left mesa
Problem: The ranger is your main hero in the game. You land on a mysterious and dangerous planet, explore unknown lands, craft powerful weapons, customize her and catch illuvials to unveil the secrets behind them.
However entering a battle you just place her on the battlefield and let her die like cannon fodder. You can give her weapons and armors. But I don't feel that these are necessary. A weapon is just used to give your ranger an affinity. That's it. All the work in the battle is done by your illuvials anyways. If the battles get harder you just can bring more illuvials with you which again makes the ranger useless. In the current system you could also implement a battle system like in pokemon where the ranger doesn't participate in a battle at all. But since she is there I feel you should be incentivized to protect her and to make her more powerful.
What I am missing here is the excitement over a new weapon/armor. When you play other games you are constantly seeking upgrades to your weapons to get stronger and beat harder enemies. In illuvium weapons seems like the last thing you want to get when you have everything else. You cannot see the weapons on your ranger while walking on the overworld and you don't need it in battles.
Solution: Add a (small) penalty when your ranger dies in battle. Decrease the dimensional stability by 30. The penalty should be slightly higher than cost of weapon+armor.
- You care about your ranger. It does not make sense from a RPG perspective that you walk with her on the OW while dying every few minutes without any consequences.
- Your weapons and armors matter. Since armaments give your ranger more power she has a higher chance in surviving the battle. Maybe she can defeat an illuvial on her own while the rest of the team is protecting her from greater dangers.
- As a player your motivation is higher to forge better weapons/armors early. Since some of them are really expensive there has to be a motivation to do it.