There are some ideas going through my mind regarding the increase of control at getting the gear players want.
Warframe has some very addictive mechanics to give the player goals to play for and let him estimate how time-consuming it is to get there.
So here is one idea adopted for LE:
There’s a guy named Shady Joe. He’s a time travelling vendor that has some nice goods to offer. Everytime he showes up he has some glyphs, runes and shards in his store as well as 2-3 unique/set items, even 1 legendary item. Those goods are as expensive as fuck so not everybody can afford these. You need a bunch of gold as well as pieces of shattered uniques for trading with him. So you wanna make sure you farm your ass off to get all you need till he arrives.
But he gets chased by creepy creatures that want to steal his treasures. So he can’t stay for long at the same place. After 2 days he has to go underground and stay away for 2 weeks.
Everytime he returns he’s sending one of his henchman to contact you at the end of time and tell you where Joe is hiding for the next 2 days. The henchman does not know the exact location where Joe is waiting in case he gets caught by those creepy creatures. He just can tell you in which timeline Joe is staying. So it is up to you to search the maps and find him. But beware! Those creepy creatures are searching for Joe, too. So it can happen that you meet them and they are fierce and mighty enemies.
When you finally find Joe you can open a special town portal called The Shady Portal. It is also offered by Joe and stays open at his position until he goes underground again.
At the current state of the game gearing is far to easy so RIGHT NOW I’m against another layer of getting stuff. However this might change in the future so every idea might be good. On the other hand we already have gambling and with it the possibility to get unique and set items so I can’t see the need for a Shady Joe ;).
I’d rather have some “time traveling” alchemie chests. You put something in it in the past and after all the time it was in the chest untill you reopen it in the future you get something new. Everything about it is hidden so it’s up to the community to find out what “recipes” there are to get good stuff. Like putting 3 same uniques into the chest to get another random unique and stuff like that.
So you’re referring to the Eternity Caches that once were announced. I like this idea as well.
But if there aren’t specific receipts it is just another gamble system.
So coming from the discussion about rune of removal I wanted to bring in more control for the player.
If you know that on Wednesday Shady Joe will open his chests you can work towards it. Farm gold, shatter uniques. This way you get rid of uniques you don’t need and the gold. Everytime a unique drops that you don’t want to use you don’t think “fuck, another trash item, this run was a waste of time”. Instead you think "Ok, time is not completely wasted, I can use it to get an item I want next time Joe showes up.
And I forgot to mention that Joe has a family, wife and 4 kids. His Wife (Bernadette) is pregnant again. He has a hard life in the underground and needs the money to care for his family. Don’t let him down
I was racking my brain trying to remember the name of Eternity Caches. I will do my best to make sure the Shade-ster gets plenty of business to aide his growing family!
Hey, it’s Baro Ki’Teer for LE! I like the general premise, but in Warframe Baro offers the same rewards every time he shows up to all players. Are you proposing something similar? If so, I would be against this, as it would marginalize the power of those items among the player base. One of the most fun aspects of Diablo like ARPGs is finding (or making) something that is unusually powerful and difficult to obtain. A Baro like guaranteed mechanic would be against this premise. However, a Baro like trader for cosmetics would be interesting, and/or having the ability to purchase maybe one random legendary, an assumingly very powerful item, for a large amount of gold.
Don’t know if it would be too easy to obtain items this way. There are many ways to make it harder (increase the price…). Also it would be possible to only make special crafting parts available that have to be used in the Eternity Caches to craft mighty items.
You can combine the different endgame modes to collect all ingredients you need to craft a legendary armor:
do 5 monolith runs to get arena key
do arena waves to get a “shiny thing”, you have a chance to find a “shiny thing” after every 5 waves
you need 5 “shiny things” and 5 shattered uniques to buy a “mighty fragment” at Shady Joe’s
put 2 mighty fragments, 2 rings with +mana affix and x other items into the Eternity Cache to get “The Big Fckng Axe” at the end
I like this more than simply killing thousands of monsters in different game modes and only rely on luck to get what I want. Rng is a bitch. You can’t plan what to do to get your Spellblade max geared. You will find many good items the longer you play but it will happen that the one 1 hand sword that you really want badly does not drop and instead you are getting necro or druid stuff you don’t need.
Yes, that is how some other games work. But this is not the only way it could work. In MMOs there are epic questlines or faction based farming for getting the really good stuff. These mechanics would work in ARPGs as well. To make sure it’s not too hard or to easy it needs tuning. But these mechanics are not “too easy” or “too hard” from the scratch.
Just think of warframe. You log in with the plan to get a new Frame. First you have to do a questline to get specific items and the blueprint. Next you have to collect some resources and finally you can craft your new frame. It takes X hours to get to your goal and also relies on rng because you don’t get the items you need as a guaranteed drop. The key point is you can estimate how long it would take to get what you desire. And you can measure your progress on the way to get there.
I never played a game that makes the chase for items that accessible for me, like Warframe does. So why not use some of these mechanics. I’d love to see something similar in LE.
And I don’t say “screw the actual mechanics”. It’s not “bad” at the moment. But in my eyes it could be improved - make it more spicy.
