Light orange items could use improvement

[Praxis]

I'm talking about those that normally drop off rares and have unique sounding names. I don't remember last time I used one, maybe when I had an empty slot on a beginner character. Weapons for example always have base damage with some very situational buffs like or +3% arcane damage and +0.2 Psi per crit. Even regular greens are usable far more often.

[SageAcrin]

Rares(the term for those) need help, but at last check, they have some weird, special hardcoded methodology and can't easily have egos added.

And the trick they do use(artifact generation without egos but with increased randomized bonuses) basically doesn't produce very good items of most types.

As near as I can tell, it just shows why totally relying on utterly RNGed values, as opposed to designed sets of advantages, doesn't work too well. If the values just go up more, they will end up alternating between horrible and awesome.

[Crim, The Red Thunder]

Technically, it isn't orange, and using that color to describe it confuses people about the actual orange items (randarts) instead of the pinkish looking (salmon is the term I tend to hear) rares. Rares are always dropped by 'rare' enemies, found with a purple border and a slew of player class talents.

And you're correct. Even at high tiers, they tend to pull low numbers. However, every so often you stumble across one that is... quite significant. Like +20% crit multiplier, and spellpower stack on crit +7 (up to 3 times).

But yeah, a bit more variance in power levels might help.

Annnnd, ninja'd by SageAcrin.

[SageAcrin]

For the record, I'd really still love to see them get lesser egos assigned based on material level(getting a chance of one that increases to 100% at Tier 5) and a small chance of two lesser egos.

Lesser egos are surprisingly cool, can't compete well with greater egos(as they shouldn't), and it's basically the perfect way to make one underpowered item(due to being relatively weak) and another underpowered item(due to being very inconsistent on power) stay consistently useful-combine 'em later in the game.

But yeah, it's apparently a pain to code.

[Praxis]

Perhaps introduce more specific modifiers, like if it's a weapon then there should be more weight for +damage modifier and small weight for +magic resist penetrate.

[HousePet]

Adding a fixed property relevant to the item type would be good.
When I say fixed here, I mean weapons would have an offensive bonus, staves would have a spell cooldown or mastery bonus, armour would have a defensive bonus...
Just something to make the item passably usable for its slot.

[cttw]

I've found a robe of +104% crit damage with a doomed.

EDIT: turns out it was a randart.

[SageAcrin]

Are you sure that wasn't a randart?

I've never seen a rare generate with half that value.

(Regardless, if that's actually a Rare, it does prove the point that just upping values is a poor decision...208% critmod occasionally if you doubled it, and most of the items still wouldn't be that great. )

[Hachem_Muche]

Good News!

I did a little poking around in the randart generation code and found a pretty easy way to add a single ego to rare drops by using the full randart code with some adjusted parameters. I've put up an addon that can be used to test the new methods at http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/egos-rare-items

My preliminary testing shows that the new rare drops are much more consistently useful than before.

Please test this out and let me know how it works.

[SageAcrin]

Neat! I'll give it a shot.

Can it be tweaked to give only lesser egos? Or is making that limitation notably hard?

[Hachem_Muche]

There should be a way to restrict what egos can get applied, but I generated a couple hundred rares of various levels and a normal ego (type and chance dependent on level) seems to give pretty good results. If it's too powerful, I can dig into it more.

[SageAcrin]

Well, basically, my reasoning is, a lot of lesser egos are uniquely good and don't get generated much later in the game.

Stuff like the basic status blocker rings, the mono-element robes, rings and hats, etc., there's more in the same lines.

So it'd be a way to have them show up more later in the game, more than a way to nerf Rares. If anything, I'd like to see them generate with 1-2 lesser egos, rather than 1 lesser or greater.

But it's not as big of a deal as making Rares good; Just a thought to make them more distinctive.

[cttw]

Are you sure that wasn't a randart?

I've never seen a rare generate with half that value.

(Regardless, if that's actually a Rare, it does prove the point that just upping values is a poor decision...208% critmod occasionally if you doubled it, and most of the items still wouldn't be that great. )

It's the robe worn by this character: http://te4.org/characters/7470/tome/89e ... 1b1f9767b6

I am not sure if the correct name is rare or randard, sorry.

[Theyleon]

That's a randart (orange) item, the discussion in here is about rare (salmon) items (the ones that always drop from rare enemies)

[Hachem_Muche]

OK, I've updated a new version of the RareEgos addon (http://te4.org/games/addons/tome/egos-rare-items).

This adds a new filter setting that prevents lesser egos from being phased out completely at higher levels.