Runes of Magic: Have The Look and Stats Too!

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You’ve raided and raided, spent months in PvP, farmed and sold drops, poured hour upon monotonous hour into reaching level cap collecting and hunting down the best of the best gear for your class. Whether weeks, months, or even years later, this is what you’ve been working so hard for. The time is near, just one more raid; one more piece of equipment to completion and you will be hailed alongside the others to be crowned one of the best. You will be elite.

The time has come; you have the gear, decked out from massive head to massive toe. It’s time to make your entrance into the hallowed halls. You are tingling with excitement and anticipation of showing off your giant glowing weapons and shiny armor. You’ve even cleaned the crumbs from your desk, loaded up your favorite heart-pumping music and put on a clean pair. As you start strutting around your favorite MMORPG’s gathering spot, you notice something. No one really cares, but more disturbingly, as you prepare to snap that screenshot alongside the others, you realize it doesn’t really make a great screenshot. Why are you not more excited? Deep down the answer slowly surfaces like a kraken out of the cold unfriendly depths of the ocean.

Everyone is a clone of everyone else. As your elation deflates like a balloon, reality starts to set in and you start asking yourself those questions. What fun is looking the same? PvP will just be complicated by mistaking people for each other because they’re all identical. No one can brag about anything to each other. Sure, PvP arenas are still an option to show your skill, if you want to participate. Regardless of whether you fight in PvP battles or not they’ll still all have the same gear and look. So how can you find a way to separate yourself, what if you just don’t like the way the best gear looks? How do you get the look you want, give your character more individuality and bragging rights for your unparalleled sense of fashion?

The answer lies in the Aggregator. A new tool found in Runes of Magic. With this item, you can have the look you want and the item stats as well. Pretty nice feature eh? You can finally keep that awesome mid-level 1-H giant green glowing demon sword without sacrificing power. Simply collect a similar item with stats you do want, in this case a 1-H sword. Take the high level uber-sword and your favorite sword; throw them into the Aggregator and BAM! Out pops what looks like your treasured mid-level 1-H giant green glowing demon sword but with the stats of the more powerful sword.

There are two Aggregators: the Aggregator and the Advanced Aggregator. They both require similar items. You need a same slot piece of equipment. So transferring stats between chest and helmet is a no-no. Additionally the regular version only lets you transfer similar items between same slot and type. You can’t take a cloth item to plate, or vice-versa. That’s where the Advanced Aggregator comes in. You still are restricted to same slot, but now you can take stats from leather to plate, or any other combo. Sets and binding restrictions don’t affect the transfer. If you transfer only one item from a set or all, they will still retain set bonuses.

Both versions of the Aggregator can be obtained in the Item Mall. The regular is 6 diamonds and advanced is a bit more at 15. The Aggregator is a disposable item so once you use it, it’s gone. If you make plans to transfer a set of 7 equipment pieces, be prepared to shell out 35 diamonds for the regular, and 99 for Advanced. This doesn’t sound so bad considering it could be high end gear that you’ll be keeping for a long time or a Twink that you’re finished building. Did you already spend all your hard earned money on donuts and energy drinks? Do you not have any spare income to spend on diamonds? It’s not the end of the world for you. Runes of Magic offers diamond trading in their Auction House. It may take you longer to obtain enough diamonds in-game to buy one but it’s nice to know that you aren’t excluded from getting Aggregators at all.

This feature is even more customizable when you use the character customization which lets you change your avatars appearance and even color your armor and mounts. If that wasn’t enough, you can also choose from blank armor sets in the Item Mall which have pieces that you can mix and match. Now your character can be as individual as you are. You’ll have to start being a little more careful too in deciding whether to attack someone or not. No longer can you memorize equipment’s stats by how it looks.

The Aggregator is a neat feature in Runes of Magic. Having the additional ability to design your characters fashion can add for a lot of additional fun game time (especially Role Players). Is this something that other MMOs will adopt? Given that either subscriber-based or micro-transaction based MMOs could implement this element in different ways, I see it as a plus no matter how you look at it. Runewaker, developers of Runes of Magic, may have stumbled onto a really fun new feature bigger companies may need to look into. I know I’d love to have my Shaman strutting around in a tuxedo with good stats (Hint-hint Blizzard).