A bunch of suggestions now that I've won

[gruevy]

1 - Artifacts should probably be reworked in two ways. Firstly, they need to be reliable. For example, the Spellblaze Crystal should drop the crystal focus every time, without fail. The only place to get one should be there. If you want it, kill that. If you don't kill that, you'll never see it. A lot of utility artifacts should be this way, and half, or even better all, of the bosses should have their static drop. If I want the summertide vial, I should be able to get it at will. Same with the crystal focus, tooth of the mouth, etc etc etc. There should be a few crazy hard bosses wandering around that drop the best armor and weapons, and if you dare risk it, you can count on getting the drop.

Secondly, I think it'd be pretty cool if artifacts grew with the character. Instead of having the artifacts have a base item type of whatever they're made of, have them based on the 'artifact' type, and the damage, armor, defense, etc of each grows with your level. If you want to use the Mail of Bloodletting, you should be able to wear it the whole time and by level 50, its base armor and defense value are comparable to all the other heavy armor around. Some things on armor should grow as well, such as perhaps crit chance or spellpower. Basically, the idea is to make one artifact to fill every need or slot or whatever, (or a good number of em) and if you need that filled by an artifact instead of a lucky purple, you can go kill the right boss or do the right quest to get it, and then use it the whole game.

If you find that fancy artifact sword, but it's weaker than the voratun green you've got, then carry it around or drop it in the sher'tul vault until you're higher level. This sounds a lot funner to me than constantly selling things to shops.

2 - Shops should be reworked yet again. Firstly, if you sell an artifact to a shop, you should never see it again. If an artifact LOADS in a shop, but you don't buy it, then it should be possible to have it appear later on elsewhere.

Second, shops should be split up. There should be a cloth armor shop, a light armor shop, and heavy armor shop, and a massive armor shop. Or perhaps a cloth shop, leather shop, and metal shop. Weapons should be split up like this too. It just makes more sense, and it makes the game a bit cleaner. Right now, a shop has like 30 items in it, but only two of them are of a type I'm interested in. I have to read all 30 to see what there is, and it's tedious. I'd prefer to look at a shop that has 12 items, all of which are types I might use.

3 - Gem slots on armor. I don't know why this isn't already part of the game, but some rare non-magical armor should have gem slots to toss all those useless gems into. Gear is really, really random. Let us craft the items we need. One slot isn't enough, and five is probably too many, but two or three couldn't hurt, and you could craft exactly what you want and make an item better for your char than what you found in a shop.

4 - Take another serious look at the way that damage scales. A level 15 character has almost no chance to kill a group of level 20 mobs, but a level 40 character can kill level 45s pretty easily. Damage and hps are poorly scaled. I'd recommend reducing all the numbers in the game by about 80%, and building them back up slowly to create a more gentle slope. A gentle slope is easier to create when the numbers are lower.

5 - Respecs. No, I will never drop it. I had over 4k gold by the end of the game and a wasted talent tree purchase. Scale the cost of a respec to the amount of things respeced. If you want to buy out of a tree with nothing in it, it's cheap. If you want to buy out of a talent tree with 20 skill points in it, it's going to be almost prohibitively expensive.

6 - Scaling runes and infusions. Make them scale to your level and never drop, or almost never. Finding a 300 dmg shield rune at level 3 is overpowered, and never finding another one until level 40 is ridiculous. Besides, they are even more spammy than gear. Make each rune and infusion type hard to find. If you want the wizard's shield rune, you have to go kill X. If you want the sneak's regen infusion, you have to go kill Y. Once you have each type of rune, it is permanently affixed to your character, but you can only have 3 active at a time and swapping them results in a 300 round cooldown or something. Put nice numbers on them, btw.

[marvalis]

Some of my personal opinions on your comments:

the Spellblaze Crystal should drop the crystal focus every time, without fail.

For certain drops I tend to agree. Especially the themed ones. Altho the current system is not to bad either imho.

Secondly, I think it'd be pretty cool if artifacts grew with the character.

No, that would totally destroy gear progression, and totally change the game. Not all artifacts should scale. In tome 2 there where certain weapons that could level up. This would be a nice idea! I think that some artifacts can scale.

if you sell an artifact to a shop, you should never see it again.

One thing to note is that tome did not have many artifacts at this time, and you see the same one over and over again. I once did a long dive into the infinite dungeon. I dropped the bad artifacts, and every vault had the same ones that I dropped. Once you have a very large pool of artifacts, the chance becomes much smaller.

Second, shops should be split up. There should be a cloth armor shop, a light armor shop, and heavy armor shop, and a massive armor shop.

And each weapon shop should have at least one of every weapon type. It would be nice if shops just sorted the stuff by type, and you can click on whatever you want to show/hide that category.

some rare non-magical armor should have gem slots

Ah we hit upon the item customization, a powerful form of statcrack. This is a very good idea, and will certainly make the game more addictive. There are many ways to do this, for example, you could use certain item (a gem for example) to create a gem slot. You can get one or two, but 3 is 50% chance to fail and to loose all gem slots, 4 is 75% fail, 5 is 95% fail. The gemslots should only have a small bonus (like 2% dmg/resist, +1 stat etc). Getting 5/5 gemslots would be hard, and give you something to waist all those gems on.
There are other potential forms of item customization, and they are worth looking at.

Damage and hps are poorly scaled.

What we need is some kind of damage and hp normalization. We need formula's to determine how these scale. Then we can randomly generate items based on the character or dungeon level and this scale. It would also guarantee that a green item is always better than a white, etc. It would also increase variety between weapons (now we have 5 weapon tiers? iron, steel, dwarfsteel, stralite, voratun). I don't even think the rest of the game follows this tier system and I don't know if it is the intention to have a tier system or not.

