Torillian said:
My only real issue with the new system is that I don't see how there's a point in negative traits anymore. Never saw any quests that required specific traits so other than increasing the rank of your item when you don't have better options I don't see why you would ever put a negative trait like "more difficult to synthesize" on your items.
Other than that though I agree, definitely an improvement.
I've been playing this game almost non-stop since I got it last week and I think there's a point to having terrible traits cost points, even possibly a lot of points.
Water can be sold for 1 cole. There are traits that lower the sale price to 0 cole, and that makes it impossible to sell them. While those types of traits are worthless on water, they are very useful for lowering the price of synthesized goods that you want to register, particularly when their quality quickly enhances over time or when their quality doesn't matter.
Also, grading depends on the quality and the traits, positive or negative. Some traits seem to be worth more, as far as grading goes, but I'm not quite sure if it's much more complicated than adding up the costs of all the traits and applying some sort of modifier to the quality to obtain the final grade.
I noticed near the end of the game that many awesome weapon, armor, and accessory traits were showing up on worthless crap like food items and water, and noticed in a second playthrough that those traits can be transferred to materials used for equipment.
In order to load up lots of expensive traits from things like water and food type materials onto equipment ingredients, you'll need to trade less expensive traits for more expensive traits when you're working with things like dried flowers and magical coins in order to work with the trait cost limits.
I managed to put +10 attack, ghost repel, and a convert damage L onto a goldsomething ingot before reaching cobalt rank. I think that I could have substituted something way better than ghost repel and added in 2 other traits that cost 9 or 10 points, but I don't know if it's possible to justify spending the in-game time to do so other than to possibly brag about it on the internet
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