I liked the idea from Torchlight 2 in having a pet, of sorts to be able to ferry junk and what nots to merchants while the player remained on mission. The pet would be unavailable during its trek to, selling to merchants, then back. It would buy health/mana potions with the currency you gave it.
Now, to make this interesting, Im proposing some sort of blueprint system that constructs the pet is…what it looks like, how it moves, how much it can carry, skills that it can cast, any combat it can do based on its “type”, how much of a % it will cost the player in using this “mule” in returning the merchant proceeds and to what merchants it can sell to and how much time it takes and how much health it has before it needs healing. The type would be determined once only. If it reaches zero health, the player will have to find a way to ‘heal’ it before using it again with a hefty down time. Im thinking the professor and the player would work together to craft this “mule”. Just like the blacksmith, the player would need to find recipes to put together this creature along with ingredients just like the blacksmith crafting equipment. And there would be places and terrain the mule could not traverse or slowed by it. Any of the Rouge dungeons, it would sit outside that dungeon and wait for the player to finish. It might be restricted on how much damage it can do depending on the class and pet bonuses would be greatly scaled down as determined by the players class summoning abilities. And these pet bonuses restrictions can be slightly lessened through items and crafting the professor does depending on what the player finds/does. Can the pet be tied to the players spirit, health, who knows? Just thought it would be a cool idea and give the player an extra thing to toy with. And it would take actual game time for the upgrades to be completed and the pet would be unavailable for use during the time it was being worked on and the greater the benefit, the longer down time it would have. Also nothing saying the player wouldn’t have to sacrifice some health or spirit for the mules upgrades at all. And this would be available to all characters. Though, I think the stash management needs to be done by the player in person. And there is no reason why these mules couldn’t aide other party members in multi player. Pvp? Mule vs Mule? Why not?
What are you guys thinking? Could there be some sort of “kennel” for multiple mules for a shared type stash? What massive undertaking would that take and even what kind of maintenance the player would have to invest in up keeping these additional mules? Definitely food for thought
