Before I make my response, I think I have to define some terms I'll use. Name, what a weapon's Base Might is.
The idea of Base Might is a value from 10 to 200 that determines the other stats associated with the weapon. Each weapon type would have a spread of percentiles for each stat (ex: Axe might have +115% in Attack, -20% in Defense, and +40% in Casting. A 80 Might Axe would have +92 Attack, +32 Casting, and -16 Defense). This lets us create weapons that are different from one another stastically, while also controlling for other things, such as what bonuses we can give for artifact weapons, what kinds of things we have available with their unleashes, etc. Effectively, we could use Might as a pool of "Artifact Points" that we can use to distribute to artifacts to help keep them relatively balanced with one another so we don't get crazy things like the "big three" from TLA and DD (Sol Blade, Tisiphone Edge, Excalibur in TLA, Sol Blade, Levatine, and Phaeton's Blade in DD). It also allows us to create scaling abilities, which I will be discussing later in this post.
The way Base Might works would be simple - the lowest value is 10, associated with "Character level 1". The highest value is 200, associated with "Character level 51". When we build an area, we keep in mind what level we expect the player to be at, and we craft our monsters and equipment around that expected level. Because there are 50 levels between each extreme, it gives us a nice easy number - each for each level above 1, we add about 3.8 to the expected base Might of a weapon. If it's a level 20 area, the items we populate it with are about 86 Base Power, +/- 2.
Got the gist of it? Cool. So then:
1 (on keeping mundane weapons): I think we should. Having a baseline for weapons in the mundane weapons helps to give a sense of distinguishment between those and artifact weapons. Another way to look at it? You have to crawl before you can walk, and mundane gear is effectively that crawling bit for equipment progression. Even if they are obsolete by mid-game, we have to remember that there's more to the game than just the end. Journey before Destination, after all.
2 (on keeping crits and unleashes separate): I think we should. Critical Hits and Unleashes are two substantially different things. Unleashes are effectively a surge of psynergetic power unelashed from a weapon. That is not what a critical hit is from a conceptual level. A critical hit is when an adept exploits an opening or weakness in the enemy's guard. Of all games, the Dark Souls series has a good example of the two:
The Moonlight Greatsword has a special effect where you can send out a surge of power from the weapon at the cost of the weapon's durability. This is conceptually how Unleashes work.
When you circle behind an enemy or you parry them, they're open for a poewrful attack - a backstab or reposte attack respectively. This is conceptually how Critical Hits work.
Dark Souls effectively has a manual representation of what the Golden Sun series does from an abstract representation through probability. What's more...
Critical Hits and Unleashes, being two mechanically different things in golden sun, are not incompatible. I argue they should be capable of stacking. We can look at this in a method of perception - one's source is the weapon, the other's source is the attacker. Let's see how this could work from that angle mechanically:
Weapon Unleash rates in GS are assigned to the weapon themselves. They tend to range from 35-40% base rate - I suggest we both reduce this rate, and have it scale with the strength of the weapon. My proposition for Unleash Rate is:
5 + 10% of a weapon's Base Might. The unleash rate of a weapon obtained around level 20 (~86 Might) should be ~13%. This value can be further augmented through other equipment, but we shouldn't allow for these values to exceed around 60-70% in our deign process.
An unleash's power is ~35% of the weapon's base might. For a weapon obtained around level 20 (~86 Might), this should be ~+30 in power. This value is based on the trends in Golden Sun, where most unleashes ranged from 30-40% of a weapon's attack stat in their power.
The idea here is that Weapon Unleashes are
equipment focused. I also think that when you equip a weapon with an unleash, you also gain the ability to manually cast it in battle. Unleashes when triggered at chance with the attack command are free, but purely based on chance. When used manually from the psynergy menu, they're guaranteed, but cost energy. Presents a risk vs reward sort of opportunity, while also doubling as a shout out to Garet's "wouldn't it be cool if we could use critical hits on command in battle?" comment from Kolima forest.
For a critical hit:
5 + 20% of a character's level. For a level 20 character, their base critical hit rate should be about 9%. This value can be further augmented through equipment that boosts critical hit rate.
