Whetstones for Melee Weapons - An Alternative to Essences

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Glowing Mushroom
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Whetstones for Melee Weapons - An Alternative to Essences

Post by Glowing Mushroom » Sun Sep 20, 2020 6:33 pm

Essences are great! They add damage and fancy effects to our sword, axes, spears, and so on. Whether in the form of a temporary or permanent essence, they are a huge part of Arelith and its economies.

However, there is something satisfying to me personally about using a non-enchanted sword. Seeing it without effects gives it a more traditional appearance, and the sound effects when you bash something with a non-enchanted sword are equally as satisfying. The essences add their respective effects and sounds when used in combat which overtake the sounds and appearances of a non-enchanted sword.

With this in mind, I would love to see new items added which add Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing damage types in the same way essences would. This way you can - for example - use a sword and get a more vanilla experience with it while still gaining damage bonuses as compared to the usual essence.

Craftable Whetstones could be arranged thusly:

Coarse Whetstone......+4 Bludgeoning Damage, Permanent
Fine Whetstone...........+4 Slashing Damage, Permanent
Diamond Whetstone...+4 Piercing Damage, Permanent
Etc., etc.

With temporary stones simply being named Small Coarse Whetstone and so on.

Small Coarse Whetstone....+1d6 Bludgeoning Damage, Temporary
Etc., etc.

This whole idea originates purely because of a visual and auditory perspective. I like the way non-enchanted swords look and sound when used, but you can only achieve that when it's not enchanted. So not only could this add new variety to melee weapons and items to the economy, but it would add an option for people to use non-enchanted weapons and make them more deadly through traditional RP means, those being the sharpening and care for the weapon itself without magic.

EDIT RESPONSE:

That is totally understandable. As a fix, add items called Armor Polish to add resistances to the respective whetstones. Based on testing they may or may not be stackable with one other elemental essence, but you cannot have more than on polish on a single item.
Last edited by Glowing Mushroom on Sun Sep 20, 2020 10:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Jack Oat
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Re: Whetstones for Melee Weapons - An Alternative to Essences

Post by Jack Oat » Sun Sep 20, 2020 9:44 pm

The great thing about current weapon essences is that there's counterplay to the damage they give. For instance, a +4 offensive essence is blocked by a 5/- defensive essence.

Adding physical damage as a temporary object like this would be, in my opinion, too powerful currently.

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