I have mixed feelings about this suggestion.

On the one hand, it’s a thoughtfully designed mechanic. It’s neat, it sounds feasible, and it would give additional benefits to leveling for agility and grit.

On the other hand, you’re talking about “balancing” the weapons in the hands of our thralls, and I have to wonder whether that’s a problem that needs solving at all.

Leveling a good thrall is already getting grindy. Sure, they sped up the wheels, but it still takes a lot of time to get a thrall to level 20, and you still need to capture and place several “copies” of the same thrall to get a decent distribution of growth chances.

Growth-chance-hunting is bad enough without having to agonize over grit growth chance because you don’t want low stamina rating to make your thrall even more of an idiot than it is right now. Maybe if they reworked the thrall diet so we weren’t limited to picking between +14% to one attribute and +7% to two attributes.

That stance is strictly Funcom’s fault and no one else’s. Many of us were willing to tolerate even the most egregious quality problems because we felt that the new features and new content were good enough overall. Sure, there are always bugs and imbalances and other kinds of WTFs, but it tended to work out over time.

The first chapter of Age of War has pulled the rug out from under that notion. We got a new mechanic that currently has no use whatsoever, we got a few crumbs of free content designed to drive the sales of monetized content, and a few half-assed revamps that nobody asked for and that made the game genuinely worse.

And the release of that ignominious update was accompanied by huge technical problems.

Should Funcom cease all work on the game? If they can’t get their act together, then yeah, they should. But even if they can get it together, they should first focus on putting out the dumpster fire they lit up before implementing a mechanic like this one.

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