Infinite loot!

[yerkyerk]

One of the aspects of an aRPG is that it serves as a glorified stamp collection; and the worst that can happen to a collector is that he finishes his collection. So, implementing a tremendous amount of variety for weapons would allow players to loot for a very long time, increasing the endgame.

Some suggestions;

Rare weapons, like in D2 - weapons that you don't find much, but spawn 4-8 (or more) modifiers, generally weaker modifiers than the ones you get on normal magic weapons. If you're lucky enough to find one with 8 modifiers, all being powerful (which should be rarer than the weaker affixes) you'll probably have the most powerful weapon in the game.. but the chances of finding the perfect rare would be negligible, especially if all the powerful affix also spawned in perfect form.

Magic affixes being the most powerful affixes in the game; because you can only have 2 affixes, as opposed to uniques and such, they should be more powerful, so even they remain interesting, especially for players who focus on extremes; like a player who thinks its worth sacrificing all his health/resistance/dodge/etc for a huge damage output. Petmancers, for example, as they can stand in the back while the pets do their work. Perhaps even allow low level aura's as affixes... Ofcourse, the powerful affixes should be pretty rare.

More affixes! Some ideas for affixes;
Grant skill (improved by +skills and usable by all classes - may also be unique skills that don't exist in any of the masteries)
+3 to specific skill (only usable by classes that own the skill)
Level 6 aura (fixed, not improved by +skills)
Reduce health by 15% for target as well as user
1-3 sockets (varies - makes for an interesting situation if this spawns as a prefix and affix, sorta allows players to forge their own weapons)
I should make a thread for affix ideas if there's interest, there's a lot more stuff to come up with

Auto-mods; another d2 idea; specific weapons (like the staves) could drop with integrated mods, like staves being able to spawn 1-3 specific skills that give 1-3 skillpoints for that specific skill. Perhaps only put automods on weaker versions of the weapons (lower damage output, slower, less blocking, less armor, etc...).

Lots of varieties in affixes and unique weapons; so that finding a specific affix or a unique you were looking for still allows you to find a better version. The more variation, the better.

MI's were pretty interesting - it gave an incentive for the player to go back to certain monsters, instead of just farming bosses 24/7. Ofcourse, some MI's had crap bonuses, so a useful bonus for each MI would, that would set it apart from other MI's, would be great. Perhaps nerf out the most powerful affixes though, so they don't 'exclude' normal magic weapons from the game.

Scrolls being carried and perhaps even used by enemies; I'm not sure if there are going to be scrolls, but it'd be interesting to equip them on monsters; I bet they'll be seen as a funny and rewarding addition and they'll be used a lot more - especially if you can't sell em or fetch only a moderate cash price for it.

Rare stones with unique abilities;
D2 had very rare runes, granted, they overdid it with anything of ist or higher; but it still felt really rewarding when you found one of the higher runes (never got one above Gul, chances above that are abysmal). TQ however, spams relics and charms, which makes them much less rewarding. Plus there's not a whole lotta things you could do with them... So, having very rare stones which open up a new aspect of the game (runemaking, crafting, I dunno...), opens up more room for infinite looting

Statues collection;
Put several statues in the game, which are broken into 20 or more pieces; the more pieces you get together, the higher the price. But if you're in need of quick money, you can sell the thing for a lower price. Only really useful if the economy is fixed though...

Oh yeah, and fixing the random issue would help too

[medierra]

Rare weapons, like in D2 - weapons that you don't find much, but spawn 4-8 (or more) modifiers, generally weaker modifiers than the ones you get on normal magic weapons. If you're lucky enough to find one with 8 modifiers, all being powerful (which should be rarer than the weaker affixes) you'll probably have the most powerful weapon in the game.. but the chances of finding the perfect rare would be negligible, especially if all the powerful affix also spawned in perfect form.

