Pantheon designer explains itemization overhaul starting next patch

Visionary Realms set out a revised approach to gear in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen in a May 19 dev blog, written by a QA designer credited as Codeman, who said he has taken on responsibility for managing and refining itemization across the game. The changes begin arriving with the next patch and will continue as an ongoing process, with older items addressed in later updates.

The stated frame for the work is the eventual 1.0 release rather than the current build. The studio said it does not want to hand out items in ways that solve present-day complaints but pull against where the game is going, on the grounds that continued development will resolve some of those complaints on its own. Feedback was invited, provided it accounts for that longer horizon.

Distribution and stat consolidation

Codeman addressed a common complaint directly: that the pool of items available to a given class or archetype within a level band feels thin. That is deliberate, he said. Beyond raw character power, items are meant to move players around the world and give it a sense of activity, and the studio expects the picture to improve as more content lands in overlapping level ranges.

A second problem is arithmetic. Pantheon characters have a large number of gear slots, and the team kept individual stat values low at launch to avoid runaway inflation as content is added. Rather than thinning stats across every slot or letting the totals balloon, most stat bonuses will now be concentrated on armor. Accessory slots, a group that the post said includes waist and back for this purpose, will instead carry ratings, resists and other non-stat bonuses, some of which have not appeared in the game yet.

Wider stat spread and reworked resists

With class abilities being changed to draw on a broader range of stats, the studio said gear needs to offer a correspondingly wider variety of bonuses. The overall number of stats appearing on items will rise while being spread more thinly across them. Codeman presented that as a route to horizontal progression, with players assembling alternative gear sets that lean into different stats and, by extension, different abilities and playstyles for the same class.

Resists get a similar treatment. Making them more widely available is intended to let the team build content that leans on them, and the planned system pairs each bonus with a penalty. The example given was a lower-level or lower-quality item granting some fire resistance while carrying a steeper nature resistance penalty; a better item might add only slightly more fire resistance but reduce the penalty, shift it to a different resistance, or in the best cases drop it entirely.

The effect is that an upgrade does not have to mean a larger resistance number. Under the studio's model, an item can be an improvement because its drawback is smaller or because the drawback is one the player minds less. Codeman described adhering to these rules as part of moving the team toward a single unified vision for the game.