So this suggestion aims to tackle 3 issues the game has right now:
Echo Exploration
Give all Unique/Set Items a decent value/purpose (evne if you don’t need it)
Enable targeted acqusition of very rare drop-everywhere uniques
Here are the details of what I imagine this system to be like:
This Mysterious Merchant would randomly spawn in echoes. (Not shown on the map until you kill enough monsters, you might not even know its in the echo until you kill enough monsters)
You could sell him a number of uniques or set items for some special currency (E.g. Ancient Dust). Depending on the rarity of the unique/set items it will grant more of that currency.
You can only sell a certain number of uniques/set items per encounter with the merchant.
The merchant has direct access to your stash tab, so you don’t need to teleport out and get the unqiues you want to sell.
He always has a limited stock of at least decently rare drop-everywhere uniqeus/set items and always 1 or 2 very rare unique/set items. (I am speakingtop 1/3 or 1/4 of rarity items; e.g. Bastion of Honour, Omnividience etc.)
A lot of these sugestiosn are obviously still up for debate and could slightly be adjusted.
But I feel like a system like this would at least rewards picking up unqiues/set items you don’t want to use yourself and also incentivises killing more mobs in echoes.
Why not allow players to collect shards of uniques? The way you get the shards could be any number of ways.
Shatter unique items to get random shards of uniques, trade them at an npc when you get enough or craft them at the forge etc. This allows you to “slowly make progress” towards a unique.
A dungeon system that allows you to break down uniques and get a shard of your choice, so say it takes 25 shards to make a bastion, if you do 25 dungeon runs and have 25 unique shields you can deterministically get a bastion.
A dungeon option is my favorite. Basically a dungeon thats entire purpose is to ease/deterministically obtain unique items. it would be a somewhat long grind in practice for the rare items, but it would be set up in such a way that you always make progress towards the item.
There is definitely a need for some form of recycling mechanic in the game, since most uniques are not worth picking up.
There is also definitely a need for more content in the game, either as a dungeon or as echo stuff.
@DiceDragon I am not a huge fan of the unique shards idea.
It would be nice to have a deterministic way of farming stuff, but I fear this might shine a light that is a bit too clear on the grindy nature of the game.
If the game puts the equation in front of you of the time you need to acquire a certain item, the game will end up looking like a deliberate waste of time, and start feeling like a job.
Say a dungeon run takes 30 minutes, you need 25 shards to make a bastion, then a bastion is worth 12 hours and a half.
Just to clarify, I think it is fine that an item requires tens of hours to acquire. It’s just that making it this obvious (such as making it easily computable with basic math) feels in bad taste.
I agree with you, this is mostly because a lot of the arguments lately seem to be stemming from exactly the lack of some kinda bad luck protection.
With bad luck protection, there is always a minimum that it finally goes “okay, you get it!” that bad luck protection once figured out just becomes the “grind” and if you get it before then, huzzah you got lucky! if not, then “i got it in pity, its all good”
So its a hard spot really, we can already deterministically farm items, but it clearly is still not enough based on the number of “where bastion” posts.
It is a difficult problem to solve.
The gambler was the most deterministic tool we have ever gotten for target farming uniques, and it had its own host of problems.
In POE the solution was essentially trade (I just mention this for completeness, please let’s not discuss trade in this thread).
I a m going a bit off topic here, but I feel that for LE a possible approach could be what they did with ravanous void, which is both a global drop and a boss drop.
In this approach most rare and desirable uniques could be also assigned as rare drops to some bosses (monolith/dungeon), so you have a good place to go to target farm them.
The solution proposed in this thread is to have a separate currency specifically for uniques, which could also work. I think the system that determines which items are offered would make or break the system. In order to be balanced, rare items will still need to be rare, but making them too rare would make the merchant essentially useless. (and you are going to be very sad if you don’t have enough currency when bastion gets finally offered)
My idea was something, where the merchant almost always has some of those fairly rare uniques and sometimes even the super rare ones, but the cost of them would be pretty high, so you need to frequently find and visit the merchant and turn your unwanted uniques/set items into that new currency.
My idea was that you can always only convert a handful of uniques and set items to that currency per visit of the merchant, so if oyu want to utilize it you woudl be incentivced to search for it frequently.
This would make your not able to buy anything for your first few visits, but once yo uaccumulated a bit of currency, that would be enough to buy some desired uniques you would be stoked to always check his stock, if it has something for you.
Tbh I really LOVE the ideas stated here as it gives uniques that you dont need for your characters builds a new value as you can trade it for shards / stuff you can trade for rare uniques.
I like this idea, if the big uniques are like 200 uniques cost or something else insane. While the small ones are like 2 or 3 uniques(cost equivalent to rarity)
Also if he shows up in the mono choice zone, not in the mono itself(because that would be annoying) - he has a mini boss fight or side objective you must do for him to be willing to trade.
