Allow enchanting items through the Fortress

[Planetus]

I'd like to suggest the idea of the player being able to enchant unenchanted (white) equipment (and maybe runes/infusions?) in the Fortress, using Fortress energy. I'm thinking it'd be another feature unlocked at X energy, and it may have a golem-type guardian. When the player goes there, they can interact with something that opens their inventory menu. They select any white equipment and are given enchantment options, which would potentially include every possible random ego. Each ego would have to have a source, either nature, arcane, master, psionic, etc. and some egos could have multiple sources to choose from (i.e. fire on hit could be arcane or nature). The type and strength of the ego would determine the energy cost to enchant that item. I'm thinking maybe the quality of the item could allow more enchantments, or be a multiplier to the strength of the enchantment (not sure how egos work now). Maybe, if the player produces an item with 4 or more egos, the item gets the yellow or orange color and the player can name the item. I would imagine adding more than one ego would add a multiplier to the cost, as well.

Potentially very powerful, yes, but limited by access to unenchanted items (it's a pain to get a voratun weapon and armor for the crystal set already) and by Fortress energy. Would this still be too powerful? Would balancing require that the energy needed to make anything competitive with what's already available exorbitant?

[Nimmy]

I could see it work like this: after you transmogrify 100 thunderous weapons, the fortress begins to feel an affinity with thunderous weapons, and you now get the ability to enchant weapons to add to them the thunderous type (maybe all weapons, or just vanilla weapons). As transmogrification fuels the fortress, this might make sense thematically (only transmogrifications after you obtain the fortress would be taken into account).

This would only work for the first ego/type that you transmogrify 100 times, not for the others.

Probably a lot weaker that what you were suggesting.

[TheRani]

I think it would be cooler if you could tell the butler to set the fortress to search for a particular type of randart for some large amount of energy 500? 1000?
Maybe 500 for item type alone, or 1000 to make it avoid arcane or AM-powered randarts.
And then the next farportal would have a boss that drops a randart of that type.

[Planetus]

Nimmy, I like the idea of the fortress 'learning' enchantment egos, but I'd suggest this allow all egos as opposed to just the first one. What that would mean is that, as you transmogrify more items of different egos, you expand your library of possible enchantments, so rare egos would still be hard to get. That would make it harder to make overpowered items early on (in addition to energy cost and possible tier effects).

Rani, I intended this idea as a costly way to avoid the random generation of items that embodies just about every other way of getting items in this game. Specifically, I say so because the vast majority of randarts are quite limited in their benefits to a specific character because they so often include cross-class benefits (i.e. increase arcane damage and increase mindpower, who uses mindpower to generate arcane damage?). Most randarts I've found have had only one or two egos that really helped the character in question, which is then rivaled by many of the non-randart items I find, and completely overwhelmed by most of the named artifacts, including many that are a tier or two lower. As another way to address this, I'd appreciate it if the randart generator selected a random class and then selected bonuses that would be beneficial to that class (i.e. Arcane Blade can get +physical power and +spellpower, +MAG and +STR, etc, while a Necromancer wouldn't see any chance for +physical power, +STR, +fire damage, etc). But I imagine that solution would be much more complicated for coding (how do you define what benefits for what classes) and ultimately more limiting for unconventional character builds.

[Mewtarthio]

How does this mesh with auto-converting egoed items to gems?

[Planetus]

If you're talking about the alchemists extract gems ability, presumably it wouldn't count, since that doesn't count for Fortress energy either (at least I don't think it does).

[Mewtarthio]

Yes, that's it. The trouble is, once you activate the auto-extraction, you're forever removing your ability to learn egos for weapons and shields and severely hampering your ability to learn armor egos.

[Planetus]

That's the risk of auto-extraction. It's only a convenience anyway, and you're also forever loosing the gold and energy you could get by transmogrifying. I've done the math, you can't sell those gems for the same money you'd get from converting the items. That's the choice of extraction.

[random417]

Maybe make it less powerful, but easier to use and code... Just convert a white item to a randart or something, using the same random rules for randarts as everywhere else. It would cost less that way, but would be somewhat spammable, it the same way that the merchant is.

[Mewtarthio]

That's the risk of auto-extraction. It's only a convenience anyway, and you're also forever loosing the gold and energy you could get by transmogrifying. I've done the math, you can't sell those gems for the same money you'd get from converting the items. That's the choice of extraction.

...The entire point of auto-extraction is that the gems give you more gold/energy than the metal items. People were just extracting all the metal in their chests, then manually transmogging them all. The auto-extraction was added to automate this process. There is literally no reason to turn on auto-extraction if all it does is make you lose money (in fact, the auto-extractor really just calculates the value of a gem you would get from extracting and gives you the higher of that or the object's value).

[Planetus]

Mewtarthio, you may be talking about something different from me, but with all my play using alchemists, even recently, the gem you get from extraction is only dependent on the tier of the item you're converting. A white, green, blue, purple, and even randart iron longsword will all give you the same gem (or tier of gem), but the chest will give you more gold (and I presume energy) for enchantments on objects. When I convert even iron or steel randarts, I'm often getting 10-20 gold.

[Mewtarthio]

Mewtarthio, you may be talking about something different from me, but with all my play using alchemists, even recently, the gem you get from extraction is only dependent on the tier of the item you're converting. A white, green, blue, purple, and even randart iron longsword will all give you the same gem (or tier of gem), but the chest will give you more gold (and I presume energy) for enchantments on objects. When I convert even iron or steel randarts, I'm often getting 10-20 gold.

If you get more energy transmogrifying the item itself, then it shouldn't get converted into a gem automatically. The auto-extractor really just checks what gem you would get from extracting from the object, compares the value of the gem to the value of the object, and gives you whatever's higher. If you have a t1 longsword worth 4.0 gold or less, it should give you 4.0 gold. If you have a t1 longsword worth more than 4.0 gold, it should give you the longsword's actual value.

Of course, this is irrelevant to the topic at hand, because, now that I look at the code, you should be able to just run the "reverse-engineer the egos" function at the start of the transmogrification.

[Fayd]

The discrepancy here is that you are both correct; it is incredibly rare and difficult to get a T1 item more valuable than 4 gold when sold, from my experience, and as you go up in tiers, the problem gets worse. Therefore items that ARE more valuable (usually the salmon ones) still are turned into gold, but otherwise they get extracted and then transmuted, so it looks like a strict tier-based system.

That or Planetus is experiencing a bug. Which could happen.

[Planetus]

I just got the Fortress with my first character that could use extract gems since auto-extract became available. I thought Mewtarthio was talking about setting extract gems on auto-use or something, not a 25-energy change to the transmogrification chest. So, in effect, we were talking about two different things. But now that I've seen it, I noticed that this auto-extract was conditional on the gem being worth more energy (and thus gold) than the item, which I would imagine would be rare for enchanted items, especially heavily enchanted or randart items. So I doubt an alchemist using this would miss many ego items in doing so.

EDIT: After testing it out a bit, it seems the value, or at least transmogrification value, of gems has increased a lot. Now it looks like only randarts would survive the auto-extraction process. Since this is something that mostly only alchemists would have to worry about, and since it is being done through the Fortress, I could see the auto-extraction process still giving ego learning points.