Tweak shield/heal/regen runes/infusions some.

[PurpleXVI]

A character's survivability can be a lot down to the gear they find, but ultimately, barring a REALLY good combination or set, or finding ALL the artifacts intended for your class(or NONE of them...), your gear rarely breaks the game in your favour and it's possible to work around the limitations imposed by your equipment. You're rarely ever completely strapped for anything decent.

The one exception, though, is shield/recovery runes. All classes, as far as I can tell, start with either a shield or a regen rune, and most classes lack any shielding or healing outside of their runes, or in some cases their personal shielding/healing simply cannot keep up with a rune that scales with a stat. Having not a single scaling rune is pretty intensely crippling to most characters, in my experience.

So I'd suggest that instead of starting characters with a non-scaling regen or non-scaling shield rune, they should start with a scaling shield or regen rune tied to the most important stat for their class. That way, even if the RNG completely screws them with regards to drops, at least they'll have one functional rune/infusion. Because as it stands, it's pretty easy to get all the way to the East without ever seeing a single good rune/infusion as either a drop or in a store, and once you get to the East without that, it gets a lot harder to keep going.

[donkatsu]

I'd like to add to this by saying that the strength of inscriptions could use a lot less variance. As an example, at a point where I was finding a couple of shield runes that were 100 points, or at the high end, maybe 200 points, I then found a shielding rune that shielded for 650 points. The game was dead simple after that. It robbed the game of any need to think or plan, I just hit my gigantic shielding rune that was maybe twice my actual health pool, and I was good to go. On the other hand sometimes you don't find a single shielding rune until Dreadfell, and it shields for 50 points. Having such wide variance adds nothing enjoyable to the game, it just makes certain characters a boring cakewalk while making other characters needlessly struggle.

[HousePet]

Most of the shield value variance is from the stat scaling.
Shops pretty much cover the need for a good shield/regen drop. Let's not make shops superfluous by giving character everything they need to start with.

[grayswandir]

Just to clear it up, all stat scaling on inscriptions is the same amount. One ' of the warrior' gives you the same amount of boost per point of strength as any other. Any difference between two inscriptions that scale off the same stat, or different stats that happen to be at the same value, is purely from the base power of the inscriptions.

For instance, for shielding runes, each stat point gives you +3 shield.

[donkatsu]

Most of the shield value variance is from the stat scaling.
Shops pretty much cover the need for a good shield/regen drop. Let's not make shops superfluous by giving character everything they need to start with.

They pretty much do, which is why every game starts with immediately leaving the first dungeon and checking Last Hope for a good shield rune/regeneration infusion/what have you, and then restarting if you happen not to get one. Why not just cut out that step?

[HousePet]

So you restart the game because plan B (shops) for getting a decent inscription fails, before you even try plan A (loot)?

[jenx]

So you restart the game because plan B (shops) for getting a decent inscription fails, before you even try plan A (loot)?

On nightmare mode, yes !

[donkatsu]

You've got it backwards. Shops, which cannot kill you and can be checked quickly, are Plan A. Dungeons, which can kill you and take longer to clear than simply walking over to a shop, are Plan B. Simply retrying Plan A is much more efficient than moving onto Plan B, unless you have no chance of dying, in which case I would suggest trying a harder difficulty.

[HousePet]

Forum discussions would work much better if people would state when they are not talking about the base difficulty level by default.

And I still think that restarting the game because a small fraction of available inscriptions isn't up to your standards, is a silly way to play.

If you have to shop-scum, I would suggest trying an easier difficulty.

[donkatsu]

It applies to whatever difficulty level has a >0% chance of killing you. For some people, that's Normal, and that's totally legitimate. In fact, for most people it is Normal. And no thanks, I'd prefer to play game where I at least have a possibility of actually losing, not because I purposefully make suboptimal decisions (like ignoring shops) and then get screwed by RNG, but because it's actually challenging me.

Are you that same person who obstinately refuses to acknowledge player complaints about things like npc drowning, or talent point shuffling, or Sludgenest farming, etc etc etc? Have you still not figured it out, or do you insist on dismissing any problem that you personally don't care about by throwing out asanine remarks like telling people their way of playing is "silly"?

