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So one of the things I was most excited for in enhanced was the scaling equipment system; with Starfinder only providing a 10% return for sold, used equipment (and no way to meaningfully break it down into more than that in usable crafting materials) I've always found upgrading to specific designed goals a little excessively difficult. The designers seem to have appreciated this in their explanation of the system in the Enhanced book noting that looting new weapons and armor along the way "is less optimal for players who crave continuity—either because they have class abilities that rely on using certain weapon types (like many soldier gear boosts) or because using a specific weapon over the course of their character's career has narrative value."
Imagine my surprise them to realize that the list of allowable customizations is <u>very</u> limited. Certain builds that require specific categories of weapons or armor are well supported—but others are entirely omitted, either inadvertently or intentionally. What was the point of acknowledging that there are big gaps between when you can get certain types of weapons... and then not allowing for those to be filled in except in a few, specific cases?
Some were presumably omitted due to their power—reach, grapple, throttle, double, entangle, flexible line, wide line, guided, ignite, modal, polarize, tail, thought, thruster)
Others are crowd control or debuff related (aurora, echo, gravitation, harrying, reposition, sunder)
Some I cannot imagine why you're not allowed to spend a valuable BP on this property if you want to (breach, breakdown, conceal, deflect, drain, feint, force, integrated, recall)
There are a dozen critical hit effects that simply aren't available for purchase either. What happened to providing specific gear for builds that depended on it? If you need an injector weapon for your biohacker or a trip or disarm weapon, great, but I hope you haven't picked any other combat maneuver to specialize in. Surely, nobody at Paizo thought "you know what's too strong and characters definitely shouldn't be able to specialize in? Sunder."
I haven't been able to find anything out there discussing this as being intentional or why it was done, but I was curious if other people had. I understand maybe not including things from adventure paths, but a lot of these are from main books - including the core rulebook itself. Are the designers just softly walking back items and systems they've created that they would undo if they could? If this was a power creep issue, it doesn't make any sense, as the custom weapons tend to have substantially higher damage potential than pre-designed weapons. Was this a simple lack of scope? If these properties were intentionally omitted, that deserved at least a mention; realistically, perhaps they should have been available at substantially higher BP cost (2, 3, 4 BP?) or with damage die limitations (like operative, explosive/blast, and energy properties got) so as to adjust the balance accordingly. Enhanced created a scaling gear system for custom gear... that is barely customizable compared to the vast universe of Starfinder gear out there. The <u>entire category</u> of powered armor was omitted from the system, as were shields, as were I'm sure a ton of other categories of things I haven't caught because I've only played a few classes (are Solarians entirely left out in the cold as well?)
Am I crazy? Or is this system just... half finished, at best?
I think it's working as intended, you have some limited ability to customize without making things better than existing options, just tweaked (but really, being able to make a cold weapon that does the same damage as a fire/sonic weapon is great, baseline weapons always punished them). Page limits prevented anything comprehensive, and the plethora of baggage out there made it dangerous to get too complex.
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I think there are going to be some cases where you can make much better weapons at first level. For only 10 credits more you can make the equivalent of a tactical doshko with 2 perks.
I was kind of hoping for more even damage level scaling, but for a tactical doshko you still have to wait until level 7 to go from 1d12 to 2d10(would be 2d12 if not scaling) It also cost 2135 more credits to scale than just buy an advanced doshko. That's a lot of credit if you just want to scale damage that doesn't scale between those levels. On the other hand for that cost, you would have 6 BPs to add to it which would give you all 5 perks that can be used on a doshko, which is worth the cost. but after the 9th level when you get your last BP all you can scale is damage.
Interestingly you get your weapon's BPs at lower levels, and at higher levels for armor.
I hope we get scaling weapons in SF2e but this feels more like a playtest and not a finished rule set. but I'm happy to playtest them.
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Optional rules are almost always 'half baked*' in my experience...
This is not even a little bit the point of the question, but you're absolutely right—half baked was the term I was looking for
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In my example above you can get all of the perks in one melee weapon that are allowed for melee weapons, some perks have multiple effects to choose from but it is limited in what you can do if you fully perk out. It's the perks that justify the extra cost of scaling equipment, but if the only perks left on the list are not something you want to add to your weapon the cost of scaling to maintain a weapon damage per level doesn't seem with it. I haven't tried building armor yet but seeing that you first get 1 BP at the 8th level and another 1 BP every 5 levels not sure what the benefit to low-level armor would be. It kind of looks like it's best to spend the extra cost of scaling weapons early on and then switch to scaling armor later in the game because trying to scale both at the same time would get really expensive.
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iirc, somewhere in those rules it mentions some rules that only apply to thrown weapons but lacks any means to make thrown weapon. So part of me wonders if the section was shortened and had wordcount cut.
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Unfortunately, the book doesn't say anything about scaling equipment you already have but could be used as a guideline for doing so.
The cost of the upgrade and the damage increase would be easy to find using the current charts. The number of build points would take a bit of work. First, you would have to reverse engineer how many build points the item had used already to see how many are left.
The other issue with build points is there not evenly distributed at every level so you would have to decide their progression from the level you're starting, or at higher levels just use them all at once.
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Unfortunately, the book doesn't say anything about scaling equipment you already have but could be used as a guideline for doing so.
This one, single thing would have filled in all the gaps. Not the easiest thing to do, but an actual scaling system for existing equipment—not just a separate category of scalable equipment—would have made the system tremendously more robust.