Hello, first time poster, I read the last batch of PE project updates and IWD II was mentioned quite a bit in them, for whatever reason I'd like to complain about my biggest disappointment in that game. It's pretty minor but the fact that I still remember it after all these years is kind of telling.

 

In one of the extremely early combats the party takes down a Warg and gets a collar, memory tells me it was called the Flea ridden collar, but I can't find the item in the database on GameBanshee.

 

Anyway, the item allowed you to turn your hands into claws for a small amount of damage that was still superior to that of a level 1 monk and 3-4 attacks per round as I recall. From a purely roleplaying perspective, the item was amazing, nothing beats a Wolverine monk that could turn his hands into beastial claws.

 

The problem is, the item was a one-off enchantment, and the damage and number of attacks was quickly surpassed by my monk as he leveled up. I'd blame the game being saddled with the D&D ruleset, and as I recall one of the Obsidian people did mention semi-recently that using pen and paper rulesets for PC games has become more of a hinderance.

 

So anyway, I love the idea of these kinds of flavor items, but they should be used to augment existing stats and not overwrite them completely, which would serve to give them more longevity, I would have loved to have used that collar on my monk all the way through to the endgame.

My personal favorite implementation of crafting has a bit to do with this (allowing you to keep your Wolverine claws throughout the game if you so wished). In my opinion, you should be able to take the graphics, stats, abilities, and any other aspect of one item and apply it to another via crafting, or re-create it as a different item. The purpose of this being to keep the aspects of the items you like or which fit you character even as you level up, scaling its stats (there would of course be a cost for doing this, probably involving the destruction of an item at your current level). In 3D games this also works well for customizing appearances (with no effect on gameplay), but shouldn't matter much for this sort of game I would think (possibly color dyes?).