer repairs than the sword, and will likely cost less to repair.
Higher level items have higher repair cost. Repair cost is considered both an item affix and a vendor statistic. Durability rating and repair rating operate together, but repair cost is a separate affix. So, repair cost goes up as an average constant as new items are found as a part of level progression, but duability rating and repair ratings are both dynamic and are applied throughout.
All of these changes are important to know about regarding item value and price, but were visually distracting when directly found on items. So, we added a second item page, connected by using a new skill called “Inspect” for all characters and classes. This lets the player see an advanced breakdown of item properties, which has its own mappable hotkey and toggle button which is available in the inventory page. To be able to keep things visually simplified, it is possible to “Hide Inspect” from the inventory page in the menu. This isn’t the same inspect as for comparing active items on other players. It is possible to use Inspect>Inspect
Different vendors are better or worse at repairs and charge different rates.
The Indestructible attribute became rarer and much higher level. There have been a few new Legendary item powers surrouding this, one which briefly increases your durability rating in combat, with a cooldown, a 2 piece set of Legs/Boots that increases the durability rating of your upper body items and lowers resource cost of spells/skills, and another that sacrifices your duability rating to deal more damage. The Ethereal items have on average a lower repair rating, and are rarer to have the Indestructible attribute. This brings a very strict sense of being “equipped” and expands a more material sense of the items themselves, because the metallurgical properties can have different consistencies.
We also updated the art of the “damaged” and “broken” Repair Warning icon from the existing yellow/red. The icon that appears as a warning to how damaged the items are now has class and gender specific art. We also added a menu option to allow the player to change the default General Repair Warning mode to an Item Specific Warning mode, which illustates which item is damaged.
We have since closed the engineering console and the team is now assigned to a different project.