In the original GS, critical damage was based on the
target's level. That's silly, but using the attacker's level might be a good approach for us to take - so I like to use the following:
((Attack - (Defense * PierceMod))/2 + AddMod) * MultiMod
Where:
Pierce Mod = 1 - ((15 + Level/4)/100). Example at level 20: 1 - ((15 + 20/4)/100) → 1 - ((15 + 5)/100) → 1 - (20/100) → 0.8 (only 80% of the enemy's defense is factored in)
Add Mod = 5 + Level/4. Example at level 20: 5 + 20/4 → 5 + 5 → 10 power added to the damage of the attack
Multi Mod = 1 + (10 + Level/4)/100. Example at level 20: 1 + (10 + 20/4)/100 → 1 + (10 + 5) / 100 → 1 + 15/100 → 1.15 multiplier
So at level 20, a crit does the following:
((Attack - (Defense *0.8))/2 + 10) * 1.15
While the character is inexperienced, a crit would be somewhat on the weaker end of things. But as they get stronger, a crit becomes more and more powerful, reflecting the character's ability to exploit openings in an enemy's defenses. While unleashes reflect the strength of a character's equipment, criticals reflect the strength of the character themselves.
Finally... there's no reason these shouldn't stack. Since both are triggered via the attack command, it checks for unleash, then for crit. It shouldn't be too tough to assign crits the zoomin and slight pause effect in battle the GBA games did, while also being able to layer it modularly to unleashes that land critically. We should also probably discuss whether we should allow crits for spells too, and if we do, if it should apply to all spells, or only certain kinds of spells.
3 (usable weapons): Using the idea above about unleashes being usable from the psynergy menu, I think this is one way we could do it. Another method would be to have on-use weapons be used from the item command, but they have their own EP pool. So if you have an item with 40 EP associated with it, and its ability costs 12 EP, it could be used 3 times without worry, but if used a fourth the item will break. This removes the problem of random chance, and allows us to have a method of recharging items. If adepts recover energy while walking, maybe their equipment does as well, just at a much slower rate? Perhaps for every 4 points of energy recovered, 1 weapon energy recovers as well. This way, on-use weapons aren't trivialized. We should make sure they're
actually worth using, though. No ability used through an item should be replacatable via spells, IMO. It should also allow us to use things we'd otherwise not be able to implement due to how the GS systems work, such as non-elemental attack spells.
So, for Multiple Unleashes on one artifact: DD did this very thing, and I don't think it worked out very well. The strongest weapons with the most unleashes became sub-par because it actually lowered the potential DPS compared to weaker weapons. Sure, the Excalibur was more powerful than the Levantine, but the Levantine had Centurian AND one less unleash, so it used an OP ability and did so more frequently than the Excal could put out Legend. Likewise, the Phaeton's Blade was preferred over the Tisiphone Edge for literally the same reason, despite being notably weaker as a weapon. We should use different methods to distinguish weapons from one another than just having multiple unleashes.
Smithing: I've seen floated around by people, such as
Orange Bran and others, that weapons should be upgradable. This would be an interesting way to keep weapons relevant longer, and on thinking about this I've figured out a way I think it can work.
For our smithing system, rather than using one item the way TLA and DD do it, we should use two - a Base material, and an Alloy material. This removes the element of random chance from the process, and stops wasting the player's time as they constantly reset for that 5% Excalibur chance. Instead, we'd have things like:
Orihalcum + Orihalcum = Excalibur
Orihalcum + Dark Matter = Cosmos Shield
Orihalcum + Salamander Tail = Big Bang Gloves
Salamander Tail + Orihalcum = Herculean Axe
etc
The way I see this working is that the relative strength of the equipment made is tied to the rarest item in the set, so in this case, the Excalibur and Herculean Axe are roughly similar to one another in terms of power, though they used different base metals. So... here's the thing - In GS, we already have precedent of using weapons as materials for crafting thanks to Rusty Weapons. I propose instead that we have kind of "reforging" system for weapons. Each one has a base might associated with an "early", "Mid", and "late" tier piece of equipment. Let's look at a well known weapon as an example: The Elven Rapier
We'll have a couple rules - you have to use an elemental ore (ex: Tear Stone would be Early Mercury, Salamander Tail would be Late mars, etc), and the element you use determines which weapon in the tree it becomes. So, for example:
Elven Rapier + Golem Core = Dwarven Blade
Dwarven Blade + Sylph Feather = Sylph Rapier
Sylph Rapier + Tear Stone = Mermaid's Nail
Mermaid's Nail + Spark Stone = Elven Rapier
This would effectively mean that each weapon would be part of a family of twelve weapons, of three levels of power, but with different elements. What's more, if we look at the travelling caravan idea pitched in the worldbuilding thread, we could actually tie the crafting system into it, as we'd essentially be able to have a smith to keeps current to where the player is in the story (assuming I'm understanding the idea correctly), preventing the need to travel all the way to Yallam each time you want to craft something.
It also lets us reuse assets a bit. If each level of power for a weapon group is its own design, we could have the different elemental variants of them just be palette swaps (in this case, the blade would change color for each element).
What do y'all think?