GrimArmory is looking to the future, and wants your feedback!
It’s been an ongoing issue in GrimArmory that enemy files with loot specific to them (which is basically every item in this mod) run into problems when Crate makes updates to those enemies. This is an issue that DeathHooks was made to tackle, though I never really capitalized on its potential…until now.
In the (hopefully near) future, my goal for GrimArmory is to make its mod-specific loot drop via the DeathHooks script, rather than finagling with enemy loot weights/tables. This will consolidate things internally for me, from a development standpoint, and will also make GrimArmory easier to update to parity with vanilla Grim Dawn content when Crate makes changes to their enemies.
So what do I want your feedback on?
1)
As far as I am aware, and this functionality may change in the future, an item cannot “drop” on the ground via Script. Instead, items can only be directly added to a player’s inventory. (e.g., some vanilla secret quest items) Do you think it would be problematic if Augury cards were added to a player’s inventory rather than first appearing on the ground? On the one hand, Augury cards are components, and therefore are automatically schlurped up when a player walks over them. But you still get to see them drop and be made aware of having received the loot. Direct inventory insertion does not have this form of visual communication.
A script could make use of UI notifications, such as SR Timer increases or the “A Nemesis Approaches” message, for when an Augury card is looted. But I worry about these notifications being too frequent and, subsequently, not paid attention to. I’d like your thoughts on this, too.
2)
While I’m making updates to the looting functionality of the game, I also want to consider changes to the functionality of Augury cards themselves. Currently, they are “partial” components, and you need to assemble a full stack of them to get the completed, “usable” version of the item that can be “spent” at Inusat. Back in the day, partial components could be auto-combined via a simple button on the UI screen, but that button no longer exists and its functionality appears to have been removed from the game.
So, the question then…should I make all Augury Cards ONLY drop as completed versions, similar to the way components function today?
Were this to happen, there would be two immediately-noticeable changes that would come with it:
- Any existing partial Augury Cards would be automatically completed. Free loot for those that get in on the system early! Woohoo!
- The drop rate of an individual Augury Card would be reduced roughly to the fractional rate at which one could assemble a “completed” Card in the current system. That is to say, that if you currently need 4 partial cards to complete an Augury Card, the droprate in this proposed new system would be reduced to roughly 1/4th of its current value. So Cards would be rarer, but you’d only need to see one of them to exchange them for an item at Inusat.