Ideas for my RNG overhaul project

I now made a mod for titan quest so i know how to add prefixes and suffixes to unique items.

Now i’d just like to figure out what the scope of my mod should be for grim dawn. Could use some advise on the spells part and ideas for progression.

I know it will be controversial but I want to:

  • increase randomness of items, make it so that players slowly progress from full yellow items to full green…blue and lastly purple. I think i have a general outline for this. I’d make it so that items have a high chance to roll awful prefixes that give minus to important stats but have a low chance to roll good prefixes. This means Most items will be shit so if you get a legendary item, it’s likely to be unusable.
  • change progression from short to long term, i’m not yet sure how to accomplish this. I could just make all mobs scale to any level and increase xp required to level but that seems cheap… I feel i want to change gameplay a bit, maybe make it so most of the leveling is through bounties?
    - reduce randomness of spells and increase skill cap of combat. I dislike how some spells are completely random and it feels like you just aim in the general direction of mobs and hope for the best. This is what i feel will be the hardest to change and not sure if worth it. Like instead of meteors shooting in random directions i want them to shoot in the same place every time. So if the meteors miss, it should be because player failed to aim correctly, not because of luck.

So my questions i guess are:

  • is it possible for affixes to roll at minus? I just tried editing a unique to have minus eather resist and instead of -50 it had 15920952095 resist lol (not exact number but you get the point). If not i guess i can make it so affixes are more important than unique item’s stats. So a yellow item with a good affix would be better than a legendary with a bad affix.

  • Any ideas on how to remove the current anti fun grind method of exiting to menu and going back in and just spamming 1 gate over and over again, just running to boss and back to menu? Maybe if i could make teleporting cost money? Then possibly players would want to clear everything instead of just going out and back in menu.

  • Any easy ideas that allow me to change the gameplay from mindless slaughter into something that takes more skill? I’m thinking about making projectiles slow but hurt a lot. Reduce the amount of mobs possibly to increase clarity.

I remember when i played minecraft and when arrows were slow. That’s when we kept kept running sideways to dodge the arrows. But when they increased arrow speed, suddenly you could barely do that anymore so we just changed our strategy to just run straight to archer mobs and prioritize killing them instantly. I feel like grim dawn has the same issue, theres so many things happening and yet the player just smashes through all mobs. The only time you die is if you get unlucky or even just blink with your eyes. I was watching some videos and saw how a player facetanked a boss and didn’t die even tho his hp went from 100% to 2% and back to 100% in just a second! I’m not sure how but i want to make the combat less like that. Instead of dying because of 1 mistake, i want players to die because of multiple mistakes but have the combat still be harder and more skill based than vanilla.

So an acceptable way of dying in my opinion would be one of these:

  • failing to dodge a spell + failing to aim a spell
  • failing to dodge 2 spells in a row
  • failing to aim 2 spells in a row

I feel like i can easily change items and progression (kinda) but gameplay would be much tougher to change and not even sure if it’s possible. I feel if anything i’d change a few things that have a huge impact.

Also, did any mods do something that i want with the gameplay?