ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

With the recent packs of Artifact/Prodigy/Ego/etc. tweaks, I feel like Rare items are kinda in an odd place right now.

Which is to say, they aren't very useful on average. Their flatrate, unique traits are good on tools, and sorta okay on Lites(though ego tweaks to Lites has, from my testing, eroded that niche; Lites with actually decent egos compete well with rare Lites on average), but short of the absolutely perfect rare item, this isn't a big deal.

Originally, the raw cash value of Rare items somewhat mitigated this(a Rare was often worth 20 even early), but this has somewhat dwindled; They're actually not useful for much, nine times out of ten, for any niche.

There are three ways to attack this, as I see it(though I may be missing something, as this is part of the code I know less)...

A: Try to redo the code for rares. Since this is basically the randart themeing code, this is rather hard to do without strengthening randarts...which they shouldn't really need, at least, not after the ego tweaks(the runs I've seen/done with those on seem to back this up).

B: Strengthen the bonuses on rares. However, this generally doesn't fix the problem. You get rares that would be even more incredibly good on narrow niches, but the 90% is still generally useless.

C: Grant them egos. However, if you grant them egos that are too good, there's no point in ego items. So that's a problem.

My thought on this; Grant Rare items a (Material Level*20)% chance to spawn with a lesser ego, and a (Material Level*20)-40% chance to spawn with two lesser egos if they draw any ego. Never a chance to generate a greater ego, under any circumstances; That'd compete too hard with ego items.

This means that rares will start spawning with lesser egos fairly reliably by T2/3-when greater egos start showing up commonly-and will start spawning with double lesser egos fairly commonly at T4-5-when you're competing with double ego purple items and a good, full-game-gathered series of randart/fixedart items.

This makes them very much still niche oriented, but in a different way; Lesser egos get less and less common as the game goes on, and many of them, at this stage in play, have interesting and unique niches; It's kinda hard to get an "of the mountain" equip lategame, for instance, when the ego modifiers are strongest. This is a shame, and this would help fix that, as well as make rares stronger.

I think the idea of putting (one or two) egos on rares is a good idea, but faces some technical difficulties. Some of the ego resolvers run into problems when generating rares. IIRC it's mostly the charm powers and generic, i.e. function-embedded, resolvers that clash when trying to generate rare items with explicit numbers of egos.

This could be fixed by revising all of the appropriate resolvers (which would require the egos and charms code to be updated as well) or by changing the equipment/drops generating code to run through the same execution path as full randarts and just phase out the current rare generating code completely.

The current approach simply gives rare items an budget boost to compensate for the lack of egos, but tends to make the resulting item a bit unfocused, and less likely to be useful for any particular character.

I don't see any reason revising the way rares are generated has to necessarily strengthen full randarts, which I think are in a pretty good place right now.

The most useless of rares at the moment is staves.
Would be nice to see these generated with (material tier) randomly selected magical category mastery boosts of +0.1 and (material tier) randomly selected -1 to the cooldown of magical talents.
eg. a t3 rare staff would have +0.1 mastery to 3 randomly chosen magic categories and -1 to the cooldowns of 3 randomly chosen magical talents.
As rare staves tend to generate with melee bonusses on them, this shouldn't be too powerful. It may actually still be too weak as it depends on luck to get useful talents. Still it could be quite fun.

Could be extended to rare mindstars too, but limit the number of bonusses to (material tier)/2+1 since two are generally equipped.

As for the others, not sure that adding egos would be that useful or interesting. Most types of generation already use egos, so they aren't in overly short supply and it could reduce the craziness of rares by limiting their scope a bit.
However, all I can think of at the moment is that the minimum values on them could be better. Rares generating with nothing or next to nothing on them is a waste of time, as is 3% resistance.

Gloves are bad for this since they can generate with stats invisible to most players