Greetings, adventurers! Welcome to the first post in our brand-new Dev Diary series where we’ll be highlighting various key aspects of the game to help you gain extra insight into what to expect from Mandragora.
Gear Progression
Your character power in Mandragora comes from three different systems: unlocking Talents in the Talent Tree, learning and upgrading Active Skills, and last (but certainly not least!) from Equipping Gear.
Items are a huge part of the game—you can find, earn, or craft over 350 items and 110 consumables and enchants during your adventures. With all that in mind, it’s time to talk about Gear Progression in Mandragora!
How Does Gear Work In Mandragora?
There are multiple Character Item slots where you can equip Gear:
- Main and Offhand slot for Weapons, Shields, or Relics (two Weapon sets)
- Body, Head, Hands, Leggings, and Back slots for Armor Pieces
- Four Ring slots
- One Flask + nine Consumable Slots
There are various Weapon and Armor Types available for you to equip:
- Main Hand: 1H Mace, 1H Sword
- Both Hands: Dual-wield Daggers, Greathammer, Greatsword
- Offhand: Light and Tower Shield, Fire, Astral, Chaos, and Wyld Relics
- Armor Types: Cloth Leather, Mail, Plate
Each class has a default starting Weapon setup - but all classes can learn to use any of the Weapon types, so you can wield what works best for your playstyle.
Now, let’s look at the stats on a Weapon:
- To equip a certain item, you need to have enough Equip Load. The Weight of all equipped items are added together to calculate this value.
- Speed indicates the attack speed of a Weapon in Hit/Seconds.
- Stagger is the amount reduced from an enemy’s Poise with 1 hit. When it reaches 0, the enemy is Staggered. Maces are usually slower than swords - but they also have higher stagger values.
- Stamina Cost is a multiplier of the base stamina cost of an attack. In general, heavier Weapons use more stamina.
- Damage indicates the different damage value and types of a Weapon. In this case, the Flanged Mace deals 50 Physical and 50 Fire base damage. In brackets, you can see the total damage of the Weapon which is Scaled by the stats indicated in the last line: Strength and Power.
Here’s a look at an Armor piece:
This is a Plate Chest Armor. Just like Weapons, it also has a Weight stat.
It also has a Poise attribute which increases your total Poise, making you more resistant to enemy stagger attacks.
Each Armor piece has an Armor value as well, which reduces incoming Physical Damage.
The rest are Attribute bonuses: Constitution increases Health, Defense increases Physical and Magical resistances, and Vigor increases Equip Load.
All of these attributes have secondary effects as well, which you can check in the Glossary:
How Do I Get Powerful Gear?
There are three ways to acquire new and better gear in Mandragora:
- Crafting
- Killing enemies
- Exploring and completing quests
Crafting requires a lot of materials, but this is the most reliable way to get a certain Weapon or Armor piece. Crafting and teaching new diagrams to vendors increases their level - and the higher their level, the better gear they can craft.
You will also find items dropped by certain enemies. Some enemies can drop their full armor sets and Weapons.
So, if you really want to look like a Hollowplate Sentinel, you can defeat them and take their Armor:
Exploring the world, opening chests and completing quests will also provide you valuable items, so make sure you bring some lockpicks with you!
How Do I Decide What To Equip?
As you progress and acquire new items, you can compare them to your currently equipped ones:
You can see the new item on the left, and the currently equipped item on the right.
Green numbers indicate that the new stat is better than the current one. A plus (+) sign before the number indicates that the currently equipped item doesn’t have that stat.
Always look for stats that support your character build, and item types that match your playstyle. If you have a Weapon which scales with Dexterity and Spirit, then it’s better to keep an item with Dexterity attribute, than to replace it with a Strength one.
It’s always a good idea to keep items with special (Non-Attribute) bonuses (like Armor Penetration or Move Speed) on them, which you might want to use later or in certain Boss fights.
Keeping all that in mind, let’s compare two late-game 1H Maces:
As you can see, Emerald Dream has better base stats (45+170 damage), but for our build it is overall weaker than Pandemonium (240 total damage vs 306 total damage).
However, if we use a different build, it might actually be the better choice, regardless of its slower speed and higher stamina consumption.
When you switch to a new Weapon, always hang on to your old one for a little while - just to make sure you definitely prefer your new Weapon.
Can I Make My Gear Even More Powerful?
If you acquire a new enchantable item - a Helm, a Chest Armor, or a Weapon - it is always a good idea to apply an enchant on it provided you have the materials.
Enchanting makes items even better and can mean the difference between victory and defeat!
You can enchant items at the Occultist. The higher his level is, the better the enchant he can craft for you.
Let’s take a look at an early-game Chest Armor enchant:
As you can see, the increase is quite significant, as it provides a +4 level up worth of attributes.
Now, let’s look at a late-game Weapon enchant:
Applying this Astral Runestone to the right Weapon makes it way more powerful. It also has negative effects on many Weapons, but as you can see, the Starburnt Scepter has no Dexterity and Strength Scaling: so only the positive effects apply.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with enchantments to find the one that works best for your character!
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We hope you enjoyed this in-depth look at a very key aspect of our game.
Items are hugely important in Mandragora, and we hope a lot of you are excited to be able to find, craft, equip, and enchant all this epic loot.
As we get ever closer to release, we’re looking forward to sharing even more details with you, so please stay tuned, and let us know your thoughts in the comments or over on our Discord!
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