@bigsocrates: Pretty regularly is fair but I just feel like I see a lot of people like I can’t believe they make you break several weapons a fight and you just… don’t.

Now when I’m trying to mine all my hatred of the system comes back.

forgive me if this is obvious, but there's a calculation taking place between your weapon's 'rating' and your opponent's armor/difficulty that determines durability, right?

the reason i know this is i kinda sorta inadvertently wandered into a room full of lynells, and went from pretty kitted out to walking away with a stick and some apples.

the fight was clearly above my paygrade (it feels like an end game-ish encounter and i'm likely only midway), but it didn't feel great to have shields become effectively single-use products. there is a weird tension between 'do whatever you want' gameplay but then have combat encounters that seemingly rely on gear over execution.

@mellotronrules: I would assume that shield durability takes into account how much damage is incoming and being blocked but I'm not sure about weapons. I think it's the case that weapons take more durability damage if enemies block the attack but maybe there's some manner of behind the scenes 'armor' stat to certain higher level foes.

I do know that on my new file I immediately went up to the castle soon as I could glide and those guys are like the 3rd or 4th tier of enemy and all my starter weapons didn't break any faster against them... although it took several of them since they're huge sacks of HP when using said weapons.

@efesell: I mean - even in this discussion, there’s people saying it’s something they can do without in the game. Literally no one is saying why it is in the game. And again - if it is so great, why haven’t I seen it show up in more games since? Because no person actually enjoys it. It’s just something you need to deal with. Another chore. Not something fun.

@sravankb: I mean there have been multiple explanations why it’s in the game and what it brings to it mechanically.

But like… both things can be true here. I am telling you directly that I do enjoy the system as it is with the Fuse power but also I wouldn’t fight anybody if they said hey we aren’t doing it anymore.

That review is... weird. I mean I get it, a lot of people complain about weapon durability. But it's not some giant "fuck you" to the player. There are almost always other decent weapons lying around. Yeah, it's kinda annoying, but the tone of that review makes it sound like it's some kind of torture. It just makes me think that that writer just wasn't in the right headspace for this kind of game. I get it, you don't enjoy those aspects, but it's not that bad is it? Personally that hardly bothers me at all. That said, since it bothers a lot of people, it's kinda a shame that Nintendo didn't address it better. If it were on PC, there would be a day-one mod to remove weapon durability, and then a lot of people would be able to enjoy it who otherwise wouldn't. It's an interesting point that Nintendo really takes the stick-instead-of-carrot approach to getting you to try out new weapons. I guess the "carrot" approach would be to have infinite durability but give a damage bonus to new weapons that wears off after a while.

My opinion on this game went up a notch as I discovered a certain quest. I went from exploring the stables and following up on a vague hint to a crazy rabbit hole of cool adventures and ended up with a ridiculous and unexpected reward. It felt amazing to discover this all on my own without someone constantly badgering me to look for it. I really like that this game usually only gives text description of things you have to do instead of marking it on your map so you can follow it blindly.

It seems like there is. I've had situations where a middling quality spear will last me 20 minutes of fighting dozens of those weak frog thingies in the depths but then I will blow through two good non-decayed swords fighting a stronger enemy like a silver bokoblin.

The only times I've ever actually ran out of weapons fighting has been (spoilers for late game enemies) fighting the grand/great/super duper/whatever it's called tri-elemental gleeok that can hit you for like 15-20 hearts even with good armour and elixirs (I still haven't beat that thing. It's rough. Way harder than anything else I've fought so far), and during the lynel colosseum challenge in the Depths where they just feed you a series of increasingly strong lynels. By the last lynel I was running out of weapons and anti-gloom food completely. As it turns out, an enemy that's tough to dodge and can do a bunch of gloom damage is challenging.

