The recent announcement on Item Gifting got me thinking what trading is really trying to accomplish at its core. Generally speaking, there is some rare item that I want and it would be nice to use a different rare item I found (or a large number of more common items) to swap for what I want. However, the root of the problem as often is the case in ARPGs is “there is some rare item I want”. The mechanism of clicking through a trade window isn’t particularly fun. The fun part is that you are being very efficient. Almost gaming the system to accelerate your progress. At times it feels like cheating. So what about a monster farming subsystem that allows the player to feel like they’re cheating by being so efficient?
SUGGESTION: TARGETED MAGIC FIND
Opposed to having a specific encounter give a higher odds of an item, why not flip the idea on its head and let the player customize their drop odds for ALL monsters? Let the player be so efficient it almost feels like cheating.
BASIC MECHANISM: A SPECIAL LOOT FILTER THAT WILL PERIODICALLY FORCE DROPPED LOOT TO BE SOMETHING THAT FITS THE FILTER RESTRICTIONS
Imagine a “targeted loot filter” you can progress alongside your character over time with more restrictions. When entering a zone there is bar you can charge up with monster kills and when it reaches full you are guaranteed to get an item that fits your “targeted loot filter”. So sort of like a pity timer with a heavy dose of RNG injected.
The more you customize your filter, the more limited your range of outcomes and therefore more powerful it becomes. Playing a fire build and want to perfect it? Target all those juicy fire affixes. Want to gather gear for a new build? Swap the filter settings around for the Werebear and acquire some baseline gear.
BALANCE: A QUALITY VS QUANTITY TRADEOFF
To prevent this from being blatant power creep there could be a catch. Every level of “targeted loot filter” restriction also results in less total items dropping. So the most efficient way to do general farming would be ignoring this tool. But if you really want a small subset of items then this will help substantially.
This concept is pretty half baked at the moment, and there are plenty of other ways to address targeted item acquisition without trade. But I hope this offers a spark for some creativity to think outside the box on ARPG norms in terms of what is allowable. Declaring that item gifting is the extent of trading actually frees up a ton of design space to do borderline broken things that are funner to interact with and min/max over time than PM’ing people on a trade forum.
We actually already have this. There is monolith blessings that cause you to drop more of X item, you can combine it with the drop more unique blessing. And you will end up getting a lot more of those items as random drops.
They might simply want to boost the values of the drop blessings. I think a lot of people simply ignore them because it takes forever to unlock the monos and clear them just to get a bad rolledl ike 40% more boots thing lol. They can roll up to 70% i think? I think if they buffed these and made setting up blessings more streamlined more people would be farming more effectively.
More options are never bad tho so more ways to target farm is always good.
If they did that, which would be cool, they need to change the blessing system so that you can “re-equip” any blessing that you have “learned”. I think that would actually increase the desire to farm for blessings.
They could simply increase the dropchance and reduce the rarity of LP on uniques. You get your build enabeling stuff faster but you need longer to have LP on the items.
Would solve all problems right now because There is no content LP is needed for anyway.
The first two of these are a bit TOO powerful, the third is not really worth it, as quantity IS quality when you actually think about it.
Blessings currently affect certain gear slots, maybe if when farming in monos, you can set some passive effects after completing them that last until the bonus is replaced.
EXAMPLE: if you hit an idol node on the mono tree you could set that as the more permanent mono bonus. And then each mono chest has a chance of free idols, plus enemies have increased chance of dropping idols. This lasts until you decide on a different node to replace the blessing(does not swich just from going into next mono, must choose to change this effect).
Also I really think “increased stability” should be one of the mono rewards, for people who are trying to just boss farm.
As far as I am concerned, monos should also have bonus objectives that reward something special, like a unique or idols or such. Or even that cause an alternate main mono reward, so players have to choose between reward A, reward B, or taking more time to get both.
Also touching all shrines should be one of the mono objectives that can roll. There should be more kinds of objectives.
