Shops

[munificent]

One challenge with loot is most random equipment is useless. If a weapon is a type your class can't use, or is equal to or less powerful than what you have equipped, it has zero value.

Especially near the end game, you end up wading through piles of useless stuff. Auto-squelch is a hack to address that, but it feels like a hack.

Gold and shops do help. They let you effectively transmute equipment to something that's known useful. But even then, near the end game, money becomes mostly useless. You could address that by having very high quality expensive items available in shops, but that feels not very exciting to me. The Amazing
Blade of Super Decapitation should be something you get from a glorious battle, not from pinching pennies.

Actually, now that I think about it, saving up for great gear is kind of fun too. So maybe that's not too bad.

Either way, here's an idea to address that that takes advantage of the crucible.

We add shops to the game. They carry basic useful items along with a variety of equipment of different types and quality, but usually not up to magic gear. We make non-magical equipment less likely to drop in the dungeon. (At high levels, of course, magical artifacts and stuff do start turning up.) Instead, we drop more gems, runes, stones and other crucible ingredients that power up equipment.

The idea then is that you buy the right kind of gear for what you want. Then you hope to find good components you can use to put that gear in the crucible and amp it up.

This way, you don't have to deal with finding 20 Swords of Flame that you're a priest. Instead, you buy a mace, find one "of Flame" gem and get the right combination yourself.

[JymWythawhy]

I really like this direction, especially thematically. It makes more sense to me to find (from most enemies) components than to find a Sword of Flame. Why was that fire jelly carrying a Sword anyway? But if it drops a fire stone, that totally makes sense.

It also makes the gearing up in the game more streamlined and self directed, while not removing too much of the grind. It will make the grind less frustrating, and will increase the fun and complexity of the crucible crafting system. I think this is a great idea.

[munificent]

Why was that fire jelly carrying a Sword anyway?

Heroic ambition! :D

[putako]

Another avenue along this line would be to "gold sink" by having to upgrade the shops in order to let them produce tiered items. Why would the local blacksmith be able to craft the Brain Smasher of Doom? He can only read half of the letters in his local alphabet. Plus his forge has a crack in it, and the Unearthly Coal he needs to smelt GodSteel (tm) burns way too hot for the building codes his shop was built to. But can he crank out some +1 items? HELL YEAH. Throw in some quests and heavy incremental gold costs, and before long, Magnus McHammer over there can be supplying the hardest core weapons on this plane of existence.

Now to level up that enchanter...

[munificent]

Great idea!

[En810]

The new shops are nice, But could we get the name of the shop on the roof somewhere ?

[munificent]

Hmm, putting the whole name would be tricky. But I do intend to make the town generally more visually interesting. (The current look is basically temp code.) One thing I could do is give the different shops their own visual style.