Pointlessly Picky Feedback About Equipment & Theming

Continuing into some off the beaten trail feedback while compiling item statistics about various armors and weapons in the game, I've compiled a list of small suggestions I wanted to make about equipment.

To preface this, most of these are very small changes, typically just in the item names, with a few other things, and will waste 99% of the peoples time who read this. This post is mostly for myself and the maybe one other person who puts high value on linguistic utility as it applies to helping players understand games and themes.

Second, this is an awfully pedantic thing, debating over single word usage. Is that unfairly picky? Yes! Second, this is posted out of a document I was using to sort through my collected information for Wiki preservation, as such it might be a little fugly in a post.

Starting at the top with Helmets;
Armor Evade Helm
Change "Helm" to Sallet
Reason - Helm should stay as 'Any Head Slot Item', over use of the term muddles the slot name.
Sallet matches with the general graphical assets used.

Pure Armor Helm
Change Greathelm to Bascinet
Reason: Greathelm is clunky to say, and as above, Helm shouldn't be used to avoid diluting the slot name.

Change Tiara's to Circlets (No singular Tiara needs reworking otherwise)
Pro - Keep name Convention
Pro - Gender Neutral

Change all reference of Cap to Hood
Pro - Keep name convention
Con - Felt Cap needs a new model (Suggested name; Leather Hood).
Viper Cap and Swathed Cap can just be renamed, "Hood" describes both fine.

Change Heavy Crown to Crusader's Crown
Heavy crown isn't particularly descriptive to this type of crown. Templar crown would also work well, given its clear iconography.
Iron Crown - Change name to Rusted Crown; 'Iron' Fails to indicate this is discarded, damaged or otherwise subpar like most 0 level items.
In alterative, replace this with Horned Crown as starter ES/Arm helmet. It already looks improvised.
Then replace Horned Crown with Iron Crown, with the graphic slightly cleaned up, to indicate it's 'average' quality.
Change Tribal Mask to Vaal Mask
There are tons of 'tribes' in Wraeclast, and tribal tends to refer to Azmeri groups, while this is clearly taken form Vaal styles.


Armor

All names of Cuirass should be changed to Plate
Reason - Having the 'family' of each item type in the name matters a lot for quick identification of items and their roles.
Using Plate and Cuirass muddles this. All 'Pure Armor" items should be labled as one or the other.
Plate is more accessible, though Cuirass is more correct.

Pure Evasion Armors follow the same, Vest and Coat should be unified into a single name
Studded Vest - Ornate Vest / Coat
Reason - Studded Armor's not real.

Pure ES follows the same, Raiment or Robes, both are good, but they should be unified unless there are plans to diverge them (i.e one has an implicit).

Armor / EV
Mail and Armour Change all to Mail.
Reason - Armour is very generic, and used as a base stat, fostering confusion, Mail fits into what ARM / Ev does as a lighter than plate armor type.'

Vagabond Armor - Really looks out of place for an evasion armor, this feels like a mid tier pure armor or Armor / ES type

Explorer Armour - Looks like an ultra heavy armor piece and not an flexible Armor / EV type.

Armor / ES
Vesment vs Mantle change all to Vestments
Same as above, unify for visual clarity

Pelt Mantle - Change to Druid Vestments
Better vibes, fits the early Ezo themes with Druids.

Ironclad Vestment - Change to Crusader Vestments, Ironclad sounds very heavy Armor.

Evade / ES
Garb vs Jacket - Same as above, pick a lane for user clarity (suggest Garb for more open ended usage)

Marabout Garb - Feels off, a really speific faith that isn't present in world. I like the odd use of unusal wording, but still feels a little out of place.

Gloves

In the abstract, I think design needs to expand what 'gloves' are as an item. Due to the remodeling of things, this slot feels less like "Object which protects the hands" as it was in D2 and PoE1, but rather, "Arm Protection" and could include sleeves and even up to the shoulder plate. This expands naming conventions and opens some interesting graphical choices (Armor / Evade could be pauldrons, for example).

Pure Armor
Mitts - Mitts absolutely fails to capture the sense of "High Armor" Suggest Gauntlets instead.

Stocky Mitts - Very poor discriptive. Rusted or Cobbled convey's the items intention better.

Bolstered Mitts - Similarly 'bolstered' sounds like a Magic affix.
Suggest 'Plated' or 'Segmented'

Tempered Mitts - Sounds a bit more advanced than the 3rd gloves, Steel or Reinforced.


Armor EV
Gauntlets - As suggested to move Mitts to Gauntlets necessitates this to change.
Mitts works somewhat better here, but still doesn't really convey a 'solid' form of armor.
Grips?

