ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Tl;dr make shops sell T3 gears from level 1, for melee classes' sake.

As in 1.6 npc drowning is gone. Also, all the shops are stocking tier 1 equipments in early game, refreshed every 10 levels.

In insane, it's extremely difficult for pure melee chars to progress post-10 level(which the randbosses are starting to generate) with random tier 1 weapons.
Yes, you don't have to kill all the mobs you meet, but hopping between dungeons while praying not to encounter any randboss is really frustrating.

Back in 1.5 T3 equips were sold at shops from level 1 and they solved the early game issue quite well.
In 1.6 there are no more starting golds, but with ~150 golds after 2 T1 dungeons players could buy 1~2 T3 gears with good ego, and that would be helpful for melees to go through the harsh early game.

I agree. Seems like a good description of the problem and a good suggested solution.

I've gone through the early game (up to about lv20) on zerker like ten times now, and I haven't really been been too frustrated at the shop and drowning changes. Early game is a bit slower since you have to take it more carefully, but it's not really so bad in my opinion.

Personally, I'm more frustrated by low shop selection - if you don't find something important (like usable infusions) you're in trouble. I think that either a larger store inventory (especially early), or an option to request the vendor to increase inventory at increased prices perhaps, would be a big help. Not being able to walk around with T3 weapons at the start might be less suffering if you at least had a likelier chance of finding a nice balanced weapon of massacre or whatever your favored weapon is after one or two T1 dungeons.

I'd also say it would be nice to find a way to give all classes access to white iron mail early. It makes a huge difference against melee rare+ and the shops may not spawn anything useful/affordable early.

But overall I understand that drowning was thematically kind of ridiculous, and I think we can all learn to survive without it, so I'm fine with that change in general.

While we're fixing shops, maybe make it so that 'arcane powered' and 'antimagic powered' gear cant load in Last Hope's shops. Nothing more frustrating that having the majority of stuff be unusable to you...

That sounds like a good idea, since anything without arcane or antimagic power is accessible to all characters, class permitting. But that change should make a big difference.

I'm not sure that everyone know about it, posting it just in case.
You can get 3 random none-random artefacts in Strange Portal location, by brute force combinations of symbols there.
Which could be substitution to drown-loot.
Also, if you aren't inclined to brut force it (after couple of tries it's not that fun) you can dig portal combination frjm game files after ~5 minuts.

I still think there are some good balance suggestions here.

GlassGo wrote:I'm not sure that everyone know about it, posting it just in case.
You can get 3 random none-random artefacts in Strange Portal location, by brute force combinations of symbols there.
Which could be substitution to drown-loot.
Also, if you aren't inclined to brut force it (after couple of tries it's not that fun) you can dig portal combination frjm game files after ~5 minuts.

How do you manipulate the symbols? Just walk on them in the right order?

Bump into it.