There is one rule the rest of Timefather's combat is built on, and it is easier to state than to live with:
Gear never grants raw damage, healing, cooldown reduction, cast speed, attack speed, or crowd-control duration.
Not on any piece. Not from any affix. Not from a set bonus, because there are no set bonuses.
This is not a balance pass we might reverse when a season looks flat. Everything else in the combat design assumes it, and the moment it stops being true, most of what follows stops working.
Why
Three reasons, in order of how much they mattered when we argued about it.
The first is that the alternative eats every other system. If a chestpiece can carry +12% damage, then the chestpiece is the build. Class investment, elemental composition, sigils — all of it becomes a rounding error next to the drop you did or did not get. We would have spent years building a spell-crafting game that players correctly ignore in favour of a loot table.
The second is the bricked character. The failure state we designed hardest against is the build you cannot undo: one wrong click, one missed drop, one respec you cannot afford, and the character you have played for eighty hours is quietly worse than everyone else's forever. Gear that only ever adds sustain cannot brick anything.
The third is that it makes the numbers legible. When damage comes from a short list of places — your level, your story progress, your class points, your elements — a player can actually reason about why they hit for what they hit for. That matters more in a game where a single spell has fourteen compositions.
So what does gear do
It keeps you casting and it keeps you alive.
Deeper resource pools. Better regeneration. Resistances. Penetration. Energy, Power and Force — the sanctioned amplifiers, which raise the ceiling on what your own abilities do rather than adding a flat number on top of them.
And crit. Crit is where the felt progression lives, and it is weighted deliberately so that early investment is noticeable. You slot a fresh gem, you walk into the same pack you cleared yesterday, and a yellow number lands where a white one used to.
Nothing about your spell changed. You changed. That is the entire loot fantasy, and it does not require us to write +X% damage on anything.
The parts that are actually fun to loot
Weapons are gems. The weapon is a gem, torn from what you killed, and it manifests as whatever the spell needs — a sword swing, a bow shot, a healing gesture — with no draw-and-sheathe fumbling in between. This is what lets a character built across two classes flow between two kits without ever holding the wrong thing. A Paladin's shield does not blink out of existence because they cast something borrowed.
Armour is worn and visible. Five pieces, three of jewellery, and the weight class is a free choice regardless of class. Heavy plate reads as a tank. Cloth reads as a glass cannon. A Warrior in robes is a build, not a mistake.
Fragments drop in your flavour. The grind currency is weighted to how your character is actually built, so a caster's bags fill with what a caster needs. You fuse fragments into gems, slot them into any piece, and you never lose a gem or a fragment converting or breaking them down. You only pay coin.
Transmog, because the chestpiece from a fight you remember should be allowed to outlive its stat block.
What this costs us
Honesty about the trade: this is a harder game to make numbers go up in.
The dopamine of a big damage affix is real and we have given it away. What we get back is a game where two players with identical gear can play completely differently, where nobody is locked out of a role by their drops, and where the answer to "how do I get stronger" is always something you can go and do rather than something you have to wait to receive.
We think that is the better trade. Ask us again after the first real playtest.