This is kinda wrong. I mean, you won't be able to wield the top end of stat req of other weapon categories, but most armament types have a few armaments that don't have high requirements in their core stat and can be attuned to have decent scaling to whatever other stat you're using - arcane, faith, or int.
For people who are STR only or DEX only, there tends to be a scant few weapons of the opposite kind that can scale. For example, most katanas are dex weapons, but one scales with strength. Most blunt weapons are a str affair, but flails lean dex.
I was talking in terms of value as a drop/find. Even if I can equip this new Seal as a STR build, will I care about finding it? I'm fairly certain most people tend to build either around what is the most powerful or an aesthetic archetype (katana weeb). If a DEX samurai find a flail which also scales with DEX, is he gonna be excited about it?
Err, Moonveil is one of the more obvious of the powerful weapons, but if you look at my posting history you'll see there's many more over the top setups in this game, many of which are stronger than moonveil.
Yes, I found a better setup as well, but it wasn't necessary for a long long time with Moonveil.
Plate armor looks the same on a man and a woman you know. Boobplates aren't a real thing, do you have any idea how much cloth padding you must wear underneath a set of plate? Besides protection you from abrasion while moving with plate, padding also adds (moderate) protection against hard hits, plate protects you from cuts, but not from the force of being hammered.
ER has a reasonable amount of gender specific things where it makes sense, like clothing.
This is a video game set in an over-the-top fantasy world(with Aliens!). Dragons are also not a real thing. Do you have any idea how much padding you must wear to survive a tail swipe from a dragon? What is going to happen to your shield arm, when you block a hit from a giant? My point here is about the effort or lack-there-of that was put into the sets. FroSo just didn't want to make a 2nd variant for every set they have. They didn't even want to make most sets, unless those are also used as a model for an enemy. Maybe this is the price I have to pay for not having any micro-transaction or battle passes in the game. It's still a negative in my eyes, especially when comparing it to other titles. Why even go to the trouble of implementing a character creator at all, if all I am going to see is the same model as the Crucible Knight enemy?
Ah, you've revealed your true motivator!
Not sure if I missed the part where you talk about them, but talismans are among the sort of items I was very happy to find most of the time. They can be build defining with the right combinations of talismans.
Yeah, I forgot to mention the Talismans. My text ended up just like my playthrough - by the end I just wanted to get it over with - so I left a couple of things out.
Talismans are where they put all the actual interesting effects on. At least some of them do. Many Talismans are still just boring +5 Stat or 5/10/15% more of X. I ended up changing my Talismans around much more than any other of my equipment slots. I think relegating all the interesting effects onto a non-descript slot like that is also a cop-out. I think the classic character doll model with rings, amulets, belts etc is superior for role-playing and itemization purposes.
Talismans provide you with 0 visual feedback on the changes that you make as well. It's so much more satisfying to boost your Spells by equipping one of the Raya Lucaria Glintstone Helmets compared to a +5 Int Talisman. My suspicion is that FroSo probably wanted to do this more, seeing how Limgrave and Liurnia are the zones where the most effort was concentrated in, but eventually cut their ambitions down as the work mounted.
The levelling system defines the sort of things you can wield. If you want to be good at sorceries you won't be good at incantations (well, you could be good at both but it would require farming way too many levels). A dex arcane build will never be good at wielding a colossal sword. Etc.
Isn't this just a negative then? The leveling system decentivizes you from experimenting with other builds, the way you're putting it. Yes, I was dealing a lot of damage later in the game, but the HP bloat (1,2k HP rats lmao) does balance it out.
