LETS for a moment toss the question of balance, i am asking more of a thematic question- not just ARPGs. But why is it always 2 rings, and never more? I feel like it is such a missed opportunity to do stuff.
Why not have magical tattoos that act like stats also? I think it would be a interesting suggestion to play arround conceptually.
We have 10 fingers, so even if you had 1 ring per finger that would allow 10. Now would that look a little weird? Maybe but if you want to why not right?
Now in theory, if such a thought experiment made you curious. How could it be applied to Last Epoch? Let me know down bellow.
Ignoring balance, I’d probably go with UI clarity being an issue with 10 (or more) ring slots. Having too many item slots in general would make that section of the UI a lot busier in a bad way. Then they’d likely have to reduce the numerical impact of the ring item ('cause you can’t ignore balance).
Why not a magical T-Shirt and magical Boxer Shorts?
I bet you could wear about 20 T-Shirts, one above each other. And why stop at 10 rings? You could even wear several rings at one finger!
Powerful piercings! Eyebrows, nose, ears, IMPLANTS! With cybernetic skills, i.e. additional strength implicit.
What about glasses? Sun glasses with implicit fire and lightning resistance.
BRACES! Magical braces for killer breath!
Let’s get serious again. You can basically add everything you want. But it becomes increasingly more difficult to balance and it becomes more confusing for the user. So I am not craving for more gear slots.
Besides, lore wise you could argue that wearing more than one powerful magical ring on one hand would overwhealm the wielder…
It’s not just that. Once you design your RPG to have a certain number of gear items, that’s it. There’s no point in adding anymore, because your whole system is designed around those items. You could even make it with only 3 item slots total, and still be able to make it diverse enough
We can’t, though. It’s simply because of two reasons: balance and not overcomplicating the system. It’s already hard to juggle a dozen gear slots. If you start adding 20 rings (you can wear more than one ring in each finger), 5 amulets, plus a whole bunch of stuff like a scarf, socks, etc.
Actually ill disagree here, I think more slots means you can have more unique effects, which leads to more design. having 3 item slots leads to items needing too many rolls. like lets say currently you have 10 slots, which is 40 affixes, 20 prefix, and 20 suffix.
if you had 3 slots but wanted to keep a similar level of power, then your items would each need 12/14 affix. 12 being a bit weaker total affix wise, 14 being more powerful, 13 is an odd number and thus is kinda ugly/weird. Getting an item that has all the stats you want/need becomes infinitely harder. As well as you only getting to put on 3 uniques instead of potentially 10 for effects.
The reason there isnt more slots is usually because it has a similar effect where if you have 20 slots instead of 10, and each only has 2 affix, its pretty easy to get perfect stats on an individual item, but you will be running around not seeing certain slots drop forever because there is just less chance to get any given slot. ive played games with 20+ slots, and often times will just have slots empty for a long time because of it.
As for rings, ive played games with 4 rings. 4 rings seems like a good number, and probably would be the place to start if they wanted to add slots. As for balance, you would probably want to nerf the affix power on the rings, and potentially nerf their base types as well.
I could see 4 rings being fun, since rings are generally I feel the flex spots in gearing currently.
But they could also add a shoulder slot and a cloak slot. might be interesting as well!
I would guess that this is mostly for historical reasons, PoE has two rings, and so do a lot of other entries in the genre.
If we want to muse about what could have been, I would be curious about an attunement system like d&d.
In D&d, most magic items require attunement, and you may have up to 3 attuned items, so you could get three rings, or no rings at all and instead have magic armor, magic cape and magic boots, or any combination of those.
Of course you can only wear a single armor magic or not, but you have a lot of flexibility about the other slots, if you have no magic rings, there is not reason for you to wear a ring at all.
If you increase the number of slots to something like 10 that could fit in an ARPG system.
