With all the posts about the new armor and weapon changes coming with publish 81 i've been thinking about some of the issues that other people have raised, and some things that I would personally like to see happen to allow greater customization. Most of the issues seem to revolve around the armor changes and most specifically the effect mage armor will have on armor if the current set of changes go in. We currently already have the ability to remove damage increase from weapons by combining the drops from the Shame bosses on levels 1 through 3 to get a whetstone. What I would like to see added is a similar item, made from the same ingredients, that would remove the mage armor mod from armor.
Now... to allow for more customization. There are several mods that drop on both weapons and armor that most people would agree are pretty worthless. I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what everyone looks for on their armor or weapons, but i'm pretty sure that most people would like the ability to remove lower requirements or increased durability from something in order to be able to add something to it that they would find more useful. My thought was that an expanded function on the whetstone and the similar armor removal tool would give you the ability to remove these mods based on your item identification skill. Just as a general starting point so you get an idea what i'm thinking about here it could be along the lines of:
0-25 DI or Mage armor depending on the tool
25-50 Lower requirements
50-75 +durability
75-100 luck
and as an added bonus at 100 skill you could have the ability to attempt to remove the -100 luck mod.
To keep this from being overpowered it should work similar to enhancing where it requires certain ingredients (maybe a use for arcane gems or other underused/unused items) and there is a chance to fail based on the items overall weight. You either succeed and use the items and the mod is removed, fail and use some of the ingredients, or have a catastrophic failure and lose the whetstone/removal tool and some ingredients. Ideally i'd like to see just the tool lost on a catastrophic failure but that might be a bit much since you could just keep trying until you finally succeeded.
Now... to allow for more customization. There are several mods that drop on both weapons and armor that most people would agree are pretty worthless. I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly what everyone looks for on their armor or weapons, but i'm pretty sure that most people would like the ability to remove lower requirements or increased durability from something in order to be able to add something to it that they would find more useful. My thought was that an expanded function on the whetstone and the similar armor removal tool would give you the ability to remove these mods based on your item identification skill. Just as a general starting point so you get an idea what i'm thinking about here it could be along the lines of:
0-25 DI or Mage armor depending on the tool
25-50 Lower requirements
50-75 +durability
75-100 luck
and as an added bonus at 100 skill you could have the ability to attempt to remove the -100 luck mod.
To keep this from being overpowered it should work similar to enhancing where it requires certain ingredients (maybe a use for arcane gems or other underused/unused items) and there is a chance to fail based on the items overall weight. You either succeed and use the items and the mod is removed, fail and use some of the ingredients, or have a catastrophic failure and lose the whetstone/removal tool and some ingredients. Ideally i'd like to see just the tool lost on a catastrophic failure but that might be a bit much since you could just keep trying until you finally succeeded.