The helmet is yours now

Equipment is really in. Each character has six slots (helmet, armor, pants, gloves, boots and weapon), every piece shows on the doll, and what drops from the Den and the boss now includes pieces with rarity and rolled attributes.

Why

Piece-by-piece equipment, visible on the character, has been one of the game’s three pillars since the first draft, borrowed from MU Online. We’d already proven that the layered doll swaps helmets. What was missing was for the piece to really exist: to have an owner, have stats and drop from somewhere.

How it works

Every new character starts with the class kit, already equipped. The mage comes with a hood, tunic and staff, and the warrior with a leather cap, leather armor and dagger. Old accounts got the kit automatically.

Pieces have rarity: common, rare, epic and legendary. Rarity raises the main attribute and rolls from one to four affixes, such as DEF, health, crit or elemental mastery. The weapon can come with an element affix, which changes the attack’s element, and then a warrior with a fire dagger starts opening and closing different reactions.

Each class has its limits. The mage only wears light clothing and uses a staff; the warrior wears light, medium or heavy and fights with a dagger. The server checks everything, and the client only shows what can be used. A piece belongs to the account: if the tunic is on Lira and you tell Bram to wear it, it comes off Lira.

In the Den, each mob has a 6% chance of dropping a piece and the boss has 40%. The boss chest always gives one, rare or better. The stats apply in the room, and people in town see the new outfit as soon as you swap.

The big swords aren’t in yet, because they use bigger sprites than the 64 pixels the game reads today. For now the warrior fights with a dagger.

Next step

The blacksmith, to upgrade pieces from +0 to +15, with a risk of breaking from +10.