No major changes yet to the game model, I'm afraid. But I have gotten a few more levels, and bought the bigger armor... and can say a lot of my balance dissatisfaction has been with the advertised "flatter" power curve. As soon as I accepted that this is a total lie, I started figuring out how the system actually works.

Basically, as far as your ability to take damage goes, there's not a lot there. You have hp, determined by your stats, but since everything goes through armor first, and you have a few times the armor that you have health... it's not terribly important. Your armor points are based on your equipped armor. Simple enough. There are 2 restrictions on armor. 1) Your level must meet minimum requirements. 2) You must have 1 point placed in the relevant armor skill, mostly separated by class. Thus... it is your equipment that does the fighting, your character is just along for the XP to unlock the better gear. Well, mostly.

Levelling up and buying new gear is actually quite cost-effective, in terms of the upgraded damage and endurance, although gear acquired this way does lack any enchantment bonuses.

Now, to recap, it feels like the balance point is "I can kill something [my level +4] or less." That's a grotesque oversimplification, but, barring complications with boss mobs, it'll do.

This means the game is playable, with some detours to perform about every sidequest, so you can get the xp and level, to wear the gear that can fight the menace.

I hit level 10, which brought on this particular need to update. This grants permission to use the lowest set of modification recipes. It's not entirely clear from the tooltips how this works, and the tutorial is presently placeholder text. But I've listened a lot on the general and global chatter. At first glance, it looks like a robust system, you get a modification recipe, it says what type of item and what the upper level bound it works at is... which, unfortunately, is also the level you can use it at, and it looks like they are in 5 lv groupings. This is silly, of course, and likely to be changed within the first year. It does state clearly that you can modify equipment ONCE. That's fine. The cost to beef them is more than purchasing a vanilla model at the shops anyway.

Except that you cannot *add* a bonus with this system.

It only modifies existing bonuses.

Granted, the improvement you get out of this is really quite nice. Took an armor regen bonus from +8% to twenty-something. That's one of the more useful bonuses you can get in this system. But this means that after 10 levels of collecting recipes, I could only use about 10% of them. I couldn't add functionality to any of my gear. I could only take 1 of up to 4 existing benefits and improve that... if it was the right type of gear. But it's such a nerf of what could be a fun system to work with, with the entirely sane "one-modification per item" limit.