Refuge Skill-Mod Augs

DodoBot

DodoBot

Dalayan Elder
Right now, there are three skill-mod augments available for purchase with refuge tokens:
  • Alteration
  • Backstab
  • Archery
While extremely useful to certain classes, these are of limited utility to others. I would propose adding a few more skill mods to these to flesh this out a little more (and give people aside from healers, rogues, and rangers a place to use their tokens).

I am thinking at the very least, the rest of the casting mods would be warranted:
  • Divination (resist check)
  • Evocation (dmg, but potentially hard to balance - maybe lower values)
  • Conjuration (for pet classes and DOTs)
  • Arbjuration (rune mod - and while we're at it, this should totally be added to knight gear as a nice itemization option as well)
Potentially weapon skills would be nice to add - especially 1hs (others might be hard to balance, but are a good idea). Monks and Bards might want something to complement their skills as well, but I don't know enough about how their damage works to comment here.

Any thoughts?
 
I know little about these augs (apart from their name), but it does seem the three skills on offer favor Clerics, Druids, Shamans, Rangers, and Rogues while ignoring all other classes. This seems arbitrary and unfair, though the same could also be said of other content. I think it would be a simple copypasta job for someone on the team to include at least the other casting skills, assuming there are no big balance issues I'm failing to see.

How great would the demand be for this kind of thing, anyway? I could easily imagine, say, Necromancers willingly sacrificing a mana aug in order to accommodate a Conjuration mod, but if it took this long to make it into S&R, maybe it's not very high on most people's wishlists.

If weapon skills are not wanted, something like Offense could serve as a catch-all without cluttering up the list of available augs too much. However, high-end melee would probably have more insight on this.
 
I think the augs are there for pure melees as another offset to the other classes getting Runic Spells. Alteration is a little bit out of place, but this is my hunch.
 
Grinkles said:
How great would the demand be for this kind of thing, anyway? I could easily imagine, say, Necromancers willingly sacrificing a mana aug in order to accommodate a Conjuration mod, but if it took this long to make it into S&R, maybe it's not very high on most people's wishlists.
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There have been other S+R threads about this over the years. I couldn't even get a dev to comment on this the last time I made a thread about it and mine was just one of several attempts to get this addressed. The skill augs available seem totally random by today's itemization options; they might have made sense back when Cyzaine implemented them but that really isn't the case now and hasn't been for a long time.

It's not just skill mods either; casters/hybrids also get the elemental damage aug options while other classes get zilch.
 
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Purposes for those refuge tokens on ENC if you managed to get your class tomes as drops:
EOF
 
Heh to be honest I had heard of them, but never dealt with them directly.

Alteration? Really??

This probably needs looking at.
 
I'm glad this isn't just a case of deja vu, and there actually were some posts about this in the past. Going back to Solo's original post 3 years ago, it seems he made a list. To quote him:
Silosobi said:
I am curious if it is intended that certain skills are not represented among the refuge augs?

I believe you can get augs for Backstab, Archery, and Alteration?

No augs are available for Conjuration, Evocation, Divination, or any weapon skills. I dont see these skills as being particularly more powerful than the above mentioned ones.

I propose adding augs for all skills listed above.

Refuge augs are very expensive and eat an aug slot that would otherwise be hp/mana/ac/etc, so there is certainly still a tradeoff involved.

I find it to be really frustrating to see loot that is a tier or two higher than current gear, yet it is not an upgrade because my old item happens to have a mod. If more augs were available it would make more gear options viable among all classes. Right now there are certain items that just seem near impossible to upgrade unless the upgrade just has same/bigger mod. If augs were available one could consider the plat/stat loss from getting an aug verse the raw stat upgrade involved and it would open up more gear choices for everyone and reduce the problem created by those specific items with big mods that everyone "needs" to maximize their character effectiveness.

