Okay, here are my ideas, organized in three tiers.
Incremental Improvements
These should, hopefully, be doable without upsetting the game too much:
- Followers immune to lava and fall damage. Since AI and path-finding will never be bug free – no program beyond “Hello, World” is – it would be nice if we didn’t risk losing all the effort sunk into a follower just because of a glitch.
- Secondary follower bonuses for strength and accuracy. Right now, strength only gives melee damage bonus and accuracy only gives ranged damage bonus. This ends up making certain follower perks truly unfortunate. If these attributes had secondary bonuses, such as the ones I proposed elsewhere, this would turn these perks into a source of interesting decisions and give new depth to follower leveling.
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Purge balancing and fixes. Right now, a newbie clan with a sandstone base on the newbie river can get wiped out by a Sobek Purge without even knowing what’s what. Meanwhile, if you build inside the volcano, you might get a pretty tame Beast Tamer purge, made even easier by the fact that half the waves spawn (and die) inside lava. While we’re talking about Purge fixes, the new Purge types seem more like a proof of concept than a finished feature. I like where they’re going, but if we could take the mechanics difficulty progression between waves from the old Purges and apply it to the new “zergling swarm” Purges, that would be great
- Armor stands. Being able to put our armors on display would be very welcome.
- Saddle racks. Same as weapon racks, shield racks and armor stands, but for saddles.
- Auto-run for mounts. Make the auto-run not disengage when steering the horse, opening inventory, looking at the map, or typing in chat.
- Dyeing saddles. Self-explanatory.
- Opening gates while mounted. Self-explanatory.
- NPC title bars visible while mounted. Right now, being able to see what NPC is standing right in front of your horse is kinda like winning the lottery. Okay, a bit more likely than winning the lottery, but not by a very long shot.
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De-lobotomize the AI. Right now, it’s a coin toss whether your follower will do its work or go into Microsoft Clippy mode: “Hey, it looks like you’re fighting an enemy! Let me get between the two of you and just stand there!” “Hey, it looks like you killed a foe! I’m going to keep hacking at where it was, just in case it’s not completely dead!” “Hey, it looks like you’re swarmed by 5 enemies! I’m going to keep backing away step by step, because it looks cool!” Okay, that last one is more like Claptrap from Borderlands than Clippy. And then there are times when you bring a pet and it flings you off a cliff or humps your back affectionately. Can we, uh, do something about this stuff?
- Elevator thralls. Allow players to put thralls on elevators to make them go faster. The higher the tier, the faster the elevator goes.
Ambitious Additions
These are the things I hope we might see, even though they might require more work and have deeper ramifications inside the game:
- Decorative thralls and pets. Allow players to place thralls and pets that perform idle animations just like followers, but have no AI and cannot participate in combat. On servers without building damage, they’re invulnerable. On servers with building damage, they can be damaged just like any other placeable. They don’t defend themselves, they don’t react, they’re just decorations.
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Purge attractors. Allow players to perform some kind of activity that makes their Purge meter fill faster. It’s okay to have the Purge meter fill slowly enough to avoid wiping out newbies who haven’t learned about it yet and to avoid solo players having to worry about frequent Purges. But when you’re the only active player in your clan and you want the challenge of the Purge, you have to make it your second job for a few days. Would be nice if you didn’t
- Cosmetic armor slots. Add a second set of armor slots on the character paper doll. If filled, other players see you wearing armor in those slots, instead of your real armor, if they have their settings configured to see cosmetics. Give players three options in their settings: 1) always see cosmetics, 2) always see real armor, or 3) let it be controlled by the server. PVP and PVE-C servers would have it “always real” by default.
- Dragging thralls while mounted. If I recall correctly, I think Alex said the team hasn’t been able to find a way to do this yet, but it sounds like there’s hope they might achieve it.
- Follower sidekicks, not follower heroes. Make followers deal reduced damage only while following. I don’t like being a sidekick to my own thralls. Of course, this would mean bosses would have to be rebalanced accordingly.
Wild Wishes
Okay, these are the ones I dream of seeing someday, but I’m almost certain they won’t happen (some of these are mutually exclusive):
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Clan splits. Allow players to split the clan or leave the clan without losing ownership of their buildings and placeables. Yeah, no idea how to do that, but I believe in the dev team
- PVE-C claim totems. A placeable that changes the way buildings are protected from damage on PVE-C servers. The full proposal has been submitted in a separate thread.
- PVE-C clan wars. A mechanism that allows one PVE-C clan (or unaffiliated player) to declare war on another, which would involve building damage. The full proposal has been submitted in a separate thread.
- Artifacts. Everyone makes mistakes, even game designers. When a legendary item is introduced, it might severely unbalance the game. At this point, the usual solution is a straight-up nerf. As an alternative, the severely unbalanced weapon design could be reclassified as an “artifact”. An artifact cannot be repaired, has a decay timer instead of durability (and it keeps ticking even if it’s not being used) and the server can spawn a limited number of them. At the moment of nerfing, all the existing instances of the old item are converted into artifacts. If their number exceeds the artifact cap, their decay timer might be shortened. Additionally, players can see that a clan has an artifact by checking the player list – clans with artifacts would have a skull (or some other visual indicator) beside their name.
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Legendary kits from world forges. Remove all legendary kit drops, both for weapons and armor. Instead, make them craftable only at Volcanic Forge (for armor) and the Forge of Ymir (for weapons). Give the world forges new purpose and watch the delicious conflict ensue
- Removal of legendary drops. Alternately, just get rid of legendary drops whatsoever. Make players gather resources – by farming dungeons – to craft legendary items.
DLC Desires
These are the things that are normally sold as DLCs, instead of being added for free to the core game:
- More vaulted ceilings, arches and domes. Blood and Sands introduced something I’ve wanted since I started playing: vaulted ceilings, arched gates and doors, proper windows. Problem is, those don’t blend in with anything but other arena pieces and, if used carefully, Turanian pieces. Meanwhile, Aquilonian architecture is still stuck with flat surfaces everywhere. The closest we can get to an arch is a roof-ceiling-roof approximation, which looked just fine until we got real curves in Blood and Sands.
- Triangles, triangles everywhere. Speaking of vaulted ceilings, you know what’s missing in Blood and Sands? Wedge vaulted ceilings. And all architectures are missing wedge-shaped stairs and wedge-shaped awnings.
- Ramped fences. Can’t place fences on stairs or ramps. It’s not only that you can fall to your death, it can also end up looking really ugly.
- Religious decorations. You know how the Riddle of Steel introduced Setite Cult statues? Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a whole bunch of decorations for all religions?
EDIT 1: Added some AI-related stuff to the “incremental improvements” section.
EDIT 2: Added cosmetic armor to the “ambitious additions” section.
EDIT 3: Added a new section, called “DLC desires”. Also added elevator thralls to the “incremenental improvements” section.