@ben_h: ha, that last encounter you mention in your spoiler tags is exactly what i stumbled into. granted i had a feeling i had bit off more than i could chew, but dark souls hubris took over and it went on for SO MUCH LONGER than i anticipated.

not ashamed to admit i might have done some battle cooking (thank god for for rocket shields, the upper level and portable cooking stations).

like most difficult encounters in this game- i walked away feeling good about my performance, but the rewards are frequently slightly deflating.

I did address this idea. Just to reiterate, I understand that the design goal is to get players to be resourceful and creative and experimental. I think their implementation when it comes to weapon degradation is awful. Again, the rest of the game makes up for this, and Fuse does something to negate it. @efesell made the point earlier that when a weapon breaks you can usually just smash two things together and get something whose DPS is in the same ballpark.

That doesn't alleviate it anywhere near enough. I've been trying my best to just use what I want to, but I still feel a pang of disappointment every time something I liked using breaks. Just as I was starting to have fun with this diamond-encrusted sword I made thirty minutes ago, I get the dreaded "about to break" message. At this point I usually just throw it because I'll get some extra damage that way (I think, anyway). Can I make another one? Sure! It's easy! Do I want to have to stop every few fights and spend another diamond and another whatever making another one? No! Do I want to go farming for materials for the weapons I like to use once an hour, or every few hours, or whatever? Jesus Christ! No! This game is already massive as-is, I do not want to add padding to support a mechanic I hate in the first place.

Why can't there be some kind of item out there that makes a weapon repairable? I'm not asking for all weapons to be repairable - if you attach a tree branch to a rock I expect it to break. But I was fighting a sludge monster a few nights ago and I was thinking "boy, I sure hope the weapon that makes this fight far less clunky doesn't break on me" and then it broke and I had to go through all the clunky mess of making a new one mid-fight and I was just like "fuck me, this is garbage and I hate it".

I proposed a novel solution to the weapon degradation system, I’ll say it again: how about a baseline set of unbreakable weapons that are weak but you’ll always have them, so like a base sword, shield and bow, not disable and at a low rating, like 2 or 3. That way you always have something, but you are still incentivized to get and fuse better stuff.

In the end, rolling right out of replaying BOTW, I am used to the degrading enough that is just accept it. Nothing is perfect and I can still enjoy a game with a flaw/trait I otherwise don’t like. But I get it being enough to drive people away, and that’s totally fair, it can be extremely annoying.

@tartyron: Those weapons would be functionally useless especially later in the game, and the game sort of has that anyway in the way it sprays weapons at you. I mean you can't smash through a barrier of breakable rocks without a few polearms falling out.

You would have to be a remarkably careless gamer to end up in a situation where you had NO weapons available. I think what most people don't like is that you fairly frequently end up breaking your better weapon and ending up having to use a worse one and it feels like going backwards.

@bigsocrates: Um, I was that remarkably careless gamer at an early shrine when my last bow broke and the fans lifting an elevator were too far up for ultrahand to recover and without a bow I couldn't turn them off. As I conceded in that post, I could have waited for the battery to run out, but I quit for the night, which didn't feel good. A base bow would have been nice, but again, I've gotten used to it all after 2 botw playthroughs and totk so far.

@tartyron: Yes that can happen at the very very beginning of the game, but that could have been solved by including another bow in the shrine. You also could have just left the shrine and grabbed another bow from outside. Or loaded up your prior autosave and gone through the shrine in like a minute now that you knew what to do.

That's not really the situation that people are talking about with weapon degradation (again it happened once very early in the game.)

The main issue people are talking about is having weapons break late in the game when you have rare materials, and at that point you have a large enough pouch and enough stuff around that it's not an issue of not having anything to use.

As a side note...would waiting for the battery to go out actually work? I thought shrines didn't have the battery meter and you could just use devices indefinitely? Maybe that's only devices that are on by default? Not sure.

@bigsocrates: I'm not sure about the battery thing. I was angry and quit for the night, and then came back with several bows that I ended up not needing because I didn't jump off the elevator that time. I guess I haven't seen the battery icons in shrines, though.