Suggestion: Attack Skill Scaling.

[__________Mindswayer]

Gaute Godager’s article leads one to believe that equipment will be scaled per “To Equip” reqs. I suggest having the equipment scaling based on Attack skill only (in the case of weapons anyway).

Let me give you an example of what I mean by “Attack Skill Scaling”.

Take a QL 40 E-Beamer. It has a LR_Energy req of 175, an AssaultRifle req of 117, and an attack skill of 67%LR 33%AR. It’s Attack Skill Req would be:

(175 x .67) + (117 x .33) = 156.

Now a QL 41 E-Beamer:

(180 x .67) + (120 x .33) = 160.

What this means is if a player is holding a QL 40 E-Beamer and his attack skill is 160, his QL 40 beamer will be behaving like a QL 41 beamer. Likewise if a player wielding a QL 41 E-Beamer had an attack skill between 156 and 159, his weapon would perform as a QL 40 E-Beamer.

A high and low end QL cap should be implemented or else you’ll have QL 1 weapons behaving like QL 200 weapons in the hands of those with the necessary skills. As an example, a weapon may perform 25 QL better than it’s actual QL and may only perform 25 QL worse than it’s actual QL. Therefore a player wielding a QL 20 E-Beamer with an attack skill of 156 would have his weapon doing the damage of a QL 40 E-Beamer.

Secondary skills (like fling, brawl, etc) that don’t affect attack skill shouldn’t be factored in considering they are often kept much lower yet are able to be debuffed by the same amount as all skills. Skills that you would naturally keep much higher. Ransacks will destroy the game if this is overlooked.

However. One must still meet all requirements when equipping a weapon. The scaling is done after the weapon is in hand and there is a change in attack skill.

[Darkarch_]

In a way this already happens. Your attack skill gives a damage bonus depending on how much you have. For example, my fixer at level 78 was using a ql124 aleph which is listed as doing something like 20-186(160) damage or the like, don't have AO open to get exact numbers. However, because of his attack skill which was around 550 when buffed, against say a shade at the NW mine in lush fields, his highest non crit hit was around 400 give or take 5-10 damage. He wears a +6 and +4 projectile ring and uses the +5 damage buff, and I believe the runbuff he uses is -5 damage, so hes getting about another +10 damage on top of what the weapon does. So he does about 100% more damage than what the gun is listed as doing, or the equivalent of a much higher ql aleph(for reference a ql200 aleph does 32-280 damage).

The way the attack skill gives a damage bonus as of right now, if you throw the general -20 smg debuff on me I would laugh because the effect would be almost nonexistant. However, with the general outline of what Gaute proposed, if that aleph was borderline of being 10% overequipped or whatever, if you threw that -20 debuff on me it would make a BIG difference, something like around 100 less damage I think if its reduced by 25%.