Living Artifacts - Artifacts that gain experience

from Elemental Forums

How about if items equipped on a Sovereign or champion could gain experience?  So when a champion gains experience, they could choose to put a percentage of their experience into one or more (must be) equipped powerful artifacts, or keep all the experience for themselves.  This is a slightly reworked version of the concept of living artifacts from King's Bounty.  Mages could craft (at a balanced cost) or start with (for those already with Path of the Mage) a special artifact that would increase spell effectiveness of one of their spell schools as they put more of their experience gained into it.  Sovereigns or Champions could start with a living artifact, or find one or more.  They should start reasonable and get better the more experience you put into it, but the experience would then not be used the boost the champion/sov themselves.  Units have experience, why not have artifacts that gain experience and abilities the more you put into them?  They could still have level, strength, dex or constitution requirements like other regular items.

1,808 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Although not exactly what you are looking for, there are items that scale with the character level.

 

I like the idea of items gaining experience, but I think it should be an automated process. I would prefer not to micro experience into an item.

 

 

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I like this idea... could spawn a lot of weapon-specific level-up traits that could be used.

Examples: 

Sharp - +1 to Damage

Heavy - +2 to Damage - 1 to Intiative

Keen - +10% Critical Chance

Brilliant Energy - Ignores armor values (and blade looks like energy rather then metal anymore)

Vorpal - +25% chance to instant kill (needs balancing probably)

Flaming - +5 Fire Damage

Freezing - +5 Ice Damage

and so on... 

I really like the idea. For really powerful ones, I'd suggest some kind of trade off from the wielder...like, Bloodthirsty Longsword requires blood from it's holder to be used. -3 Con to the wielder. Something of that nature. Could make it scale, and provide bigger penalties to the holder as the item gains more levels. 

Just my two cents.

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Really cool idea!! Even cooler if as they gained level they gained some degree of sentience or will and could end up with personalities of their own and could revolt against owners who did things they didn't agree with!! :D

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Maybe, the living artifacts you have equipped gain experience equal to the experience the hero gains, but the amount is always divided equally among all living artifacts.  So one living artifact would get all the experience the champion gains.  With two living artifacts, each would get half of the experience the champion gains, and so on.  So you could level up more than one living artifact at a time, but it would be slower.  And no micro (although you could still check living artifact experience).

So, with the army XP changes, first, all the experience from winning a battle or completing a quest would be split up among all the surviving units/champions equally, and then the champion's experience gain, as well as being given to the champion, would be divided up amongst all the living artifacts a champion is wearing while gaining that experience.