I dunno man, in most regards I bow down to D2 as king in the genre but I think rare items in TQ were a lot more useful than those in D2. I played a hell of a lot of D2, put a couple chars through hardcore, and never have I found a particularly useful rare item. The affixes are generally in such weak quality that they're totally useless when compared to unique, regular magical, or rune items.

I get what you're saying though and agree with the principal. A greater variety of generated, useful loot is a direction we're pursuing. One of the things we did a little bit on TQ was allow certain "unique" items to also get affixes. I think this worked pretty well and was thinking it would be cool to create a class of item that had a few of its own magical attributes but could then be combined with a wide array of affixes.

MI's were pretty interesting - it gave an incentive for the player to go back to certain monsters, instead of just farming bosses 24/7. Ofcourse, some MI's had crap bonuses, so a useful bonus for each MI would, that would set it apart from other MI's, would be great. Perhaps nerf out the most powerful affixes though, so they don't 'exclude' normal magic weapons from the game.

Yeah I also like the idea of having more loot that is tied to specific enemy types or named-enemies so in the "end-game" players looking to collect or craft specific items would know where to go to have the best chance of finding them. This would add a sort of free-form questing element and help break up the monotony of doing a billion loot runs on a single end-boss who had a universally high chance of dropping every high-level item.

Scrolls being carried and perhaps even used by enemies; I'm not sure if there are going to be scrolls, but it'd be interesting to equip them on monsters; I bet they'll be seen as a funny and rewarding addition and they'll be used a lot more - especially if you can't sell em or fetch only a moderate cash price for it.

Did you guys find scrolls to be very useful? We just sort of threw them in but personally never bothered to use them.

Rare stones with unique abilities;
D2 had very rare runes, granted, they overdid it with anything of ist or higher; but it still felt really rewarding when you found one of the higher runes (never got one above Gul, chances above that are abysmal). TQ however, spams relics and charms, which makes them much less rewarding. Plus there's not a whole lotta things you could do with them... So, having very rare stones which open up a new aspect of the game (runemaking, crafting, I dunno...), opens up more room for infinite looting

Oh, I'm way ahead of you on this one ; )
MuahahaHahaHAHHA!

Statues collection;
Put several statues in the game, which are broken into 20 or more pieces; the more pieces you get together, the higher the price. But if you're in need of quick money, you can sell the thing for a lower price. Only really useful if the economy is fixed though...

Great minds think alike - I've been working on a similar concept but instead of statues you'd be collecting fragments of items like journals or notes that would reveal a little more of the game fiction and could then be sold.

Oh yeah, and fixing the random issue would help too

If you're talking about the crappy drop controls on chests, we've already taken care of that. It drove me nuts that we had to ship TQ like that.

If, on the other hand, you're talking about the weird tendency to get duplicate drops of rare items at a rate the defies probability - I think that is just a ghost in the machine. I'm still suspicious but the engineers have checked the random number generation again and again. I figure its not really a big problem, so its probably better to spend time investigating other issues.

[modeling_man]

It's all about SOJ's
B

[khrotos]

Has there ever been a poll on here about scroll use? I never found them "in the wild" and never found the need to give up gold or inventory space for one. I thought they were mostly there to make artifact creation slightly more expensive. I should probably try one out someday.

[Poet of the Fall]

If, on the other hand, you're talking about the weird tendency to get duplicate drops of rare items at a rate the defies probability - I think that is just a ghost in the machine. I'm still suspicious but the engineers have checked the random number generation again and again. I figure its not really a big problem, so its probably better to spend time investigating other issues.

I've seen this issue in other programming environments, the problem simply was that the CPU was so fast that consecutive random rolls happened within the same clock tick thus producing the same results. The solution can be to either use a secure cryptographic random function or to store the value of the last roll and then reroll the next call if it comes up with the same value until you get something different.

