Randarts...

[Grey]

...suck.

I've seriously not found anything even half decent lately. They need some work or they need to be cut out of the game. Major problems:

- Too much low material shite
- Poor values on items
- Mis-matching values and abilities, like spellpower on shields

The current system seems to generate all possible randarts at the start of the game, and seems to make far too many of them steel-level material. It doesn't take long in the game to outgrow steel, and for weapons at least anything less that dwarven-steel or even stralite becomes worthless by level 20. This needs to be rebalanced to reflect what the player will use over the course of the game.

Values of effects need to be increased. Every randart should have one particularly good stat to it, so even if everything else is crap on it there is one outstanding value.

Traditional equipment values need to be increased compared with a normal item of that type. I mean higher armour, defense, ranged def, attack, damage, crits, etc. Some randarts should be significantly higher on these. Some randarts might simply be a normal item with double the stats, no extra magical effects.

Armour items should have more resists than damage increases. Stun resistance needs to appear more.

Less magic-related effects on weapons and shields. Even my arcane blades find them useless.

[Grey]

I must also say that the randart generation rate in Dreadfell is insane! I have artifacts swimming out of my ears in here, mostly ones I've sold off to shops earlier.

[PowerWyrm]

I agree. Currently, randarts are only good for their selling value. I even found randart gloves with no abilities at all!

[Grey]

Here's a new way of doing some randarts:

1. Choose an item type and material
2. Boost all regular stats by 20% (or 10% for weapon damage)
3. Give the item the effects of one or two random pre/suffixes
4. Give one extra random power (make it based on the elemental theme if the randart has one)

This may still produce junk, but at least we know many of the pre/suffixes are useful and themed well for the item types.

[teachu2die]

i think bigger issue here is, yet again, the shortcomings of the current material system. a plain dwarven steel greatsword basically always trumps a steel greatsword, even one that is double ego or randart. the disparity of power between material types is too extreme, and characters are forced to graduate from one type to the next too quickly - you basically need a steel weapon after the trollshaws, and at least dwarven steel before carn dum. and the dwarven steel weapon doesn't merely do 100% more damage than the iron does, but closer to 400%.
rethinking the way metals work might not be a bad idea.. (i know a number of ideas have been proposed in the past)...
as it stands, iron materials could pretty much be entirely removed from the game. it would only clear up drop tables and speed up the beginning of the game.

(of course, fine tuning randart abilities to make them more usable and thematically cohesive is a great idea.)

[Aoi]

Personally, I kind of like bows that get melee bonuses... =P

[Susramanian]

Grey, I really like the idea of using existing ego powers to build randarts. Maybe in addition to what you said, force the inclusion of a greater ego power. So a typical randart item would look like a beefed up version of the base item with one greater ego and one or two other egos and one random power thrown in there, with the possibility of using a theme to group everything up nicely. I think this would result in very desirable items, especially if we disallow low material levels.

Before doing this, I think we should take a good long look at what egos exist for each type of equipment. Equipment types with few possible egos will have rather uniform randarts, which is obviously bad.

I've been meaning to propose an ego overhaul, and this seems like a good excuse.

[Grey]

Well more ego ideas is never a bad thing. And my idea is for this to just be on some randarts, not all. A variety of ways of making randarts will make them more interesting in general. I don't like forcing greater egos, because there are far too few of them and not all of them are that great.

[Susramanian]

Yeah, the greater egos as they are now wouldn't be sufficient. As you say, we need more of them and we need them to not suck. I'll post before long in the ego/artifact thread about an overhaul.

[teachu2die]

that sounds good and all, but remember: randarts can't be TOO great. i mean, you're basically guaranteed to find half a dozen of them by the time you finish the maze. they probably shouldn't be guaranteed to be better than all double egos, unless they are made substantially rarer.

[Grey]

Well they *should* be substantially rarer. And appear less in duplicate and triplicate. The commoness of randarts at the moment is only offset by their uselessness. They should be both useful and rare.

Remember that a double-ego is far from guaranteed to be that great either, so there's still a significant luck element to getting something right for you.

[Taxorgian]

I do think randarts should occasionally be good enough to be objects you'd want for most of the game and I don't see why they should necessarily be worse than (say) fixedarts. A realistic formula would be:

Type 0: 1-2 minor egos and a small (1-3) bonus to a random stat [very common, normally junk to sell; other than the question of how much money should be available, these can be unlimited in number with no balance issues]

Type 1: two greater egos and a small (1-3) bonus to stats or (8-20%) foo resistance [common]

Type 2: one greater ego (and maybe a minor ego), and a larger stat bonus/improvement to intrinsic stats (7-10 total) and 2 minor resistances or one major (40%+) resistance [common]

Type 3: two greater egos + 3-6 specific stat improvement [e.g., + to WIL or MAG for staffs, + to STR for most weapons, + to DEX for knives and missile launchers, CON or equivalent HP for armor] [rarer]

Game breaker type 4: two or three greater egos, 4d3 specific stat improvement, 2d3 to 1d2 other stats and 40-60% total of different resistances [very rare, almost impossible to find in the West]

Bosses should give a minimum of a type 1 if they drop a non-fixed artifact.

[Hachem_Muche]

I suggested a system for randart generation in http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=23773 that addresses the issues brought up in the this thread. I'd be happy to code this up, but I'm very new to Lua programming (extensive programming experience otherwise) and am not familiar with the interconnected code in TOME yet. (Basically having trouble generating new from scratch equipment) It addresses scalability, object coherence, and material effects and is designed to be easily tunable once the system is in place.

The important things to note with randarts, in my opinion, are they significantly enhance replayability by ensuring that even very similar characters are distinct with each play-through, and that they add a nice bit of excitement in uncovering new and better goodies as you get deeper into the game. To achieve this, randarts should, by the end of the game, be approximately as powerful as the best fixed artifacts; a best kit at the end of the game should have a fairly even mix of randarts, fixed artifacts and greater egos, so that they all are important. The relatively high drop rates of randarts in beta is a good thing in that each game generates a nice sampling of them. It should be simple enough to make them more rare as TOME nears an official release, however.

[kingvictory2003]

Well they *should* be substantially rarer. And appear less in duplicate and triplicate. The commoness of randarts at the moment is only offset by their uselessness. They should be both useful and rare.

Remember that a double-ego is far from guaranteed to be that great either, so there's still a significant luck element to getting something right for you.

I'm absolutely with Grey on these points here. Though they are random artifacts, they are still artifacts, i.e. not from a sweat shop or an assembly line. No one would bother to make an artifact from a chunk of plain iron or steel. The only exceptions should be the already implemented standarts with flavor, such as the axe of the dwarves (don't remember the exact name), which I believe is made of iron, but has stats of voratun.

I think one of the charms of randarts is the ability for them to have attributes that are not normally found on certain item types. This does include the significant problem of useless attributes on given items, but I can tell you that finding a randart light with +elemental damage is good fun.