Professional items, like the Silverer’s Cosmogone Spectacles or the Correspondent’s Pot of Violant Ink, are getting a new slot all to themselves. This Tools of the Trade slot is similar to the Treasure slot added for Ambition items.

Is this change live already? No. Expect it to take place towards the end of June, when the next Profession wheel drops.

Which items are affected by this? The tier 3 profession items. The full list:

A Crooked Cross
A Notched Bone Harpoon
A Pot of Violant Ink
A List of Aliases, Written in Gant
Set of Cosmogone Spectacles
Shrine of St Joshua

The items granted by earlier professions will remain as they are. Tier 3 professions are the final form of the main career paths in the game, and we want them to feel uniquely important and rewarding.

Will the items’ effects themselves change? Yes – they’ll all be normalised to fit this new slot, whereas right now they have slightly different power levels depending on their current slot. Overall, though, being able to stack them with more other items will make them inherently more powerful, and they’ll continue granting the same valuable Advanced Skill and Bizarre/Dreaded/Respectable bonus.

Will this new slot be fixed? No. Although you will only have at most one item to equip in this slot, you’ll be able to freely equip and unequip it. Failure text enjoyers need not worry.

Why are you doing this? Over the last year or so we’ve tried to balance finding design space for new items with the expectations around the power level of items that are important to your character’s identity. For a long time this limited us to avoiding doing items that overlapped Profession item effects – mainly, interesting new advanced skill weapons – or led us to somewhat clunky solutions like the Epistemologically Flexible Approach to Historiography.

Eventually, we decided to just allow new items to fill that space (as we’ve seen with one of the new Hallowmas masks this year). But we’ve come to the conclusion that if we’re doing so, we should just give Profession items their own space. Treasures were well received, and the added complexity of one extra slot seems manageable, especially if that slot allows only a single item to be carried at a time.

Why are you announcing this ahead of time? Because of the changing of the seasons, and the d__ned rats.

What about the other things on the roadmap coming up? Besides what we already talked about on our last blog, we should have some more news about the upcoming story arc and the next professional wheel soon – though not this week.