ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I think shops restock a bit too quickly at the moment. It's quite easy to do a circuit of Angolwen, Derth, Zigur and Last Hope, and the head back to Angolwen and it has restocked already. One is almost encouraged to do this in the hopes of finding an artifact or some other rare item worth buying. Better runes and infusions are especially the thing I always look out for.

Shop restocking should take more time, or only happen inbetween boss fights.

I don't like this idea. I don't see how frequent shop restocking harms the game. Making them restock rarely just makes it harder for people unlucky enough to not have what they need to survive.

There's something wrong with the game if people need to scum shops to get basic survival gear. As it stands I certainly don't believe tha to be the case anyway - the best loot is from dungeons, except for rings and sometimes runes/infusions, which are most certainly worth shop-scumming for, but aren't essential to scum for either.

So, perhaps a better answer...
- decide what level of unenchanted rings should be available (probably by character level). Make these more common in the shop, and rings above this level not appear in the shop at all. Alternately, have unenchanted rings never appear in the shop, and up their drop rate elsewhere.
- improve the runes/infusions that can be looted from the dungeons and decrease the quality of same available in shops. In particular, shops should be allowed to carry most different kinds of runes/infusions, but not particularly high-level versions of same. wild infusions purchased in a shop shoud be limited to removing at most poison and two other types, while those that drop elsewhere should naturally tend to have higher numbers.
- leave restocking where it is.

We thus have the shops left as places you go to get your basic kit (and possibly get a lucky artifact find or something, if you have a fair chunk of money after selling off your latest haul) but kill off the last of the urge to scum. The things that are worth having are generally pretty commonly available, and the ones that are worth having and rare are also expensive, so you're better off adventuring and accumulating gold so that you can afford them when you *do* find them.