Idea to spice up uniques

[buzzkill]

I know I'm a little late to the party but a really easy way to spice up those old boring uniques would be to (practically) guarantee an artifact drop if, and only if, you kill them the very first time you encounter/detect them. It would give you an incentive to fight them early, when it's still a risky situation.

[Pete Mack]

I think we are arguing different points: incentive to kill monsters vs degree of difficulty. I agree that there's no incentive to kill time hounds. But a group of time hounds behaves in a fairly predictable, and avoidable, pattern. So you run away. Big deal: I doubt I've ever seen 10 groups of time hounds in a single game, and I rarely see even 5. Yes, they suck. No, they don't interefere with game play.

[Hariolor]

I know I'm a little late to the party but a really easy way to spice up those old boring uniques would be to (practically) guarantee an artifact drop if, and only if, you kill them the very first time you encounter/detect them. It would give you an incentive to fight them early, when it's still a risky situation.

Not a bad idea, but I'd never ever again play a halfling rogue down at DL50/CL15 - I'd miss out on too many uniques.

How about just a guaranteed artifact drop, period? At least for the comparably tough and/or flavor-appropriate uniques?

Heck, I'd even be happy to see artifacts never show up on the floor (no, not even in vaults), if in exchange uniques gave more reliably awesome drops. Especially late-game.

The initial point of this thread, after all, was that for the difficulty and resources spent on uniques, I'd love to see some sort of tangible benefit beyond "well now it can't be summoned".

[Nightmarjoo]

I'd just like it if a greater proportion of uniques had drop_great and all uniques that dropped anything had atleast drop_good. Perhaps there could be some limitation though, that they'd drop stuff generated from their native dungeon level, the way chests generate objects based on the level you pick them up at instead of the level you open them at.

[PowerDiver]

The initial point of this thread, after all, was that for the difficulty and resources spent on uniques, I'd love to see some sort of tangible benefit beyond "well now it can't be summoned".

There are only two important fights in the entire game. If you achieve even a small benefit towards either of those fights, that is a bigger deal than an extra artifact clogging up the home waiting for a "what should I sell" thread.

There are not that many useful items in a typical game. If every unique gave you an item you wanted to wield, you would be horribly overpowered long before the end.

[bio_hazard]

This is probably getting into variant realm, but what if killing a unique gave you some token that either allowed you access to a good black market, or you could actually trade the tokens somehow for goods or services (like trading in your ski-ball tickets). You could even assume they don't take up space so it doesn't complicate your personal or home inventory.

[konijn_]

This is probably getting into variant realm, but what if killing a unique gave you some token that either allowed you access to a good black market, or you could actually trade the tokens somehow for goods or services (like trading in your ski-ball tickets). You could even assume they don't take up space so it doesn't complicate your personal or home inventory.

I've been thinking about that..
Hellband has many Demon uniques, I was thinking about having them offer a scroll of 'Alternate Reality' which when read puts the user on the same dungeon floor with a guaranteed artefact on the floor. Of course all monsters might be OOD, but hey, thats the life of an adventurer ;]

T.

[Atarlost]

Why an artifact? You probably wouldn't make a run at the Tarrasque for any artifact that wasn't gamebreaking, but you might try to kill it for a guaranteed stack or 50 *healing* potions. Earlier uniques could have guaranteed random stat potions, or even a 50% chance of having a random stat potion.

Guaranteed artifacts lead to fixed kit between games unless they're useless anyways. You see this in ToME where allmost everyone uses the orc cave artifacts unless something in their build requires them to pass on one or more of them.

[Hariolor]

As far as artifacts go - I agree that a stack of 50 !*healing* would be vastly more valuable than most artifacts.

But as things stand, one gets the distinct impression that there's a fairly small set of "endgame" artifacts, and quite a large number that are take-it-or-leave-it. This is part, I think, of what PowerDiver was getting at.

However, I would suggest that there is already an artifact TMJ issue (as in too many artifacts that aren't very helpful). So as a result, I spend all my time at the lowest levels scumming around for artifacts. Perhaps this is considered an integral part of gameplay - I personally would rather have to do as little level-scumming as possible. I think upping the frequency with which uniques drop_great would be a way to address this, and also spice up uniques.

[fizzix]

As far as artifacts go - I agree that a stack of 50 !*healing* would be vastly more valuable than most artifacts.

But as things stand, one gets the distinct impression that there's a fairly small set of "endgame" artifacts, and quite a large number that are take-it-or-leave-it. This is part, I think, of what PowerDiver was getting at.

However, I would suggest that there is already an artifact TMJ issue (as in too many artifacts that aren't very helpful). So as a result, I spend all my time at the lowest levels scumming around for artifacts. Perhaps this is considered an integral part of gameplay - I personally would rather have to do as little level-scumming as possible. I think upping the frequency with which uniques drop_great would be a way to address this, and also spice up uniques.

No good. Try it...

I did, I futzed around with the drop good and drop great. If you have 25% or more of the uniques dropping great you become overpowered. Drop great is just too strong. I do recommend playing around with it though, you'll get a good feel for balance.

A while back I made a thread about changing the drop-good to include various items like stat gain potions and potions of healing. I still think this is a good plan although there didn't seem to be much enthusiasm for it.

[s0be]

Yeah, I've run into this too... my attempt at solving this problem was introducing a drop_better that has a 50% chance of dropping any item with the better flag (which I added to all the items that were not egoable that I considered to be 'ego' calibur, and were not already handled by drop good/great hacks).