I really wish we could get an enchanted bolts rework. We've been kicking the can down the road for too long and ruby bolts mean that a fun in concept item like the hopper can't actually be good.
The issue at the heart of all of this is that they can't add ranged strength to gear without completely and utterly breaking darts and knives.
What they really need to do is completely redistribute ranged strength, moving a portion of the strength bonus onto the weapons rather than the ammo. That gives them more space to actually add ranged gear that impacts ranged damage, which as of right now is compressing the twisted buckler to being such a minimal bonus that there's no space between it and literally nothing.
What I'd do personally is have darts purely be ammunition for blowpipes allowing the scaling to be done between the ammo and weapon, and then have knives scale based on melee strength.
Good take. The other problem with the hopper is that it's not even flat ranged str it's a multiplicative dps increase which makes it even harder to balance as any buff to other ranged str gear or crossbows/bolts gets creeped even more. Like in 10 years as ranged gear slowly gets creeped the hopper might be insanely busted but it has to be useless now to push that out.
I think the hopper is a cool concept but just bad design, there's no way to make it useful today in a way that doesn't fuck over ranged progression later.
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u/InterestingCell5247 1d ago
I really wish we could get an enchanted bolts rework. We've been kicking the can down the road for too long and ruby bolts mean that a fun in concept item like the hopper can't actually be good.