Respecs

I would vote yes for a no-bullshit respec that can be accessed from the levelup screen and has a cost based on your level and the number of skill-points invested. No quests or any other gameplay nonsense (no special respec-npc it does not make sense and it is a hassle). Just a cost in gold to prevent abuse (for example, 50g for one point at level 10, 500g at level 50).

Scaling runes and infusions.

No ... yes... no... There are several ways to go about this. You could make them percentage of max hp based, and keep a small variation. this would make it very easy to predict what kind of infusion a player will have at any given time. For example, a healing infusion might heal somewhere between 60-80% of your max hp. This would scale with level, but if you have a 75% healing infusion you can still find one of those rare 79%. This would also prevent you from using a 600 hp infusion if you have 300 hp, so it would make certain infusions less overpowered.

[Hedrachi]

For certain drops I tend to agree. Especially the themed ones. Altho the current system is not to bad either imho.

Yeah. Number of betas ago, used to be most bosses had unique artifact drops. Finding Wrathroot's Barkwood in a store or on the floor of the Maze only to go and kill him later is kind of... anticlimactic.

Secondly, I think it'd be pretty cool if artifacts grew with the character.

No, that would totally destroy gear progression, and totally change the game. Not all artifacts should scale. In tome 2 there where certain weapons that could level up. This would be a nice idea! I think that some artifacts can scale.

I agree with Marvalis. I don't think I've ever played a game where every nice weapon scaled with you. The sentient ones from TOME 2 did, but they were -RARE-.

if you sell an artifact to a shop, you should never see it again.

Why? You can't control who or what that shop sells its items to, from an in-game perspective. Maybe the dwarf that bought your Nightsong went and got ate by a dragon, and that's why you're looking at it again.

Second, shops should be split up. There should be a cloth armor shop, a light armor shop, and heavy armor shop, and a massive armor shop.

Yes! Might also help if they had their buy limit upped, if you can't get the sunken box thingy that helps here.

some rare non-magical armor should have gem slots

Ah we hit upon the item customization, a powerful form of statcrack. This is a very good idea, and will certainly make the game more addictive. There are many ways to do this, for example, you could use certain item (a gem for example) to create a gem slot. You can get one or two, but 3 is 50% chance to fail and to loose all gem slots, 4 is 75% fail, 5 is 95% fail. The gemslots should only have a small bonus (like 2% dmg/resist, +1 stat etc). Getting 5/5 gemslots would be hard, and give you something to waist all those gems on. There are other potential forms of item customization, and they are worth looking at.

Hm. Or, further reducing the accumulation of gems, a system to merge the gems into a magical gem that can be used in this fashion. Clarification: Gems as they are now would be used as they are now, for jewelry and whatnot. An item you find in-game could be used to merge two of these gems to make a socketable gem, with formulas for the players to find. -Maybe- one recipe would produce random gems, for when you don't have the gems that produce the effect you want.

Damage and hps are poorly scaled.

What we need is some kind of damage and hp normalization. We need formula's to determine how these scale. Then we can randomly generate items based on the character or dungeon level and this scale. It would also guarantee that a green item is always better than a white, etc. It would also increase variety between weapons (now we have 5 weapon tiers? iron, steel, dwarfsteel, stralite, voratun). I don't even think the rest of the game follows this tier system and I don't know if it is the intention to have a tier system or not.

Probably haven't played the game enough to make any justifiable observation other than it really blows monkey chunks to find a dungeon (or city in my case) locked to you because it has many elites 15+ levels bigger than you in it, when Derth is... Derth. My first fighter to encounter the ... shocking problem Derth had didn't have to face these, but Igrun did. Ow. No way to fight that when you're level 16.

Respecs

I would vote yes for a no-bullshit respec that can be accessed from the levelup screen and has a cost based on your level and the number of skill-points invested. No quests or any other gameplay nonsense (no special respec-npc it does not make sense and it is a hassle). Just a cost in gold to prevent abuse (for example, 50g for one point at level 10, 500g at level 50).

Maybe have the cost scale with difficulty? Seems kinda harsh if you're just learning the game to pay 50g at level 10 when there might be stores with very nice gear. 50g at 10 is easy to come by, yes, but depending on how nice the RNG is, can also be very hard to reacquire before stores restock.

Scaling runes and infusions.

No ... yes... no... There are several ways to go about this. You could make them percentage of max hp based, and keep a small variation. this would make it very easy to predict what kind of infusion a player will have at any given time. For example, a healing infusion might heal somewhere between 60-80% of your max hp. This would scale with level, but if you have a 75% healing infusion you can still find one of those rare 79%. This would also prevent you from using a 600 hp infusion if you have 300 hp, so it would make certain infusions less overpowered.

Hm. No real easy way to answer gruevy's original message here, other than to say the RNG can be a harsh mistress. Igrun had ridiculously bad luck with runes and infusions, only one of his inscribed things was egoed... think the movement one. Don't think I can say yes to having all runes scale, but I think the starter dungeons (Trollmire, Scintillating Caverns, etc) should have a rune/infusion upgrade that will always be there to something that starts in the areas, and then the second starter dungeon could have either a second upgrade if you start with 3, or a third infusion/rune that will always be there as well. By upgrade, I mean it has no chance of being worse than what you already have. Just a thought, though.

[Nagyhal]

statcrack

You just summed up so much of my sorry life