ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Recently in my game with the current Berserker I'm running, I decided I should look into getting some better Gloves. Problem is, outside of the Randart Merchant the Shops really don't provide anything really worth looking at.

It would be nice if say have the Charred Scar was completed for players looking to top off their gear (in case they haven't found Randarts or Fixdarts) if the shops around the world were restocked and made to all include a couple of Tier 5 pieces to look at - including Randarts and Fixdarts. Might not be much but at least it might peak some interest in shops, which right now don't do much.

We were discussing this in the irc earlier. I think shops in general need a pretty substantial rework, as I think everyone has problems with them. Like my issue is how some games you'll go into the inscription shops and not find a single usable infusion. There's probably a better way to handle this.

Razakai wrote:We were discussing this in the irc earlier. I think shops in general need a pretty substantial rework, as I think everyone has problems with them. Like my issue is how some games you'll go into the inscription shops and not find a single usable infusion. There's probably a better way to handle this.

That can probably be handled by making it so shops have a specific item type available - so an Light Armor Shop would have Light Armor, Light Gauntlets, Light Helmets, and Light Boots; etc. For Infusions you could just make use that maybe 2 of a specific type of inscription are generated - like 2 Offensive Runes, 2 Wilds, 2 Regeneration/Healing, 1 Movement, 1 Teleport/Phase, etc.

A pretty good bandaid would be just notably upping shop capacity(say, 50% or so) and having tier 5 show up more commonly(There's no real reason Sunwall can't default to T5 items.).

Some other ideas:

- Remove all white runes/infusions from shops. These just take up valuable slots for an item pretty much nobody will ever buy
- Up the material level of stores in the 3 'starter' towns. I have never, ever bought T1 items, because for just a few gold more you can go to LH and buy a T3 with far better stats. I'd say the 3 starter towns should be at least T2 with a small chance of T3, and LH/Zigur/Angolwen can be high-end T3
- Like Davion said, guarantee a slightly better spread of gear. Nothing is as depressing as running to the LH Inscription store to find 6 Sun Infusions without a Movement/Heroism in sight. Or to a lesser extent, having the weapon shops spawn nothing but T2 green weapons and armor. I don't mean that shops should have the same stuff every game, but guaranteeing at least 1 Movement Infusion, at least 1 high quality T3 weapon and so on would be nice

I like these ideas.

I'd suggest that Zigur and Last Hope might get larger inventories rather than higher tier items as a way to make LH and Zigur "better", if such is desired.

I'd also like it if some stores were guaranteed to have one randart per restock.

Razakai wrote:- Like Davion said, guarantee a slightly better spread of gear. Nothing is as depressing as running to the LH Inscription store to find 6 Sun Infusions without a Movement/Heroism in sight.

Something I proposed a while back was to generate store stock from silos. An Infusion shop might have a silo'd generator like:

For x in 1, 5 do:
+ 1 random (any)
+ 1 of {sun, poison}
+ 1 of {regen, healing}
+ 1 of {wild, movement}

This gets you a list of 20 infusions, but even in the worst case, no more than 10 of them can ever be Sun.

Maybe invent some diablo-like gheed trade system - Gamble?
You pay, say, 400 gold (10% from getting the guaranteed unique) and there are chances of spawning item from normal to unique

Endorse the OP.

For pathalogical packrats like myself, I should note that buying an item from a shop is an active choice. You have to make an active choice to ditch, the random crap you pick up off the floor.