ARM / ES
Cuffs works well enough, but Bracelet's would also work well. Neither really sells the 'armor'
Could swap Bracer with Cuffs as a whole sale swap and it holds conceputal theme better.

Boots

As with gloves, I think the visual and narrative concept of the foot slot should be expanded with the new game. These on the character are generally leggings and hip coverings of some kind, and can be graphically represented with their paperdoll graphic and narrative names as such. While 'boots' makes sense for ranger like evasion items, things like Chausses (typical mail leggings) could be used for the ARM / EVA sphere, while leggings could cover ES items (or ES / Evade). Of course this would be a deeper overhaul that what may be desired, and might not be viable at this point.

ARMOR
Swap for Sabatons - Sabatons has a bit more 'weight' into the word and frees up Greaves.
Rough Greaves - Rusted or Battered greaves.
Rough implies they where baldy made, Rusted or Battered suggests poorly maintained or battle damaged.
Iron vs Bronze Greaves - odd for the weaker metal to be the better armor.
Perhaps swapping the material name for cultural ones (Ezo Greaves vs Keth Greaves)
Stone Greaves - Graphically, don't look very stone, look more Brass / Bronze.
Reinforcing the Stone look fixes, or renaming to 'Vaal Greaves'

ES Boots
Silk Slippers - The one outlier for the Sandals, only fix is a full graphical redesign and a rename.

Armor / EV
Swap to Greaves, a lighter sounding word for the more agile type.
Mail Sabaton - Nothing in this makes it sound poor quality. Rusted, Mudsoaked, Cracked, all options.

EVA
Boots is a great name for these, but it does conflict with avoiding traditional slot names for family names.
No good solution at hand.

Shields
General; Referring to families as 'X Shield' feels clunky, suggest streamlining as below;

Tower Shields
This is harder, as there are few single word descriptors for a shield of this type that's not overly particular (like Pavise)
Suggested is a slight cheat in Greatshield, which flows much better with the current preceding words than Tower Shield (Effigal Greatshield, Braced Greatshield, etc)

Crest Shields
While Crest Shield is a fine name, all (save for the Sigil Shield and Sectarian) are Heaters (the other two are Kites)
Mildly suggest Heater just for accuracy, or Heraldic Shield (this requiring new fronters, to describe WHAT they herald).

Focus
Similar to previous issues of overlapping keywords, Focus overlaps, Effigy is a viable replacement name for the shields.
This permits the word Focus to be used to describe Wands, Staves and Scepters as a family.
As it's stands, your weapon families are Martial, Wands Staves and Scepters.
This allows it to be Martial vs Focus.

Voodoo Focus - This one feels odd as it's a really particular and narrow faith that this items style seems a bit off for.
Any number of more broadly applicable necromatic words could be used (skeletal, ancestral, graven, Lightless, etc)

Wands
Attuned Wand
Name feels off for a Mana Drain.
Siphoning Wand feels better, but its securely used by Power Siphon which would be dissonant with another name.
Draining Wand has bad mouth feel.
Empowering?
Energizing?
Acrid Wand - Feels very off
In general there's a bit of a conflict as to how Wands are named.
About half are named after what they do (Volatile, Siphoning, etc)
The others are named for what they are (Bone, Withered, etc).
The ones that feel right are able to split into both (Galvanic, Withered)

Bone - Graven
Volatile - Ashbone?

Scepters
Shrine Scepters - Rebrand each of the three elements for clarity;
Cold - Charitable (Reverse of Hatred, reference to Veritania)
Fire - Calming (Reverse of Anger, the Fire Damage Aura).
Lightning - Forgiving (Reverse of Wrath the Lightning Aura).

Maces
Brigand Mace
Brigand is a really poor descriptor for a higher quality weapon
Suggest a more traditional "Spiked Mace"
If too similar to Spiked Club, "Razor Mace" or "Puncturing Mace"

Felled Greatclub - This is just a log; Felled Branch is a better descriptor.

In general, all of two handers can have the family name moved to "Maul" for clarity without sacrificing style.




TL;DR Reinforcement Points:
1 - Attempt to keep a single 'family' name of items within a line of types (Plate, Vest, Maul, etc), so players can quickly learn to identify items useful to them. A player will quickly internalize if they're playing an Evasion build, only 'Vests' are useful and can speed up play by filtering for those in their brain.

I appreciate this post: I think this is an aspect of design that is often overlooked, so I'm glad you are bringing attention to this.

"

Haeleos#7806 wrote:

I appreciate this post: I think this is an aspect of design that is often overlooked, so I'm glad you are bringing attention to this.

Pointless attention to detail is very much my brand. Normally I'd reserve this for something I'm getting paid for and just keep my notes private. But for PoE in EA, I figure there's a non-zero chance someone with the power to act on it might at least consider them.