I really appreciate the work that have been put into Forging and crafting materials. However, studying the stats very closely I find there's very little reason to alloy materials and I fear that may not change too much even when Enchanting gets released.

I'd like to suggest a "Advanced Alloying" technique to make alloying more appealing at the (potential) cost of extra sacrifice of materials.

With the technique, the smith can strategically distribute the materials in the alloy to minimize the negative attributes while maximizing the positives.

In practice, what this means is you can "lessen" the impact of the material with lower stat.. say, by 40% when alloyed to perfection.

Example: (Using only Hardness, Physical Resistance, and Durability for simplicity)

Without the technique, alloying 50% Steel (HC, 90 hardness, 90 p. resist, 25 durability, etc.) with 50% Covellite (35 hardness, 80 p. resist, 80 durability) results in a Steel-Alloy at 63 hardness, 85 physical resist, 53 durability.


With Advanced Alloying technique:

Each material's stat get modified by the following formula:

[original stat] * ( 0.4 * ( (0.5 - | [% in alloy] - 0.5 |) / 0.5 ) ) * [difference in stat vs that of highest quality] * [% quality of alloy process]

This applies only to materials that do not already have the highest stat in that category.

That should read - Starting from the original stat of the material, say Covellite's 35 hardness, we're going to reduce the "penalty" compared to steel by 40% by adding the weighted difference.

Here I've added a component for absolute percentage value in the difference of the material's percent composition compared to 50%, because we want to avoid a situation where one might consider putting in 1% covellite to dramatically improve HC Steel's durability and thermal resistance, which makes no sense. Here, 50% is considered the perfect equilibrium for alloying. If you do a 90%/10% mix, this portion of the formula would penalize the benefits from Advanced Alloying on both material by 80% for a net 4% benefit on the perfect 20%.

So assuming at 100% quality in the alloying process, we would get 57 modified hardness for Covellite, 84 modified p. resist, and finally for Steel (HC) 47 modified durability for the purpose of calculating the alloy - and a final product of 74 hardness, 87 p. resist, 64 durability, something still not great but much more respectable and worth considering.


Now I know what you're thinking, that's a dramatic improvement from without the technique why wouldn't everyone just always do it?


Quality of Alloy Process:

In order to attain maximum result of 40%, not only do you want only a 2-material mix at 50% each, you need the skill to make no mistakes and also consume up to double the original amount of material as you refine the alloy. For common materials like steel and covellite this is not an issue, just more work. However, if you want to apply advanced alloying to rare materials, this gets extremely expensive.

I asked similar when alloying first came out, and the reasoning GMs were against it is that it essentially opens the door for materials that go beyond their expected tier.

That said, it would be neat if there was an advanced alloying technique that allowed players to do something like opt to add a widget with their mix that allowed the alloying cap to change from 33% to like 40% or 45%. This would give players a better advantage when it comes to adjusting density, which I feel would be a lot easier to manage, balance-wise, than [debatably] allowing alloys to work better than pure mixes.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.