UI changes on unique item purchase

[Krsqk]

There are a couple of UI tweaks when purchasing unique items that would make it much nicer and bring it line with how the rest of the UI behaves:

1) First, the ability to cancel out of the pick-your-item-type dialog would be really helpful. I hit the option out of curiosity, not out of desire to purchase. Once I saw I had to pick an item, I couldn't remember what I needed most, and I hit 'I' or 'C' or something to bring up my character sheet. That picked an item for me, which turned out to be a nice set of heavy voratun plate or something similar I couldn't equip on my summoner. Sure, now that I've encountered this, I'll be less likely to be bitten by it again, but it doesn't behave as expected compared to the rest of the game. If this is intended, a "you can't cancel out of the next screen - are you sure?" dialog would be nice.

2) Second, it would be nice to see a tooltip for the item you're going to get - two of the three items I got were Hate-related, which was a total waste of a stat/ability. Granted, they were better than the T3 greens/blues they replaced, but I was hoping for something more class-specific. Likewise, I'm sure archmages aren't thrilled with vim items, etc. As an alternative, only offer things that are useable for the player's class.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

The second isn't going to happen. The whole point of those particular items is that they're completely random. You're not meant to know in advance. I *think* it was added to make a check for antimagic/not antimagic. AM characters wouldn't get arcane, Magical ones wouldn't get AM. But it's been a while, so I could oh so easily be wrong on this.

[SageAcrin]

That check is there, yes.

The ego tweaks next version are heavily oriented, in part, towards giving egos more general use, rather than making them as class specific, so heavily useless items won't happen as much. (That's not to say that you won't see Hate bonuses, for instance. Just, they'll be attached to other, more generally useful, traits.)

[Hachem_Muche]

While the item is intended to be both random and unknown, there are steps that could be taken to make it more likely to be useful to your character. An early step would be to match egos to the character via power source versus the resource pools the character has. This is far from perfect, but would tend to narrow down the random selections.

As far as letting you out of the item selection menu, that's easy (literally a one-line change):

Code: Select all

 game/modules/tome/data/chats/last-hope-lost-merchant.lua | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/game/modules/tome/data/chats/last-hope-lost-merchant.lua b/game/modules/tome/data/chats/last-hope-lost-merchant.lua
index 1031b2e..a6a6991 100644
--- a/game/modules/tome/data/chats/last-hope-lost-merchant.lua
+++ b/game/modules/tome/data/chats/last-hope-lost-merchant.lua
@@ -98,7 +98,7 @@ local maker_list = function()
 		"dragonbone staff",
 		"living mindstar",
 	}
-	local l = {}
+	local l = {{"I've changed my mind.", jump = "welcome"}}
 	for i, name in ipairs(bases) do
 		local not_ps = player:attr("forbid_arcane") and {arcane=true} or {antimagic=true}
 		local force_themes = player:attr("forbid_arcane") and {'antimagic'} or nil

[HousePet]

Matching egos with class power source won't work.
A variety of stuff in arcane is vim based and the variety of damage type flavours are spread across arcane and nature.
And sometimes getting some sort of buff that is non typical for your class is good for covering a weak spot.

[Doctornull]

Not really the same issue, but I've noticed the bottom option for the merchant selection dialog falls off the screen for lower resolutions (like when playing on a laptop).

Could we get some way to either fit everything on the screen at once, or maybe split up the selections into separate screens? (Weapon, Armor, etc.)

[Hachem_Muche]

Matching egos with class power source won't work.
A variety of stuff in arcane is vim based and the variety of damage type flavours are spread across arcane and nature.
And sometimes getting some sort of buff that is non typical for your class is good for covering a weak spot.

That's one of the issues, but it wouldn't have to be a one-to-one correspondence. The idea is to group the possible egos into categories that correspond to things like Spellpower based casting, melee damage or defense, etc. So the presence of a mana, vim, positive or negative pool, for example could be used to indicate that spellpower is useful for the character and then appropriate egos could be selected to match that.

Also it doesn't have to be all or nothing. The random artifact is created with 4 egos. You could have the ego selection only affect 2(?) of them. If at least one or two of the egos are useful to the character, the item is much less likely to be useless.

None of this would affect the additional random powers the item would get on top of the egos generated.

[Doctornull]

That's one of the issues, but it wouldn't have to be a one-to-one correspondence. The idea is to group the possible egos into categories that correspond to things like Spellpower based casting, melee damage or defense, etc. So the presence of a mana, vim, positive or negative pool, for example could be used to indicate that spellpower is useful for the character and then appropriate egos could be selected to match that.