I'd suggest:
T5 +3 evo
T5 +3 div
T5 +3 conj
T2 +5 1HS
T2 +5 2HS
T2 +5 1HB
T2 +5 2HB
T2 +5 H2H
T2 +5 Piercing.
Click to expand...

As a follow up for this, I'd make the weapon augs be available as either T2 or T5 (potentially dependent on the class of the player). Values for the skillmod could be adjusted if things have been re-scaled since this time. Casting skill mods (in my mind) could be done as either T3 or T5 - T3 as an option to potentially limit overkill stacking for example. And of course, I'd like to see some love for overcap Abjuration(why isn't this a thing on more stuff anyway?).
 
Nwaij said:
Purposes for those refuge tokens on ENC if you managed to get your class tomes as drops:
EOF
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Methril used to aug magic dmg when AOD mechanics worked differently. You could still do cold dmg for big moon comet / claws of the chill AOD or fire for flash flame + mage rains... but yeah, more options would always be nice.
 
Seems kind of silly to me tbh. Zaela brought up a pretty good points in THIS thread. There would be 0 thought into augging for a certain skill, necros would aug conjuration, wizards evocation, enchanters would ignore the augs, melee would aug to match their weapon skill etc. The current augs are pretty brain dead as well, I've only really seen 3 examples of people using the augs in somewhat clever ways. Apros using +alteration over AC, Arcibu using +24 dmg augs in his gloves (RIP), and Alkesh augging for poison damage on a shaman.

Every high tier wizard augs for cold damage, same as rangers, same as necros.
Rogues aug +BS when they cant cap it naturally via gear.
Mages aug fire damage.

Maybe if the augs provided some kind of choice I could support the idea, but tbh there really isnt one
 
More skill mod augs would give you more choices in actual gear since mediocre items with a rare skill mod wouldn't be relied on for like 5 tiers. I'd say that would be a good thing.
 
Tevinter said:
Maybe if the augs provided some kind of choice I could support the idea, but tbh there really isnt one
Click to expand...

There is even less choice and more of an automatic status quo as things are now.

In the case of wizards, it is not hard too hard to max evocation, which is the only skillmod we really need, but if there were augs available, we wouldn't be as restricted in wearing all the gear that has +evocation. If there was some items with better stats, that caused a loss of evocation, we could potentially wear it and an aug, instead of the way things are now, which is pretty much that you have to wear all the +evocation gear to remain capped at all times, because other than focus effects, that is the most powerful effect we gain through gear.

I personally think it would be best of all augs were available in T2, T5, and even T3, but that just seems like too much wishful thinking to me. Aug types just aren't consistent in any way across gear, and it just ends up screwing people over who happen to end up with gear that doesn't match the aug type that they can get refuge augs for. I've even known people that had to choose between wearing old/inferior gear and taking off their dragon/faction aug because they just happened to have all gear with T2 and T3s and no T5 stuff.
 
Tevinter said:
Seems kind of silly to me tbh. Zaela brought up a pretty good points in THIS thread. There would be 0 thought into augging for a certain skill, necros would aug conjuration, wizards evocation, enchanters would ignore the augs, melee would aug to match their weapon skill etc. The current augs are pretty brain dead as well, I've only really seen 3 examples of people using the augs in somewhat clever ways. Apros using +alteration over AC, Arcibu using +24 dmg augs in his gloves (RIP), and Alkesh augging for poison damage on a shaman.

Every high tier wizard augs for cold damage, same as rangers, same as necros.
Rogues aug +BS when they cant cap it naturally via gear.
Mages aug fire damage.

Maybe if the augs provided some kind of choice I could support the idea, but tbh there really isnt one
Click to expand...

Froldo was talking about saving up enough tokens to full aug fire dmg for flash flame. And like I said before, Methril used to use the magic augs... Personally, I like the idea of being able to stack Abjuration for overcap rune bonus, but there are probably less than 5 items in game right now which even use that mechanic. =(
 
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