Artifact and General Item Balance Discussion

[jotwebe]

Bill's Tree Trunk
Lower base damage a bit, give it a large phys power bonus. And/or chance to unbalance on hit. Activate for baby's massive blow.

Cuirass of the Thronesmen
Add small damage affinity to everything but physical.

Warmaster Gnarg's Murderblade
Instakill when under 30% life. Clear that chaff. Maybe Cleave chance?

Elemental Fury
Resistance penetration instead of damage bonuses.

Colaryem
5% chance on hit for elemental surge lightning.

Flamewrought
Scrap/replace. How about a pair of gloves called Day and Night? Fire/light+dark/cold?

Thalore-Wood Cuirass
I think it's pretty decent as well. A bit of Cut immunity maybe?7

Ring of Growth
Should give +1 to size, naturally.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Having made several artifacts with hidden procs (Untouchable, Storm Fury, and Colaryem's strength interaction), I've tried in all cases to make the lore suggest the effect. The problem comes in with people just sort of brushing it off as lore with no true significance.

I've thought about a more explicit "extra function" tag like Housepet suggested, and honestly it seems like the best idea at this point in time.

Definitely disagree on this. Speaking as someone currently assaulting high peak with 'untouchable' and it's hidden effect, the lore hints at special effects are MORE then enough. It's enough to make you WANT to experiment and see if 'Hey, there's something special here! This item just became awesome!', or even be AFRAID to experiment (Prothotipe's eye in an alchemy golem, for instance. I want that so bad, but I'm afraid there will be some... negative effects.... and none of my alchemists have ever gotten it.). This is pure win.

If anything, there should be MORE hidden features, to encourage this level of experimentation among players. (And if someone isn't reading the lore, therefore missing the clues, then THEY are doing something wrong, not you.)

[PureQuestion]

The problem is that ToME tends to tell you everything, and when it doesn't mention something, people tend to assume it isn't there. I certainly like mystery, but it's hard to get players to look for them when they aren't the norm.

[SageAcrin]

If anything, there should be MORE hidden features, to encourage this level of experimentation among players. (And if someone isn't reading the lore, therefore missing the clues, then THEY are doing something wrong, not you.)

I feel like this should be the realm of race/class/special condition bonuses, not general use stuff that makes or breaks an equip.

The latter is way, way too important and leads to people trashing artifacts that otherwise might have been useful for them. As is seen here!

The former's just neat bonuses and not required for the equip's functioning. That's more the lines of how it should go, to me.

[jotwebe]

If anything, there should be MORE hidden features, to encourage this level of experimentation among players. (And if someone isn't reading the lore, therefore missing the clues, then THEY are doing something wrong, not you.)

Plus it also encourages/rewards code diving.

[SageAcrin]

If anything, there should be MORE hidden features, to encourage this level of experimentation among players. (And if someone isn't reading the lore, therefore missing the clues, then THEY are doing something wrong, not you.)

Plus it also encourages/rewards code diving.

Is that supposed to be a benefit...?

I mean, it's inevitable that code diving (or guides made from those that do it) is going to come up-talents don't need four pages of errata rules for exactly how they interact with each other, necessarily. But it's not really something that should be encouraged for any reason that I can see...

[jotwebe]

Is that supposed to be a benefit...?

It was supposed to be a counter-argument to Crim's claim that it encouraged experimentation. Although I suppose that code-diving leads to coders which lead to more stuff...

[SageAcrin]

Just making sure.

[Zonk]

Worth bringing up as it's basically a bug/oversight...

Skin of Many(which I haven't seen mentioned before in this thread) has a special undead only bonus: it removes the stealth penalty, gives confusion resist(good)and gives FEAR resist.
Issue with the last: undeads are already fear immune. So remove that(it's just clutter)and maybe put something else fitting there?

[SageAcrin]

It was mostly thematic anyways, and there's also an ego hat that lowers Fear resistance now.

Doesn't really hurt.

(Though, in the interest of full disclosure; No, I hadn't thought of that, and no, I wouldn't mind it being changed to something else, like Silence resistance. Seems like if that armor was being friendly to you, it would be hard to keep you silent, since it only is if it likes you...)

[PureQuestion]

With the help of SageAcrin and supermini, among others, I've just submitted a very large artifacts tweak patch. Expect to see it pop up on the repository sometime soon.

[PureQuestion]

Added a bunch of responses to the spreadsheet.

[grmblfzzz]

I think skin of the many was probably a better example of shenanigan hidden things than Untouchable, honestly. I had no idea! I will grant that Untouchable has both a unique/interesting effect, and enough hinting that the inquisitive will investigate... but looking at the code of the effect, it's like another layer of obfuscation in that it's cool and calculable powerful, but being able to determine how it works from a little bit of in game testing, with any precision? Good luck!

On a similar note, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, there is the AM items. Many of them do sweet, extra things if you're a follower of Zigur, but I'm pretty sure that they ALL don't, which is kind of weird, and really disappointing when you find one of them. At least, I'm pretty sure they all don't, only did some haphazard testing while throwing stuff onto my Oozemancer. Consistency is good! Particularly because the AM Items need to be pretty cool/useful because of the sheer volume of arcane items that you're using.

A general suggestion for artifact design/change: Something interesting to do to artifacts that need some love somehow would be to actually make some more race-specific stuff. Don't have a count, but the spread is currently not anywhere near even, I believe. Dwarves have a bunch, humans have 1 notable one... undead apparently have skin of the many...

Havn't gotten around to looking at your changes PureQuestion, but I definitely will soon. But in case people overlooked it and/or you didn't implement anything of the sort... My favorite suggestion made so far on the spreadsheet was by Shibari to make some weapon, somewhere (He suggested Unerring scalpel, but I think it's already a solid and well designed item), that has the property of ignoring enemy evasion. Some tier 2/3 weap that is currently questionable, and it would retain some use later on when specifically fighting rogue-esque enemies (similar to scalpel with it's accuracy).

[SageAcrin]

Heh, actually, undead don't have Skin of the Many in 1.04.

One of the last things I did in that aforementioned addon(which was added to the depository) was add a bunch of artifact tweaks. Most of them were actually racial tweaks and AM bonuses. (Undead didn't actually have any at all in 1.04; They got Skin of the Many and Corpsebow racial bonuses, and Staff of the Archlich was expanded from Lich to all undead.)

A few equips still lack AM bonuses-I believe Guardian Totem and Remnants both lack specific AM benefits, Totem because when I originally suggested the idea, it was deemed to be kinda overkill, and Remnants because...well, even if I don't agree with it being incredibly necessary, it's already really quite good. But it should be far less of them now. And every race should have at least one racial equip, now.

(Though, sadly, it's still just the one for humans and Shalore...not a lot of weapons are distinctly themed after them. Thinking on it, I probably could have gotten away with making Wintertide have a Human racial bonus.)

[Shibari]

Sorry for some of my notes being half-finished/in wrong places, I meant to clean more of that up. I can't go through Pure's additions at the moment but should have a response by mid-late tomorrow.

Edit: By the way, this has been a fantastic format for discussing changes I think. Great job grmbl and everyone involved!

Edit #2: My power died for a full day, I'll add thoughts todayish :p.