PotBS Dev Journal: Walking The Plank And Outfitting a Ship

Item balancing coming in build 1.5
Meet Gavin Irby, a dev at Pirates of the Burning Sea that is responsible for item balancing. Gavin's goal is to tweak items so that there is no "golden path" of items that a player must have to advance - rather that anyone can advance well with the proper skills and abilities. Items should not matter in this process.
The most obvious problem is that it’s no fun to be sunk by a player simply because they have managed to stack a number of overpowered pieces of outfitting to achieve absurd stat bonuses. These items tend to generate a “golden path” so that you must have them equipped in order to be competitive in PvP. The consequence of these “must have” items is that all other items become “must not have.” Outfitting your ship is not so much about making choices based on strategy or play-style as it is about discovering and obtaining those few select pieces of gear. Instead, we’d much prefer that all items in your level band are useful. There should be an endless number of interesting and powerful combinations when outfitting your ship, not a single “golden path.”
For the full dev journal, check the Pirates of the Burning Sea main site.