Weapon & Armor Gilding: Gems

[DaniAngione]

Greetings

A simple but possibly neat idea!
There's a lot of requests for gems in Haven, something that has been requested for a long time tbh. (like here: viewtopic.php?f=48&t=53816)

Now, I was casually talking about mining, things that could be changed and such, when this idea came to me:
What if we get gems and, not only that, gems become a new, gilding-like, socketing system for weapons and armor? The game could definitely use more variation between weapons and armor (beyond quality) and at the same time the wide variety of gildings of general purpose wouldn't properly fit war gear I guess. Like.. How does one add a metal buckle to a sword or shipwreck buttons to platemail?

So here comes the gems!
Gems could be randomly occurring mining finds associated to cave level and stone/ore type being mined. They would be found in raw form, requiring polishing to be properly used. Being specific to weapon and armor, a lesser variety of gems (in comparison to gildings) would allow for more specific, combat-related improvements - not only in terms of skills or stats as regular gildings but in more complex, interesting effects like cooldowns, base damage/armor, armor penetration, HHP damage/or damage resistance, wound mitigation, IP generation, etc...

As for the "gilding" process itself, I think an interesting way would be to make it so that when crafted, an item has a random number of sockets attributed to it (for example, 0-2). That number could be affected by different things like the crafter's skills & abilities, hearth magic, realm bonuses, credos, etc... For example, a credo could make it so that the maximum number of sockets can be +1. The maximum number could also be "per item", making perhaps less appreciated items more useful. For example, Hirdsman's sword could be 0-2 while Fyrdsman's or spears could be 1-3 (always at least one socket)

And then you could socket the gems just like you would gild an item, with the only exception that there would be no gilding attributes nor generation of new slots.

Additionally, could make it so that gems are "removable" - however with a good chance of failure (which could generating a new cavedust-like curio, gem dust, which could actually be ok in larger amounts)
The chance of successfully removing a gem could also be affected by credos, skills, etc...

Anyway, just some random ideas. A bit Diablo-ish but it's cool!

[SacreDoom]

I think Jorb has stated that he likes the idea of gems but he wants them to be meaningful before introducing them. I don't personally understand why this iteration of gilding you propose has to differ so much from gilding clothes, however.

[MrPunchers]

Make them incredibly rare and appear more often on earlier layers so noobs have item sink to give to big guise; maybe have no quality until after polished and cut to support this?

[ChildhoodObesity]

they need to add these gems but make them drop from hard to kill new animals and shit and DRAGONS in a new dungeon on level 6 and you could socket these into your weapons/armor and there would be some that are real rare and it would encourage people to spend their entire day farming a dungeon and i would really enjoy this so please add it xd. also perhaps there should be only one dungeon so people are forced to compete for the drops within the dungeon hhehehe

[jorb]

Gems have since been implemented. I agree that they could be used to gild weapons and armor, but I'm not sure on the mechanics for that yet.

[azrid]

It should be purely cosmetic.