Oh… crap. /me grabs his sapros. 
Great minds think alike I guess then eh.
We’re currently thinking about a hybrid system where recipes sometimes involve unique items.
This is the way Sacred 1 did it. It worked well; pity Sacred 1’s loot system was an absolute shambles of organisation.
Cheers,
Malph
Yeah but with S1 you could save where/when you wanted and reload the game if you died and lost your SB. I’d hate it in a game that has auto/always save like TQ. I dont like the auto/always/active or whatever its called save function games have.
I like to have control of my char and reload a save file if something doesnt go the way I like. It was S1’s best function, I wish all games had the same save function as S1.
That feature in Sacred was so exploitable it was ridiculous 
It wasnt an exploit it was a feature! 
The feature was the save system, the save system was exploitable
You could save right before you killed a dragon (like 1 or 2 hits left)…then kill it and keep reloading until it drops EXACTLY what you wanted.
I think that’s why most ARPG’s don’t go that route as far as the save system…
Yea, not being able to save and reload the game is a good thing, imo. Makes the character and actions feel more permanent (though I think the save button should still be there - just in case you’re afraid your pc crashes right after you find the cracked sash of doom).
Anyway, to avoid confusion on the idea I postponed; my intention was to let players build up an mf meter (which is build up through experience) which resets every game. The higher the meter, the more chance at finding magical items you’ll have.
I also consider farming to be mostly an end-game activity, to further progress your character. Farming is a mini-game - but the monotomy doesn’t seem to be a necessary part of it. You can still do bossruns (and keep them an effective way of farming), but also remove the high reward of running the same boss over and over again. If the rebirth=faster than portalling thing is fixed, you can plan to do several boss runs. You could visit Typhon, Hades, Secret Passage, Snake sisters, Dragon Liche, Hydra, 3x Telkines, Charon, Cerberus, etc… all in a single game, instead of just visiting Boss X and restart the game a hundred times over because
- You have the fast rebirth fountain activated
- Boss X has the best drops
This problem will remain if things aren’t changed, and though this only has an effect on endgame - it would make farming less fun and enjoyable to me. There’s a reason I used to farm my ass off in D2, whereas in TQ:IT my farming was rather limited (except when playing hardcore on an increased difficulty mod).
And in regards to the OP; although I do understand what point medierra is trying to make by completely disregarding the dictionary, I see no harm in farming being both fun and enjoyable.
That is EXACTLY what I LOVED about it. Makes farming much more fun compared to any other game I’ve ever played.
If this was a certainty in GD, I’d almost immediately become a Legendary Donor. 
Hmm, maybe it’s just me, but I played closed Ascaron.net servers Sacred 1 and never had the opportunity to exploit the save file for survival bonus. That was never an issue. Ah well, for playing non-single player.
Almost every aspect of Sacred 1 in single-player is very abusable in some kind of way. You could have a starting character with lots of money and a stockpile of skills to turn into whatever you want by just abusing the Import function, I recall.
I would appreciate an easy way to fight bosses repeatedly. Not to farm them, but to test my skills or my set-up or to enjoy a longer fight.
Farming wouldn’t be an issue, if the overall drop quality was satisfying and/or unique items weren’t so imba.
#1 You need to farm, if your melee toon finds mostly caster items and vice versa … that cannot be helped (well, it can but should not because) and has been an incentive to start a new toon of a different class, which can use the stuff effectively.
#2 In TQ I ignore white/grey and most yellow items. I wonder if GD can improve in this aspect. White items could offer the highest armour values, but nothing else. Yellows items could have decent armour and absolute attribute/HP/energie/damage bonuses. Green items could come with good armour, mediocre absolute bonuses and best resistances. And so on for unique items. The blue ones could include %-bonuses and the purple ones boost skills. (Mobs will wear some grey stuff, but it will not drop in GD, will it?)
A balanced set-up would require items of different quality. An all blue or purple set would require that set-bonuses compensate the lower base values.
Farming would become less beneficial/necessary as unique items would serve a more specific purpose. But you could allow, that players put enchantments on them in GD.
Optional - not sure if this is fun: White items are non-magical. They might take damage and wear out (turn grey) eventually. So you need to replace them from time to time. Any enchantment on them should return to your inventory.
I agree with much of your thinking eisprinzessin. I think toning down a lot of the bonuses, especially on the lower tier unique items would help bring things into balance better. If white items dropped in a wider level-range there would be more chance to find white items that greatly surpassed the base armor or damage of whatever magical items you might have equipped, at least early on in the game.
It might also be good to lower the drop rate of bosses a little more after the initial kill but locate them in areas with other tough enemies that had increased drop rate so its more of a level-run than just a boss-run. Then we could make things a little more interesting by allowing for spawn variances with unique hero monsters. To some extent, part of the lottery aspect of the run would then also be the potential for big drop-rate increases caused by randomly spawning heroes.
Maybe instead of just near the bosses, make heroes spawn very frequently throughout the game which have boss-like drop rates every time you kill them. If you can find heroes frequently throughout the game that have similar drops to 2nd-time bosses, you won’t be so inclined to run a boss over and over. Think about the frequency with which hero monsters appear in Torchlight. That often. Like at least 1 or 2 per floor/area.
That should work, one way to get people away from spamming bosses would be to offer interesting random rewards…
Also, here’s an idea for whites;
Allow them to drop with sockets/enchants - and allow them to get socket slots. Say you find a white unsocketed hammer. You can than go to the local socketeer and pay him, he’ll than give you a random amount of sockets on your weapon.
You can either use these socket slots for actual sockets, or you can go to an enchanter, which you can pay for putting an enchantment on your weapon (which costs 1 socket slot and a bunch of currency).
It could make for an interesting money sink as well allowing people to get their personal items.
Definitely something we want to do. With our new drop system we will be able to improve the consistency of drops for heroes.
I think that increasing the occurrence of the hero monsters is a great idea, as is sweeting their loot tables. It is fun to encounter the heros in TQ, however it’s also anticlimactic since few of them are of significantly greater ability than their lesser cohorts.
Here’s another possibility regarding loot: Make some or many of the game’s items occur in very specific areas of the game. Loot in TQ in Normal difficulty was, with very few exceptions, found in a single act. The bulk of items that dropped in Epic and Legendary difficulties could be found in two or more acts in either difficulty. Instead, Grim Dawn could limit items to specific zones within a given act. If Act I had twenty different areas, perhaps Iron Ore could be found in areas six (foothills), seven (mountain), and fifteen (mine). Monster charms in TQ were managed in this way and I thought that it was inventive, not to mention a refreshing break from farming those poor old Telkines. Similarly, perhaps different technologies could be regionalized around specific towns. If there is a village in area eleven, leather armor produced by craftsmen of that town could be found in the adjacent area(s). This would create a greater incentive to farm/revisit areas of the game that don’t necessarily involve farming a boss ad nauseum.
TECHNOmancer
I had to play nice on TQ. You can expect hero monsters to be significantly beefier. I was thinking it would be cool to create even a higher tier randomly occuring “uber hero” type monster.
Oh yes, definetely
And at least as strong as, or perhaps stronger than endbosses. They’re optional, so people can skip them if they can’t beat them.
If they could drop interesting stuff that others don’t it’d also detract people from running the same bosses.
:eek: I was hoping they’d be a little easier. I hated getting 1shotkilled regularly by various monsters I encountered. I thought TQ was quite unbalanced in that regard in some parts.