In terms of the proverbial nail being struck on the head, Flutter is on target above, they're underpowered due to a concious effort to ensure they weren't released "overpowered." In my mind, that's looking backward opposed to forward, so from an analytical perspective I have concern with the mindset, but in all honesty, do understand it and in terms of the "eaches" won't criticize the collective effort. The part most in need of a fix is throwing, lets face it, how many folks have you seen playing bladeweavers. Wholesale rejection. Dev also seems to be struggling with the right balance for imbuing, note the recent change to relic frags, something frankly I wish they hadn't done, but as above, it's not that hard to see what they're struggling with.
As to the topic at hand, altering artifacts, my first read was exactly like you - I didn't like it very much either. Even after pressing hard for 6 weeks on our new gargoyles and having each of them fully developed, I still didn't like it. Another month has passed, and now I'm sort of in the middle, it doesn't "bother" me anymore, yet I don't "like" it, and I'm not sure that sitting inside Dev's perch I'd actually change it. Assuming they're finished scaling back imbuing (I only say this as literally everything is connected, and a backslide anywhere can only make the gargoyle intro and playability worse), it really is a bit unecessary to use the historical arties on these characters. What led me to this conclusion has been imbuing, a lot of imbuing, for our gargoyles and other characters. The additional resists on gargoyle clothing/ armor, makes it very, very easy to max all resists. Because of this benefit, there are a lot more property "slots" on the sets we made for our gargoyles than for our human/ elf sets. The result is that our full sets of imbued gargoyle armor, is significantly better than crafted/ imbued sets for the other races. Laying it all out on the spreadsheets we use, we've been able to do as well, and in some cases better, with the gargoyles compared to our artifact laden others. The only properties we can't match or better are luck, hit lower defense, and added skill modifiers. Of these properties, if throwing gets a relook, the only thing that has any real long term impact is luck. I've mentioned that elsewhere and hope dev does something in the future with gargoyle arties to account for this. So yes, I understand your point, and even agree emotionally to some extent. But the more I've looked at it, the lesser my argument has become, and as of today - well - I'm a bit bit passive to the idea sorry.
lol
