I would suggest unlinking smelting from armor grade (not the slot, just the process) and maybe change the nomenclature to decorations for monhun veterans sake
Drift smelting is a nice feature, but locking it behind arbitrary armor grade on top of 5km walk is too much busy work that get you nowhere and gate new players from using the system
MH player from PSP era here, only learned about decorations when I picked up World/Rise in the recent months.
I see the Driftsmelting as a long-term process of optimising current equipment and pushing for greater limits for the rest of the game’s life while other monsters, equipment, and skills get introduced later.
I have no qualms with the Driftsmelting as it is as a Melding/Decoration system that’s unique to MHNow. This gives me something to do other than just hunting monsters aimlessly.
However, I feel that driftsmelting 5km at a time is kinda steep, given the randomness of acquiring desired skills from driftsmelting. If there can be more driftsmelting machines to driftsmelt multiple stones/gems at once, that would be a great QOL improvement (I suspect this would come at some cost, like having extra cauldrons for brewing potions in HPWU).
Would extra furnaces be a once-only thing, or a permanent bonus like box storage?
Would significantly impact whether or not I would spend money on that feature.
Ive suggested the deco slots, cause this is more like qurio from rise and while that game had slot of issues for me, I didn’t hate qurio specifically, although I don’t think it belongs in MH games. What irks me and what’s my biggest gripe with smelting is - you need slot to start smelting. And this slot is locked behind quite a wall (in most cases it’s grade 8 armor). It means that you will sit on full stack for a long time when you are out of dragon shards and even longer if you are just starting. I don’t mind when I don’t get the benefits of using a new and shiny system as long as I can interact with it regardless of wherever I can
Let’s put it into perspective. In order to play with smelting you need to:
This is a lot of steps. Meanwhile my suggestions goes like this:
You have good points.
Just for discussion, I see that this driftsmelting system is not really meant for new players. The current implementation appears to be meant for “end-game optimisation”.
The equipment with G8 driftsmelt slots are generally better equipment that already offers a lot of value on its own and would mostly, if not all, require players to hit G6/G8 to unlock all the skills available on them.
Making the slots available any earlier would likely mean that players no longer have to farm for the “better” equipment and this could mean skipping of hunting time-limited monsters in favour of focusing on driftsmelting a skill of their choice.
If this impacts the number of players who are out hunting for a desired monster for the purpose of crafting their equipment (beyond just the weapon), then you may see a drop in player activity going for the time-limited monsters. This would be a negative “consequence” caused by lowering the bar for driftsmelting.
I don’t know much about Rise as I didn’t play it much, but comparing to World, the equipment that has slots begin at Rarity 5 (High Rank armor), and it seems to me that they are following that but as Grades here. But what’s different is that World has α and β sets, in which the former usually has more skills than the latter while the latter would have fewer skills but with slots available, allowing a certain level of customisation beyond what’s granted by the equipment alone.
Since all the equipment here in MHNow has only 1 set (no differentiation between slot-less α and slotted β sets) and all of them would have a slot or two available (and currently without any driftsmelt skill level differentation and slot level differentiation, whic may change in the future), they would then have to balance it by making the slots available later rather than earlier.
I see your point, but between making driftsmelting available earlier vs later (as per current implementation)… I’m not sure if making it available earlier is a better implementation than what we have currently.
If I were a new player and I have access to the slots during pre-season story, I don’t think I’d care much about the event monsters if I don’t need anything specific from them. I can just take Kulu helm and slot Weakness Exploit in and I’d have a more affordable replacement for Coral Pukei and I’d be intentionally missing from the Coral Pukei hunting parties or even 8-star+ parties (lower demand for 8-star+ hunts since only need to focus on weapon and not armor).
That’s exactly why I mentioned that slots should stay as they are. Once you get grade 8 (or 5), slot is open. But the process of melting is unlocked before that. You’ll get, say, 50 random skills sitting in your bag, waiting for you to get 8 . This way you build your way towards something from the word go, but you don’t necessary get the benefit imidiatelly after unlocking smelting but can still smelt. And for simplicity sake let’s say that once skill is slotted, to reslot yourself you need to destroy the old decoration. So it’s essentially the same system but with enough difference to make your early players less frustrated while people who are already on or past 8 can build themselves the way they want
Ah. I get what you mean now.
So, roll for slottable skills (a.k.a. farm decorations) “while still in low-rank” before “unlocking the slots in high rank”, in World terms, is that correct?
Yeah, I think would be a good change. Early stage involves a lot of hunting and travelling to build up the inventory and arsenal. Don’t waste those distances travelled.
Exactly. I’m in no way saying that something designated by design as “end game refinement” should be rather early on. But, and that’s may be due to my profession of choice, I’m not a fan of waste