Upkeep has been the biggest fail in game design of the 21st century.
It failed in numerous ways, claiming to be the solution to all the minor problems we had prepatch but in fact upkeep solved nothing as is, and created even bigger problems. The globalized archery spam was regulated through a fine nerf of the damage and accuracy and by removing the wpf bonus of retirement. Nothing to do with the cost of an archer equipment. That was probably the biggest problem we had. In second place we had the "tincans". Also here the problem was certainly not that they wore heavy armors. The real problem was the weapon speed people could acheive thanks to multiple retirements, and the crazy agi and ath values due to grinding to level 40. Give heavy armor to a level 30 without wpf bonuses. He's perfectly fine regarding balance. His speed is fuckslow and he's ganked if his team retreats. The char would be more efficient in combat without the heavy armor, however it helps against ranged units.
What I'm trying to explain is that just like in politics, we had a problem (in my example, lightspeed tincans), and people try to hide the symptoms (upkeep to prevent people from using heavy armors). But the correct solution is to find the source of the problem (extreme agi and wpf were reachable) and correct it in a way it won't change things for non-problematic parts of the mod.
Here we have upkeep, that completly changed cRPG, in the equipment we use, our speed, survivability, the powers of different classes, in the way we fight, why we fight and why we do not fight. A rather brutal change to hide the symptoms of a very simple problem.
Now we can try to fix things a little.
The 2 slots for ranged/2h weapons has been proposed many times, it has nothing to do with upkeep, but it is logically linked with the wpf curve. As investing all your points into one proficiency is highly detrimental, much people are forced into hybridizing (just look around and you see half melee players being part-time noob throwers). To be continued, gtg
