A new LDoN feature that seems like it could complement tradeskilling

[wombat]

LDON Augmentation

Hmm the examples they show are no drop, perhaps the augmentation will only work on no drop very high level gear?

I also think that augmentation will only work on level restricted items to avoid unbalancing through uber twinking lowbies.

This is good for the higher level trades gear as its level restricted

Either only apply it to level restricted items or the item becomes level restricted once its augmented. The Augmentation item can say what level it will restrict to, if its being applied to an item with a higher restriction then it will default to higher.

[Xenephex]

On test server, the 'Slot type 1 - empty' lines started already appearing on items. I'm not sure exactly when they started showing up. I just noticed them in the last few days.

I had no idea what they meant until I saw the new info about this on Alla's. The good news is that although I can't remember exactly what I saw these on, they definitely were not only on high-end no-drop items. They were either items I already owned, or were items I was looking to buy in the bazaar.

[Tariq]

Personally, I hope they implement this in a way that allows the same augmentation item to have varying effects depending on the gear it's attached to. For example, if you add a hit point augmentation to a Raincaller bow, it adds more hit points than if you apply the same augmentation to a Twisted or Nightmarewood bow. If not, then why bother augmenting old/obsolete items? People will still get the uberest gear they can buy in the Bazaar and just augment it to be even more uberific.

Now, if they do implement this to have variable augmentation effects, I can see great potential for tradeskilled items. All they'd have to do is make the augmentation effects on tradeskilled gear greater than on non-tradeskill gear. In one shot, they'd resurrect the marketability of tradeskilling in general, without having to create large numbers of new recipes all over the place.

- Tariq

[Kaysha Soulsinger]

Someone mentioned this would be nightmare for Magelo. Considering the information I have seen (no, I'm not in the Beta, nor do I play on Test), the items with augmentation slots have a few specific slot numbers. I had to think of spell stacking here. Specific augmentation items can only go into slots with a specific number. This prevents you from doing a +2 DAM augmentation into a breastplate for instance.

Even so, since you can click the "link" of the augmentation once it's on the item, this gives an important clue on how they will be handled: the player profile will have the item ID, followed by the reference number of the augmentation(s) on the item. This reference ID simply refers to the augmentation item. This requires relatively little extra coding on Magelo: all that's needed is that Magelo reads out the reference codes when reading the character data (so only for premium members) and attach those to the specific player profile, for the correct slot.

The only "weirdness" that could happen here is if the item data of the augmentation is not in local memory whereas the full item data is, and the augmentation data called by reference ... then when Magelo reads an augmentation reference that's not yet in the database, the slot cannot be filled on the profile for that player.

By the way, there's no need to worry about item database constrictions. Item ID's higher than 65536 have already shown up - one can only guess at what size they currently have their item database. Most likely they increased it by at least one full byte (i.e. 256x the original size of 32767).

Augmentations can be removed from items, by the way. Doing so yields the original item without that augmentation, but the augmentation itself is destroyed. I don't know if you can select to remove specific augmentations if more than one are placed on an item, or if all are removed then.