Melena stood on the streets of an Earth city as she began recording. Sounds of combat could be heard, though she had one single microphone, so a direction to this combat could not be determined. "Today I will be talking about equipment and enchantments, since it came up so much in my last video's comments. I am here on your world, near a monster node that is actively used to gain levels, to have live examples of what I am going to say.

"There are 3 main types of equipment: Skill-created, crafted, and condensed. I talked about my thoughts on condensed equipment at length in a comment on my video on condensing," she said as she showed an image of the comment on screen. "Any equipment given through a reward, Achievement, or Quest is part of the created category. Skill-created equipment is arguably the most useful category, as replacing it is as simple as activating the Skill again. However, the category with the highest number of uses is crafted equipment.

"This is because, while Skill-created equipment may have special effects such as having very high damage reduction or any effect the Skill creator can think of, it it limited to a single effect. Crafted equipment can have any similar, if weaker, effects, and be further enchanted after their initial creation. Now this-" She stopped and looked at the air in front of her.

"Well, it seems I will have an even better way to show off the differences between the various categories of equipment than I had hoped. In case you do not know, I was recording this video during what will have been the previous invasion by the time this video comes out. I no longer know what footage I will use, so I will just show the clips after a describing the differences."

Melena's voice continued as the scene changed to show a large group of people taking on a hoard of level 30, insectoid enemies, the humans all clad in golden armor and wielding similarly golden weapons. "While condensed weapons and armor have the benefit of being indestructible," she said as one of the group was grabbed by the pincers of one of the monsters.

Without even moving, the pincers grabbing them were snapped off, with what little stumps remaining showing the monster had attempted to crush the human. Melena continued, "they deal little damage and have no extra effects beyond indestructibility. If someone with a crafted weapon were to kill a monster in 5 attacks, it would take someone with an identical condensed weapon 7 or 8."

The group was slowly getting overrun as they were able to kill one enemy every second and a half, but it was nowhere near fast enough. Even with whatever Skills they had, the group was taking too long to kill the insectoids. Not long after the group disappeared under the monsters entirely, a group with blue equipment and armor showed up and started hacking away at enemies, each individual killing a monster in under half a second.

"Skill-created equipment, the most basic of which being Mana Armor and Mana Weapon, are significantly more useful. They deal more damage, and more advanced Skills can even grant effects when attacks hit or are landed on the Skill user. Even simple Mana Armor and Mana Weapon have the advantage of actually dealing bonus damage and having higher damage reduction than can be obtained by crafted weapons."

The hoard of enemies were slowly beaten back and off the group of condensed equipment users by the Mana equipment users. One of the group had his hand cut off due to bad armor design, and it was slowly regrowing. The scene changed to a different group, using different equipment entirely. "Most Skill-created equipment can even act as proper active Skills in their own right." From above the group, a house-sized spider descended. The blade of one of the group's members extended as they slashed at a leg, taking it off.

Green liquid poured from the wound, flowing onto the ground below. The group jumped away from where it landed, but it splashed onto the group. The armor of one of them glowed and the monster began steaming in the same locations that that member got splashed on. One of the members pointed at the rest of the group with a staff and the acidic blood disappeared from their allies.

"Their primary weakness is that they can be dispersed. This can either be an inconvenient extra source of resource costs or outright remove them from the fight if they take time to create." The spider screeched and all the equipment of the group disappeared, except the boots of one of the members. Most of it reemerged soon after, but the staff of the support member did not.

"If a key piece of your strategy revolves around the usage of a Skill-created piece of equipment's effects and it is dispersed, it can be devastating." The spider bent down to bite one of the group, but they backed off. The support began screaming at the rest about the loss of their staff just as the blood splashed onto one of the members. They began running away, but the one that got splashed by the acidic blood began screaming in pain and fell over.

The support ran and picked them up as their hands started glowing. The wound was steaming as regenerated flesh immediately melted. The support began running and said something to the one they were carrying as the spider turned and shot some webbing in front of the group. The carried member nodded and dispersed their armor. The support pulled a knife out, cut off the flesh with the acid, and threw it away before healing the wound shut without the acid in it.

The web landed and one of the members tried to cut it with a flaming sword, but the sword disappeared on contact. "Crafted equipment does not have this issue." Like before, another group came to save this one, cutting through the web with relative ease. Twenty people poured through the gap in the web, with mages immediately blasting away at the behemoth spider. Two of the new group blurred into action and went to carve up the underside of the spider while a the rest sought to distract it and pin it down.

It screeched again and none of the equipment on the new group disappeared. As it began taking damage, it swiped at some of the ones distracting it. "It is, however, expensive to obtain and replace high quality crafted equipment." Some of the shields of those who intercepted the blow snapped in half. "The main benefit over crafted equipment, enchantments, usually just grants various Stat increases, but those increases should not be underestimated." One of the people whose shield broke grabbed the spider's limb and yanked it to the side, tearing off the bottom half of the limb.

The scene returned to Melena. "If you wish to create equipment, it would be best if you have a Skill for equipment creation, but it can be done without. When you finish creating a piece of equipment, it will be given some invisible modifiers, mostly just increasing the damage, durability, and/or damage reduction, but some very skilled craftsmen can create equipment that increases Regenerations by up to ten percent. Each Skill dedicated to equipment creation makes making better equipment easier.

"I will not go into detail on how to enchant, as that is a multi-day course in and of itself, but the very basics is that you are using your Mana to carve out minuscule bits of the piece of equipment in very specific shapes, which correspond to granting various beneficial effects, usually Stat increases. There exist enchanting shapes for each of the Stats, including percent Regenerations and Resource pools and percent Stat scaling on Regenerations and Resource pools."

Melena: Sorry about the delay. A level 30 invasion hit your world. I was unable to upload this until a week afterward due to the ISPs that service around here being hit hard.

Degritone didn't respond.