The blacksmith

[yerkyerk]

I like having a bunch of different useful NPC's (don't care much for the useless ones), one I would like to see is a blacksmith.

Rather than just a vendor - I'd like to see him being able to upgrade your items. Any unique in early levels gets useless pretty fast, because they're outlevelled easily and something better will have come along. Or, if something better has not come along the player walks around with really crappy weapons.
I think a good option would be if the blacksmith would be able to upgrade the base stats of items. That justifies an NPC with a useful function and allows people to hang on to their precious items a little longer, without unbalancing anything, as the affixes on the items will remain the same.

[alexei]

I think there are some usefulness in it and I welcome such mechanic. But in Torchlight, they implement it not on NPC but a magical shrine that upgrade weapon. Although encountering such shrine is not that frequent, but I still got a badass by upgrading my green several times, and lucky that it add more and more damage and elemental.

Putting this ability on and easily accessible NPC would make it unbalanced in my opinion. But with some suggestion and tweak, this mechanic might be good after all:

- Each item will only can upgrade twice. (in TL it can upgrade several times, maybe four or five I think)
- Not random upgrade but we can select the attribute on item we want to add. Like base damage, add xx elemental, add resistant to xx, add magical attributes like finding magic items and so on.
- With different upgrade price, and I think we need to make it extra pricey on upgrade. Low level char need to farm for money to afford an upgrade.

Or something like that.


ps: this is a bit off topic, but pleaase don't make such easily spamable skill like the final destroyer skill in TL. I just keep spam until the end, even the boss! Volcanic orb is also spamable in TQ but it's not working on all monster and pain to kite archer.

[Malpheas]

I think a good option would be if the blacksmith would be able to upgrade the base stats of items. That justifies an NPC with a useful function and allows people to hang on to their precious items a little longer, without unbalancing anything, as the affixes on the items will remain the same.


Either that or he/she could deconstruct uniques into unique materials for crafting purposes. I'd like to see something like this.

[yerkyerk]

Destroying uniques for crafting materials would work as well;
alexei; the idea I proposed is different from your idea.
Instead of upgrading it with magic affixes, I propose to only upgrade the base stats (damage for weapons, armor for armors) of weapons so they fit with the damage on weapons you'll find in the area. This is much like in D2, where you could upgrade a Normal item to an Exceptional to an Elite item with cube recipes.

[Malpheas]

The only problem with this is that it would be a straight base damage / armour upgrade and not an item type upgrade. TQ (and most other games other than diablo) did not have uniques based on a specific item type but more like a universal base (axes and not a war axe). So it would have to be more arbitrary a recipe.

I mean, I'm for this, but I would like, also, to see some more standardization of items and specific tiers. That compresses the amount of base items, saves time on art and lets you be more creative with unique art, etc.

Cheers,

Malph

[Skorpion_King]

I hated having to repair items at the blacksmith in Diablo2 and having to spend gold (and specially time) there.

A kind of "mistic blacksmith" who only improves items stats would be different, like the PNJs in Torchlight or Titan Quest.

If there will be not a lot of designs for items in grim dawn then upgrading them could be a good solution, same design but improved statistics.

[yerkyerk]

Actually, this sorta could be seen as a replacement of the repair function.

Think about it; it's not plausible that the satyrs and centaurs in Act 1 were so much weaker than the Neanderthals and Tigermen in Act 3. This was done to keep the game interesting and accomodate for the players increase in strength. So, upgrading your weapon to accomodate for higher difficulties could sorta be seen as repairing it.. if that makes any sense at all.

[Kluga]

Actually, this sorta could be seen as a replacement of the repair function.

Think about it; it's not plausible that the satyrs and centaurs in Act 1 were so much weaker than the Neanderthals and Tigermen in Act 3. This was done to keep the game interesting and accomodate for the players increase in strength. So, upgrading your weapon to accomodate for higher difficulties could sorta be seen as repairing it.. if that makes any sense at all.

It does make sense, but could you then run into a problem in harder acts where upgrading only the base stats of an item wouldn't suffice for the increase of difficulty?

Anyway, I am for this idea. It's a nice little money sink which will diversify item selection

[yerkyerk]

Well, it shouldn't suffice for too long; but just a little longer than is currently the case for low-end weapons. Because it's only the base being upgraded, the affixes will eventually be too weak.

[Ironpunta]

I like having a bunch of different useful NPC's (don't care much for the useless ones), one I would like to see is a blacksmith.

Rather than just a vendor - I'd like to see him being able to upgrade your items. Any unique in early levels gets useless pretty fast, because they're outlevelled easily and something better will have come along. Or, if something better has not come along the player walks around with really crappy weapons.
I think a good option would be if the blacksmith would be able to upgrade the base stats of items. That justifies an NPC with a useful function and allows people to hang on to their precious items a little longer, without unbalancing anything, as the affixes on the items will remain the same.

I don't know if somebody already talk about LOKI, but in that game, one of the few good things was the blacksmith. He can cover your armour swords and everythings with a better materials, in fact there was a list of a lot of materials like 20 in which for exemple, gold is better then silver but mithril better then gold and so on...
And u can recicle the items, also the white ones to recover better materials, in this way u became interested also at the white items