Disclaimer: That was not a rhetorical question; I legitimately do not remember which members of the community had that weird elitist attitude, just that it's cropped up several times in the past and this is starting to sound like it all over again.

[HousePet]

Are you that same person who obstinately refuses to acknowledge player complaints about things like npc drowning, or talent point shuffling, or Sludgenest farming, etc etc etc? Have you still not figured it out, or do you insist on dismissing any problem that you personally don't care about by throwing out asanine remarks like telling people their way of playing is "silly"?

That is a silly question. If I was that person, I would just not acknowledge the question!

What I mean is, you are playing on nightmare because you want a challenge, but then you start scum the shops to reduce the challenge. Is nightmare too hard but normal too easy? Do we need finer granulation in the difficulties?
Artificially altering the difficulty with scumming/grinding/drowning isn't something that results in much fun. Not to mention time consuming.

[jotwebe]

Returning to the original topic, what I'd like to see would be a removal of randomization on inscriptions. They'd still get better in tiers. That would make it more attractive to strategically switch your loadout, because you knew you could return to your previous combination without losses (except that the number of times you could do that would be limited by the number of surplus inscriptions you had with you, of course).

I don't think stat scaling adds anything to the game, except for variety for varieties sake.

A case could be made that cooldown/duration/effect strength variations can make for interesting decisions, but on balance I think the clarity of standardized inscriptions would actually make for a better game. Maybe have overpowered/quick variants like charms have as a compromise.

EDIT: Oh, and shops should have fixed inventories at start, which should include a white radius 4 lamp, a pickaxe, a crappy psychoportation torque (so loot still matters) and a mindblast torque. Decent gloves. Possibly an "of the deep" cap. Reroll inventory after finishing "Into the Darkness" quest, inform of that the player in the quest description so they can maybe hold off a bit to buy a particularly nice piece.

[donkatsu]

It's not exactly about altering the mean difficulty, just the variance in difficulty. I'll just throw out some numbers to illustrate. Let's say for a given class, Nightmare is too easy about 60% of the time, but just right 40% of the time, if I get RNG screwed on inscriptions. Insane is just right 80% of the time, but it's too hard 20% of the time when I get RNG screwed on inscriptions. In this case, I would like to play Insane, but I want to make sure I don't get screwed 20% of the time, so if Last Hope doesn't have a certain minimum quality of shielding/regeneration rune, which it usually does, I'd rather spend 30 seconds resetting now than play for 10 hours and then die to something I'd normally be able to handle just fine.

There are lots of things that introduce variance in difficulty, this being a roguelike and all, and that's fine. Inscriptions are notable because:

1.) They have a huge effect on your character. If you have 400 hp, the difference between having a 200 point shielding rune and not having a shielding rune at all is a 33% decrease in your ability to take one shots. If you're playing a class that has no inherent healing, then ALL of your ability to recover health is coming from inscriptions.
2.) It would be a really, really simple thing to fix. Get rid of the six different kinds of stat scaling, reduce the variance in base power, start the player off with shielding and regeneration inscriptions of a certain minimum quality (assuming their race can use them), these are all valid suggestions.

Edit: To pre-empt the argument that giving all races certain inscriptions reduces variety between races, your starting inscriptions don't matter 90% of the time anyway because you can buy whatever inscription you want from shops probably before you even clear your first dungeon.

[jotwebe]

Reposting edit:

Oh, and shops should have fixed inventories at start, which should include a white radius 4 lamp, a pickaxe, a crappy psychoportation torque (so loot still matters) and a mindblast torque. Decent gloves. Possibly an "of the deep" cap. Reroll inventory after finishing "Into the Darkness" quest, inform of that the player in the quest description so they can maybe hold off a bit to buy a particularly nice piece.

[HousePet]

I just find it odd to go to all that effort over a very small number of inscriptions compared to the huge number you will see in a single play through. It just seems like looking at one card in a deck, and throwing away the whole deck if you don't like that card. But anyway...

I can't say I've ever not been able to get myself a suitable inscription when I wanted one. However, the simplest solution to this problem would be to increase the shop stock amounts a bit. Say from 10 to 15?