[Rhis]

I've seen this issue in other programming environments, the problem simply was that the CPU was so fast that consecutive random rolls happened within the same clock tick thus producing the same results. The solution can be to either use a secure cryptographic random function or to store the value of the last roll and then reroll the next call if it comes up with the same value until you get something different.

Unfortunately the current cpu cycle has no bearing on the result of the TQ engine's random number generator.

[morphmurph]

I use the scroll Frenzy to boost my speed so I can get to the end bosses quicker. I also used the scrolls that summoned a monster (behemoth, cyclops, etc) with my Ritualist (pets all the way). But overall just needed them for the Artifacts.

I liked the crafting & runewords from D2 and the artifacts from TQ because you had to find multiple pieces to get the item. That usually meant farming different areas to get the ingredients. I eventually got tired of D2 because the chance to find all of the items was so low and I got bored with farming only a few monsters. I am not quite there with TQ because I am still working on a few characters that can fill out the collection while playing the game.

[yerkyerk]

Well, the rare weapons in D2 didn't contain really interesting affixes to begin with, so that's a problem you could solve by implementing better rare affixes (perhaps a chance at 1-3 semi-powerful affixes and 1-5 lesser affixes per rare - which would allow you affixes such as 'grant skill', 1-2 sockets and such - very useful for classes that don't have a skill that replaces the leftmouse button - and allowing for a lot of new builds).

I don't really remember there being rare weapons in TQ? Or do you mean magic weapons with more powerful (green) affixes? As far as I'm concerned, they're exactly alike to the magical weapons, just with another set of affixes. The point in D2-like rares was having a small chance at immensely powerful items. An example of an interesting rare, that can compete with uniques (I take it you played D2 enough to somewhat value items);

More affixes on an item also makes the player take a more careful look at the item, as much more than 1-2 simple stats have to be compared - and the variety of weapons with 8 random affixes is near endless, provided your affix pool is large enough.
Ofcourse, overpowered runewords in D2 screwed pretty much every socketable item slot over - there's no way to beat an Enigma runeword... although it's also near impossible to find the runes to create an Enigma legitly.

As for the varied affixes on uniques in TQ; I forgot about that. I only ever found out that that happens through reading it accidentily on this board. Black pearl rings with affixes such as +1 to skills are definetely interesting, although I think it servers the players if it's a little more obvious if a unique item contains variable stats.. perhaps color-coding?

I was talking about the weird tendency of duplicate drops - I don't even know about chest control drops bugs (or is that the one where multiple chests spawn?), but I'm not sure how fixed the 'randomization' really was. Some guys on here did a lot more research into that... If it doesn't have something to do with the general randomization of items, I guess the time could be better spent...

As for scrolls; I used them mostly just to try them out once. Some had interesting effects, but I didn't bother to use them, other than for crafting (which I personally don't think was an interesting ingredient requirement - as the only way to obtain scrolls is by shopfarming, which I don't like...). However, if you'd implement scrolls, please make them droppable by monsters. I'm pretty sure I'd at least pick them up and use them on the next enemy encounter, just for the fun of variety. But I guess time spent on creating unused scrolls could well be spent on other stuff...

I like how our ideas of the game seem to coincide , btw

[eisprinzessin]

If there will be infinite loot, then we need a big enough in-game vault - no more mules, please. I expect to find lots of powerful stuff, which you can only use at a later stage/with another toon.

At a certain point you will be lost in loot. In order to retrieve something you have totally forgotten about, you need a powerful search with filters like: type, slot, requirements, name, bonuses (attributes, damage type, abilities), affixes/suffixes, does it grant an ability?, is it a set item? etc. Result lists need to be sorted, so that you can get rid of weaker stuff and identify what is best.

[medierra]

If there will be infinite loot, then we need a big enough in-game vault - no more mules, please. I expect to find lots of powerful stuff, which you can only use at a later stage/with another toon.

The player will be able to buy up to 18 mules to follow them through the game and act as mobile loot storage devices. However, for every 6 mules you'll have to also hire a mule train driver.