Surely this is not as big of a problem considering that ranged only has one type of craftable armor per tier and 3 types of weapons per tier? (bows, crossbows, thrown items). One could say you actually knocked out the most complicated one to rework of the combat triangle.
Melee had too many types of redundant equipment gumming up each tier which made it nasty to work with. Also I am of the opinion that you could’ve just reduced this mess by getting rid of redundant weapons with the update and making each tier only have a few weapons instead of carrying over everything. For example each low tier melee did not need to have a sword, long sword, scimitar, battle axe, 2h, claws, spears, halberds, mace, etc etc etc. It would’ve been smart to use that M&S rework as an opportunity to shave off most of them and follow it up with some statement to appease the community. Would’ve given you much less redundancies to worry about. (And yes, some weapon types are woven into quests and those could’ve been narrowed down too).
The lesson from the M&S should have been to use that as precedent to make it more efficient to work on the range and mage variant, rather than to just say f**k it and leave it 1/3 done.
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