Question about the merchant "superitem"

[Robsoie]

Before going to get my 4000 gold superitems from the merchant i'm wondering about some of them .

what's better (for a character with stats and skills that can wear everything) :
drakesin leather glove or voratun gauntlet ?
drakesin leather cap or voratun helmet ?
drakesin leather armor or voratun mail or voratun plate ?
drakesin leather boots or voratun boots ?

It's very unclear to me if all of those can/will deliver (according to random rolls) the same exact amazing item stats (or uglybad if unluck) or if some have more chances to give better something than the other (+stats/+skills/+res/armor/defense/+res etc...).

[SageAcrin]

The merchant randomized artifact rolls four very high spawn level egos(Which means they'll be on the high end of their variance ranges), and some randomized bonus elements.

This means that the various gear you get has biases based on what egos can appear on them.

For the different materials you listed, gloves, boots and helms have very little difference(sometimes none) between their light and heavy counterparts. So it's a matter of if you want more armor, or less fatigue.

Light, mail and massive armor have very different egos, though. If all else is equal and you can use every armor type, you probably want to go Massive, so you have a chance at the excellent "of the Dragon" ego appearing on the resulting armor.

As to which of those is better compared to each other...well, that's a function of what gear you've gotten already(if you've already got, say, Dakhtun's Gauntlets, you could get a better set of gloves, but you probably won't.), the gear that's available at that level, and your class; It's not a simple thing to judge.

As a rule of thumb, though, boots are really safe(Many good boots are lower tier utility boots, so you either will have a good boots already or not, and even then, artifact boots from the merchant tend to be more defensive in a slugfest than utility). Gloves are good, especially if you're AM(gives you a chance at good Warmaking gloves). Helms are good and solid; Mostly grab one if you don't feel your current headgear's up to snuff, but they're often a bit worse of a choice than Gloves and Boots. And Armor is generally good but often the tier 5 armors are fine and you're likely to get one that's applicable to your build, so this is generally one of my least favorite choices.

Also, note that next version will be rebalancing a lot of the egos, which changes things up here a bit. Mostly, randomized artifact lamps, wizard hats, robes and staves will be much better(though hats and robes are still unstable, due to possibly rolling a bunch of Mind/Spell effects for a mage/mindcaster respectively). Also, randarts from the merchant in general tend to be total flops less, from my testing/skimming the vaults of those that used the addon, so that's nice.

[Robsoie]

Thanks, so basically you mean that merchant superitem's drakeskin leather or voratun material for a same slot will end rolling with the same ego , the only difference being drakeskin giving less fatigue and voratun giving more armor/defense.

And that when it comes to the armour slot, the heavier will always have access to better ego in the rolls.

For my character , that just won i took a drakeskin glove and a drakeskin belt (as it was time for high peak and i had 9000 gold) that ended being nice, but i always wondered if going for the voratun version could have ended better.

But from what you say, it wouldn't have, as none of those slots were the armour one and so they would have rolled around the same ego anyways (with voratun only providing more armor/defense but more fatigue).

[Sianist]

And that when it comes to the armour slot, the heavier will always have access to better ego in the rolls.

No ... it have access to a partially different list of egos ... which might be better (might not be) depending on your class ... but if you're already able to use Massive Armor you're likely playing one of the classes that are more likely than not to count the ego's on Massive armor more worthwhile

[SageAcrin]

To be exact; Some items have different lists, some don't.

Light armor, Mail armor and Massive Armor have a big shared list, then three different subsets of egos that each one gets. Mail's tend to be shared with Massive, Massive gets a few the other two don't, as does Light(but Light Armor's unique egos aren't as good as Massive's. Arguably better than Mail, though.).

Robes, meanwhile, get a completely different ego list with no shared traits.

Caps and helms have(...almost? or exactly? I forget) the same ego list, but Wizard Hats have a totally different one.

By and large, every other piece of armor shares egos between its light and heavy varieties. There's a few little weird ones here and there(There is literally one light boots unique ego, "stealthy", which is as of 1.04 terrible and got pretty buffed in the code for next version. ), but in general, it's a matter of armor vs fatigue, outside of those exceptions.

(This is of course ignoring weapons; Knives/Maces/Axes/Swords/Tridents share egos, other weapons don't. Slings and Bows have their own mostly shared list with some uniques for each.)

[CaptainTrips]

The list of egos can be found on the wiki, but I'm not sure how up to date it is: http://te4.org/wiki/Egos

[cttw]

Be ready for massive disappointment. Also make sure you can afford it (if dwarf, always keep about 2.1k in cash).

[Robsoie]

Thanks for the clarification.
I'll have to savescum in my next game to test all those different ego.

[Doctornull]

Thanks for the clarification.
I'll have to savescum in my next game to test all those different ego.

I think you could also use cheat mode to give yourself tons of gold and test it that way.

[Robsoie]

Thanks for mentionning that, i will have to look on how to do this, sounds much easier and less time consuming than copy/paste save folders, swapping and renaming them

[CaptainTrips]

Create a file cheat.cfg in your settings folder (...\T-Engine\4.0\settings on Windows), with the line

cheat = true

then start the game, open the Lua console (Ctrl + L) and use

game.player:incMoney(x)

where x is the amount of gold you want.

[Robsoie]

Thank you, will be very usefull in my superitem experimentations.

[Robsoie]

While coming back from the East after completing Charred Scar to see what the towns shops refreshed their list with, on the merchant selling the "superitem" , i noticed in his "normalitem" list he had the artifact "Choker of Dread" , nothing abnormal as artifacts can spawn in shops.

But what surprised me is the insanely silly price considering it's not that good and i have much better (and my character being antimagic couldn't wear it anyways) :


the price of 3 superitems !

[Sirrocco]

on the bright side, that means it spawned, so you won't have to worry about it showing up in a boss drop. I always check all stores available to me for pretty much exactly that reason. Also, for some char builds, there are some uniques that are *worth* three superitems (...some of the on spellhit/spellcrit uniques for Anorithil, for example). If it shows up in a store, and you want it that badly, you're just going to have to pony up the money for it.

[Robsoie]

The funny stuff is that unless you grind a very lot of Farportal (good luck surviving) , you will reach that 12000 gold sum only after clearing every single dungeons of the game and completing it.

My yeek summoner did that, he cleared every single available dungeons then before entering High Peaks he purchased 2 superitems (one amazing, the other disapointing) , but was missing a bit more than 1000 to get a 3rd.
And once clearing High Peak + Sanctum , i could afford the 3rd.

So an artifact at 12000 gold is affordable once you completed the game and grinded all the dungeons, basically when you don't need it anymore