UI changes on unique item purchase

[Doctornull]

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*."

What I said was:

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.

I guess he's trying to formulate an argument as though my example were the only thing I said? That's kinda disingenuous.

Basing an item off the gear a character is currently wearing would tend to LOWER the utility of capped attributes like resistances, but if I see maxed Fire Resist, that might raise the utility value of a boost to Max Fire Resist.


Also, look at the specific item being replaced. If the guy has six Fire Resist items and the biggest is his armor, and I'm making him an armor, then he might appreciate Fire Resist on his new armor.


What I'm saying is: if we assume the player is being smart with his gear, then we can leverage those smarts to give him something nice.

[HousePet]

Well that is two assumptions.
1: The player has equipped what they want.
This is a reasonablish assumption by late game. But they might not have everything they would like.
2: That the player wants more of what they have.
Which has the same issue.

So if we can't be sure of exactly what the player is really after, it may as well just remain as is.


Possibly we could have the option of refusing the item (or selling it back) and recovering 1000 gp.
This would increase the number of rolls allowed without increasing the number of randarts obtained.

[Hachem_Muche]

I (mostly) agree with HousePet on this. It would be tricky to use the player's current gear in choosing what powers to generate, since not all attributes are equally useful when stacked. While more spellpower/physical power is always useful, more stun resist if you're 100% stun immune already is not. This would also open up an incentive for the player to adjust his gear to bias the merchant to make the item he wants. I think that would be way too meta-gamey.

The main thing, in my opinion, is to try to make sure this expensive item would be useful to the character. So if my archmage orders a belt, I don't want to get a belt with only melee egos on it. One or two such egos won't necessarily ruin the item, though, if there are other useful egos on it.

[noboruwatanabe]

I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea of making merchant randarts useful to every character 100% of the time. If you pick the equip slot that is at the moment the least useful for you character, you usually get something that is better than what you have, even though it may not be perfectly suited.

Like SageAcrin said upthread, you occasionally get something that's ridiculously powerful for your character, and it's awesome. The gambling/randomness aspect of I think needs to be kept - guaranteeing a tailored randart to every character isn't the greatest idea.

Edit: Being able to cancel out of the item selection screen would be useful, though.

[Hachem_Muche]

I think I fundamentally disagree with the idea of making merchant randarts useful to every character 100% of the time....

I don't think there's really any risk of that happening. The issue is to avoid having the merchant custom make an artifact for you that you'd never use regardless of your current gear , i.e. automatic transmo-fodder.