ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I didn't have much time to try beta 14 (I'm still using beta 13 for my little character story), but there's something that's bothering me. Now bosses have a chance to drop random artifacts. That's neat, but these drop replace the actual artifact drops. So Bill doesn't drop his trunk, the Shade doesn't drop his staff and so on...
IMHO, this is quite silly. Some artifacts are bound to the boss that have them. The drop should be guaranteed. For random bosses, it's ok to have them drop randarts, not for regular bosses.

They have a decent chance of dropping their artifact, but it's far from guaranteed.

Personally I like it - keeps the game fresh.

guaranteed drops guarantee one thing: diminished replayability.
how many character dumps have you seen where the character was wielding frost treads and hammerhand, even at level 40+? i'd wager its like, 75%. makes for a very dull game, and completely obviates the wealth of interesting egos and other artifacts out there.

teachu2die wrote:guaranteed drops guarantee one thing: diminished replayability.
how many character dumps have you seen where the character was wielding frost treads and hammerhand, even at level 40+? i'd wager its like, 75%. makes for a very dull game, and completely obviates the wealth of interesting egos and other artifacts out there.

Then I think we should rename the artifacts... finding Bill's tree trunk or Staff of Angmar anywhere else than from a drop from those two uniques is totally silly.

As someone else mentioned, losing the shade's ugly stick causes a certain quest to be extremely painful again....

DG said he fixed that in the next beta (see TEngine section).

PowerWyrm wrote:
Then I think we should rename the artifacts... finding Bill's tree trunk or Staff of Angmar anywhere else than from a drop from those two uniques is totally silly.

it's not TOTALLY unbelievable (maybe bill accidentally dropped his tree trunk before fighting you, and some other adventurer found it and sold it), but yeah, i don't disagree with you, it's a bit silly. and renaming wouldn't exactly be painful.

I wonder if the drop rate of the regular artifacts should be increased a bit? I've made it through Vor armory, and all the bosses along the way did not drop their signature artifacts. I've had fun with the randarts, but I would've liked a couple of the actual artifacts as well.

I actually don't have that much of a problem with randarts dropping instead of 'fixed'arts(the chance of the 'boss'art dropping is 25% I think), my main issue is with the lack of 'proper' themes, for which I made an idea thread too http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=23383).

Anyway you know what could be fun?
Have the bosses drop their artifact *and* a randart. Of course, that's probably going to be overpowered...

Perhaps some bosses should still drop their particular artifact - I'm thinking specifically of the staff in Kor'Tul.