[Feature Request] Weapon Evolution

[Hamsterino]

I see your point about power creep and how expensive the current upgrade system already is, but I don’t necessarily think expanding upgrades is inherently a bad idea—it just needs proper balancing.
For example, instead of making upgraded weapons significantly stronger, maybe future upgrades could focus on alternative effects rather than raw stat increases.

We're talking about an upgrade, which is supposed to make the item stronger in some way, because if it didn't, it wouldn't be an upgrade. So the item has to become better, faster, longer, lighter, etc. and if it doesn't, it has to have some kind of special ability to, guess what, make it stronger. If the upgrade doesn't provide any kind of bonus, there is no reason to pay millions of gold (or dozens of hours of time) for it, and if the upgrade gives you any bonus, there's power creep. I hope that's understandable

That way, we don’t just keep making stronger and stronger weapons but add more variety instead.

As I've said, the alternative has to be more powerful in some way, because I think it'll be very hard to convince people to upgrade an item a second time just for a different playstyle with no real advantage.

Also, while it’s true that the current economy makes it hard for new players to get top-tier items, that’s already an issue regardless of additional upgrades.

My problem is that a second or even third upgrade would make that even worse. The only solution to not make it worse would be to spread the current upgrade cost on two different upgrades, so a full upgrade would be still as expensive as before, but it gives you two stages. This doesn't solve the issue of power creep tho.

Wouldn’t a more structured upgrade system actually give more stepping stones rather than just making everything feel like an unreachable goal?

A good idea would be to take the current upgrade and turn it into two or three individual upgrades. 
Let's take the Tempest as an example again: for the first upgrade (which you could call ''Reforged Tempest'') you only need like 3 essences and the Huntress, but it gives you only 1 speed, 1 dmg and 1 missile speed. For the second upgrade (which could just keep the name ''Raging Tempest'') you need 6 essences and the toolkit, but it gives you the other +1 speed, 2 dmg, 1 missile speed and 5 accuracy.
Applying that to all the upgrades would make progression feel a lot more smooth and less frustrating, because there's those stepping stones (or stepping stone, for that matter), as you said.
So all in all I still don't think adding more upgrades that make Swadia's soldiers stronger is a good idea, but revising the upgrade system might be reasonable.

Upgrades did not come because more power was needed in game its because a gold sink was heavily needed.

 
Whatever the reason was, the upgrades added power, and now that's a problem. Adding more upgrades will add more power in one way or another.