>It discourages info sharing. The better items to transform,
>since they're limited, mean I don't want to let my buddy know
>about it since it reduces my chance of having it.
>
>Thieves can steal them (though some might be flagged hidden on
>purpose).
>
>They're competitive since they're limited and in high-demand
>from all mages with the wand skill.
>
>Some are obvious but really hard to get (as in, better gather
>a group).
>
>They're functional items that people use/wear. Again,
>competitive.

I honestly don't see this today with transform in the game today, so I'm going to disagree with you. Even tripling the number of mages that have it online at any given time isn't going to dramatically change the dynamics of this.



>They have diminishing return (if you don't in fact make them
>one time use) so the first transform is the best, the
>subsequent two lesser, before the item finally poofs.

Transform is one time use.

>It requires going out and doing something to get an item.

Not necessarily. I can just go pit loot my cabal, or grab something from a corpse of the dude counter-raiding (this is probably my favorite...cabal of mages defending against whomever, someone dies gets fully stripped and they all transform using his gear, Yay!).

>Anyone knew to the mage class has accessible damage
>reduction.

Also solved by giving out shield or some equiavlent to all mage classes.

>No more abs at 36 (Cabdru, anyone?). Damage reduction is more
>likely to scale accordingly to level and knowledge of the
>player.

Why not? I'll just get my buddies to hand me over some good pieces of gear and whup your ass.

>It doesn't take making a hero character to explore all
>possible locations to then make a second character and take
>advantage of that. It levels the playingfield more than the
>current system but still has reward and value for deep player
>knowledge.

Until you define for me how the spell determines what level of dam redux/hit points you get, I can't comment.

>No more non-obvious locations or tricky key words (unless you
>decide to throw a few easter eggs out there by placing a
>tranformable item there).

Detect artifact will help with that...