Fateless Games recently posted a podcast style YouTube video previewing the Godforge Gear Rework. Brad hosted the episode. Lead designer Simon joined him. Community voices Ragewood (HellHades) and PapaTez joined too. PapaTez is a Raid content creator who now works at Fateless as a QA tester. The group covered gear ranks, armor stats, attunement, and weapons.
Before getting into it, a few notes:
- The team did not call anything final. Several ideas are still open debates, not settled decisions.
- The stated goal is reducing friction and clicks after beta feedback. The team still wants to protect the deep buildcrafting the game relies on.
- Nobody gave a release date for any of this.
Here is what the team covered. Below, we compare it against what we already wrote in our Understanding Heroes guide.
Gear Ranks: Consolidating 16 Steps Into 4 Checkpoints
The rank up structure is not becoming a new 4 point scale. Gear still ranks up toward the same 4, 8, 12, and 16 thresholds it does now. The team is removing every small step in between, like 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, and 11. That leaves four thresholds as the only meaningful rank up moments. Before, players worked through sixteen individual increments. This new structure lines up closely with how Raid: Shadow Legends handles gear upgrades, where substats also land at levels 4, 8, 12, and 16. Personally, I liked the old system for exactly that reason. Grinding toward every single level, even the small ones, gave me a little win along the way, not just at the big checkpoints.
The trade off is real. Smaller increments gave players a sense of constant progress. They also mattered for precise speed tuning. Sometimes the right target sits at an in between number, not a clean checkpoint. Consolidating to four stops makes the system read faster. It also removes any chance of a failed rank up roll. Players can now rank up several pieces of gear at once, instead of one at a time.
This is a direct change from what our existing guides describe. Our gear content currently references leveling gear up to 16 as a series of individual steps. That language needs an update if this ships. It should describe four meaningful rank up points along the same 1 to 16 scale, not a full replacement scale.
Quick Equip and Batch Rank Up
The team also discussed a quick equip function. Players could rank up multiple pieces of gear in a single action. For example, a player could bring every piece on a hero up to the next threshold in one click. That beats adjusting a slider on each piece individually. This idea responds directly to repeated beta feedback asking for fewer clicks and a faster overall flow. The goal is simple: get players back into actual gameplay, not managing gear screens.
Removing Armor Material Types
This change carries the biggest impact on what we already published. It is also one of the more significant pieces of the Godforge Gear Rework. The team confirmed it. Cloth, chain mail, and plate are going away as distinct gear categories. You can browse the current, pre-rework armor sets on our Armor Sets Database for reference.
Our current Understanding Heroes guide documents an archetype linked material system. Plate Mail goes to Defenders. Cloth goes to Invokers. Chain Mail goes to Brawlers. Leather goes to Slayers. Knightweave goes to Disruptors. Each one carries its own per piece attunement bonus in a summary table. The team is reworking that entire structure now. The team designed material types to echo classic RPG class roles. In practice, they stacked a name, a visual cue, and a rarity color on top of each other. Most of that only existed to key into an attunement bonus. The team judged it too many layers for the value it added.
Armor Attunement
Armor attunement itself is staying. The team wants to keep it as a meaningful long term decision. It also gives players a reason to lock gear onto a hero, without paying gold every time they move gear around casually. What attunement looks like without material types is genuinely undecided. The team called it more of an economy question than a design one. Giving every piece access to the same top tier attunement stats, like speed, would make gear too easy to optimize. Current thinking leans toward attunement options varying by slot or gear piece, rather than full randomness. Nothing is locked in yet.
One new detail stands out. The team is considering a distinct visual identity for each gear set, its own shape and color palette, instead of a material type icon. Warmer tones might mark damage oriented sets. Cooler tones might mark support oriented sets. That way, players can still read a piece’s purpose at a glance, without the old material system underneath it.
Flat Stats vs Percent Stats
The group also discussed the balance between flat stats and percent stats. Flat stats are staying in the game. The team defended them as genuinely useful early on. This matters most for lower rarity heroes with weak base stats, where a flat boost beats a percentage of a small number. One idea, not yet confirmed, would remove flat stat rolls from 6 star legendary pieces specifically. The theory: letting endgame pieces roll flat stats lets players reach top tier gear too quickly. That undercuts long term goals.
This ties into a broader philosophy from the discussion. The team wants roster building to feel horizontal rather than vertical. Players should build out a wide bench of heroes, not pour everything into just one or two. Lower rarity heroes staying viable through solid flat stat rolls supports that goal directly.
Weapons: Less Stat Stick, More Identity
The team acknowledged that weapons in beta leaned too close to simple stat sticks. Players favored whichever rarity offered the best stats for the least investment. Few players chose a weapon for its passive ability. You can see the current weapon lineup on our Weapons Database. Confirmed changes include more frequent weapon drops overall, not just for legendary weapons. Different dungeons should also offer clearer, more distinct reasons to farm them, instead of overlapping.
Beyond that, the specifics remain unresolved. One idea gives weapons an active ability, functioning as an extra skill between a hero’s basic and core abilities. The team also floated a mastery or skill tree system per weapon. That system would offer branching choices, like trading a shorter cooldown for a stat increase. Ragewood directly challenged the skill tree idea. His concern: it risks becoming just a delayed version of the same stat stick problem. A rare weapon’s tree would likely max out faster than a legendary one’s. The team agreed this tension is real and unresolved, not a settled plan.
This weapon rework is a separate system from the Faction based weapon attunement we already cover in our Understanding Heroes guide. There, equipping a weapon matching a hero’s Faction grants an Attunement Bonus. Nothing here contradicts that system directly. But if weapons pick up active abilities or a skill tree, that section will need expanding rather than replacing.
Bottom Line
Nothing here is locked in. Several pieces remain open questions the team is still debating, especially attunement’s replacement and the weapon skill tree idea. The Godforge Gear Rework’s intent stays consistent though: fewer, clearer gear decisions, less friction getting a hero equipped, and a bigger role for weapons going forward. We will revisit our gear related guide sections once any of this moves from discussion to an actual build.
This article summarizes design concepts shown in a Fateless Games podcast YouTube video. It reflects an early, unconfirmed direction for Godforge‘s gear systems. All systems, names, and mechanics described may still change. They may not appear in Godforge in their current form, or at all. This site is not affiliated with or sponsored by FATELESS Games.