Range = distance.

You have a point, though range makes more sense if ever we implement smooth movement/targetted firing.

I think there's potential for both.

That is a sensible way to do it.

A. Yes.

B. No. Qualified: that is what enchantment scrolls are for. But you don't just randomly get a very lucky drop. Rather you use your skill and judgement to enchant an item in the best way possible with the scrolls you have acquired over time.

I don't really understand what you mean by 'dropped rather than events',

But going with what I assume you mean, technically it is a bit difficult to put such randomness as Zrub describes into drops.

Not impossible at all but this is not the way the arch/artifacts system works. Archetypes are called archetypes for a reason. They should provide a definite absolute base set of attributes for a given object. Artifacts exploit this to (potentially) allow the object to be de-artifacted back to its base archetype.

This doesn't work if the archetypes themselves have randomness/variation built in. So for Zrub's suggestion we'd actually need N variant archetypes/artifacts for each 'random' mutation; where N would quickly get into the 10s and 100s.

This is the basic problem of (multiple) buffs/debuffs. Once you have buffed an object twice, how do you then remove one buff or even isolate what effects it has? The answer is by each buff adding a buff force and then the code at some point adding up each force, which is the basis of _people_'s system. But this is a reasonable amount of extra work for the server.

Enchantment scrolls get around this by accepting the limitation that a single 'disenchantment' is not possible. It's all or nothing.

Putting technical issues to one side though, it seems to me massively more appealing that players have to consciously choose if and which customisations to add to any given object rather than the luck of the draw deciding the customisation for them. After all, isn't this the very definition of customisation?

Enchanted variations rather than randomly dropped variations also adds a number of gameplay elements.

For example, do you use your level 105 ES on this item_level 95 object or save it? How annoying if you do, then find a 96 ES 5 minutes later.

And soon enough enchanted items will start appearing in auctions. So do you go for this enchanted item, on the basis that you happen to have a stock of ESs which can then be used on it to make it even better?

I don't know much about the system that you guys are thinking of implementing, but I do think that as long as an item can only be enchanted once, and only once (and then become an ego item?) that it would make a very nice addition to the game as part of an item creation system.

Yes. The exact number have yet to be tied down, but essentially an ES will only give a very small bonus, whereas the difference between flavours is larger (or the boni on multiples).

So an inferior fire is fire +5% and a lesser fire is fire +10%. An ES of fire adds only 2%, so an inferior fire needs 3 such ESs to outdo an unenchanted lesser (and then only by 1%). Given that each ES raises the item's item_level and has a (small) chance to destroy it, enchanting crappy items won't make nice drops redundant.

I just started rewriting the artifact file in accordance with this. So far I've only done stat weapons and fire/frost/electricity weapons.