Wouldn’t it be better to simply have a flat chance of enchanting items without any concept of potential?
Directly from a little roguelike game I play, here are the concepts of “enchant” and “enchant”. That game uses scrolls for enchanting, but can be bound directly in ToS to regular and golden anvils.
- Flat chance of enchanting, using a basic table. This uses a 0 to 15 range for enchantments, it could be adapted but I think it works well with a cap of +15. Here’s the table that is used:
[0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 28, 40, 55, 70, 80, 90, 95, 97, 99, 100]
Pretty simple: this is the %chance of failure at each stage. All you need is patience and the silver that goes away with each attempt. You’re poor? You can enchant to +10 pretty easily… You’re rich? Enchant all your stuff to +15… You still get an advantage, but without becoming too overpowered.
- Golden anvils get 3 chances at improving instead of 1.
Makes them valuable, since at high level they pretty much cut by 3 times the amount of silver you need to invest. Diamond anvils have to go, golden will replace them.
Now if you really want to keep the potential system (remove 1 potential on each failure), it’s also fine, since you’d still be able to enchant to to decent level before your item runs out of potential. In that case, the golden anvils become even more desirable, since they allow you to further improve your level of enchantment once your item potential is depleted.
In fact, I like the system with potential better, as it allows scaling enchantments with item level. Level 1 items usually have 1 potential, so you only get one failure before having to use golden anvils. Level 350 items have 10+ potential, and I think this should be increased so that everything in between is scaled better (IIRC you have mainly items of level 1/15/40/75/120/170/220/270/315/350, this could translate to 1/3/5/7/9/11/13/15/17/19 potential for example).
But of course this is just a dream…