Agree very much.

You can also look at the gear the character is currently wearing: if you see six items which boost Spellpower, it's a good bet that he likes Spellpower.

That kind of algorithm could be written generically enough to handle new addon stuff like egos and damage types, if it just focused on figuring out which ego effects gave you bonuses which were similar to your current favorite bonuses.

[SageAcrin]

I think it's more interesting if you have to make due with unsynergistic but still good bonuses.

If randarts don't have a good enough spread of traits, given four egos and a special bonus set of artifact traits tacked on, that they can't at least be somewhat universal, then egos need to be more generalized, is my feel on it.

Not that I'm necessarily against making them more targetted...just saying that I like random to a degree.

[Doctornull]

I think it's more interesting if you have to make due with unsynergistic but still good bonuses.

If randarts don't have a good enough spread of traits, given four egos and a special bonus set of artifact traits tacked on, that they can't at least be somewhat universal, then egos need to be more generalized, is my feel on it.

Not that I'm necessarily against making them more targetted...just saying that I like random to a degree.

The entire rest of the game caters to that by constantly giving you random gear. That's not something you need to pay a merchant to get -- you get random gear for free all the time!

That said, if the item were available earlier, say around level 20, then I'd be more tempted to agree with you. At that point, you have time to adapt your character to suit the gear.

But if I'm buying the item at or near level 50, there's just not much room for me to adapt my play to one specific random item. An item which demands that I work around it is more likely to get thrown away in favor of whatever item I've currently got equipped.

[SageAcrin]

The thing is, the gear, if fully optimized, is insanely strong.

Purple ego gear that is exactly what your character wants is generally only a bit worse than an artifact of the same tier. Doubling that impact leads to some really insanely good stuff.

Basically, I tend to think that the item should be nerfed, if it's producing targetted results. I wouldn't mind that, but I like the more random, more powerful item more.

Usually you won't get the absolute best item for your character, but it makes it more fun when you do(as it will be better than usual), and if it's powerful and the egos are decently generalized, you hopefully will still get a quite useful piece of gear.

Basically, what I'm saying is, give the equipment_tweaks addon or 1.05 a shot before pushing too hard, and see if you like how randarts look with better balanced egos, if you haven't. I've been very happy with what I've seen come out of that, even if it is still really random.

[HousePet]

So if i've got lots of fire resistance items, its going to try and give me more?
An abundence of a certain property doesn't mean I want more of it.
You only get a few of these items, I'm not sure I want more stereotyping taking place on what I get out of it.
I find these artifacts are excellent at covering my weaknesses, why do you want to take that away?

[Doctornull]

The thing is, the gear, if fully optimized, is insanely strong.

Purple ego gear that is exactly what your character wants is generally only a bit worse than an artifact of the same tier. Doubling that impact leads to some really insanely good stuff.

Basically, I tend to think that the item should be nerfed, if it's producing targetted results. I wouldn't mind that, but I like the more random, more powerful item more.

Why not both? From upthread:

Also it doesn't have to be all or nothing. The random artifact is created with 4 egos. You could have the ego selection only affect 2(?) of them. If at least one or two of the egos are useful to the character, the item is much less likely to be useless.

None of this would affect the additional random powers the item would get on top of the egos generated.

That way we'd get stuff which is good, but not "double targeted" insanely good, just single targeted very good, and there would still be plenty of room for the random stuff you like.

Basically, what I'm saying is, give the equipment_tweaks addon or 1.05 a shot before pushing too hard, and see if you like how randarts look with better balanced egos, if you haven't. I've been very happy with what I've seen come out of that, even if it is still really random.

That sounds like a fun addon, thanks.

So if i've got lots of fire resistance items, its going to try and give me more?
An abundence of a certain property doesn't mean I want more of it.

You noticed that I was talking about Spellpower, right? A property of which an abundance certainly DOES mean that you want more of it.

Do you honestly think I meant "fire resistance" when I typed "spellpower"?

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

He assumed that would be expanded to cover anything you had a lot of. Such as any resist, or anything you had covered multiple times. You didn't specifically specify only spellpower, or only physical power. I read that as "If I have a lot of *insert any particular thing here*, I get more of *insert the same thing here*."

[HousePet]

I was simply providing an example of where checking existing abundence wouldn't produce useful results.