Items misc
NOTE: Part of the GWF changes were merged from hachem_muche's MR (!407 (closed)). However, I didn't feel that the special casing of a bunch of specific talents or the limitation to range 1 was necessary, so those were left out and just the basic system is here. Ihe no recursion flag is added here so if those special cases are decided to be necessary they are easily added. In my view, limiting melee attacks to range 1 but only if they're special doubled melee attacks from one talent introduces an unnecessary and weird inconsistency.
Randart Powers: A convenient counterbalance to the (mostly) talent level scaling of the most difficult content game is randart powers. Randbosses only equip a few slots of gear, whereas players equip many, and the more scaled players get the more slots they fill with randart items. This change cleans up some of the near useless randart powers (encumberance) and considerably increases the availability of the armor stat on them. Part of the armor gain is restricted to high levels as the early/mid game armor in the game is pretty much fine, but weapon damage is scaling out of control endgame, and armor is hard to get on gear. Many generic randart powers also had their values tweaked.
Rare Items: The generation algorithm for these is godawful. This is a problem especially on Normal/Nightmare because players expect rare items to be interesting, and instead get something that is generally a lot worse than a blue item. This is triples the randart power points on rare items and adds 2 more powers to avoid diminishing returns, which creates highly theme-focused items. The full impact of this is hard to evaluate, but it should make rares a lot more satisfying. I have now playtested with these changes quite a bit and am pretty happy with them.
Projection Ego: There are two huge problems with this. The first is that it makes NPCs able to pull huge burst damage ignoring blocking and at long range, and this is unavoidable unless you carefully check the gear of everything. The second is that it encourages melee players to play at range just whoring this ego instead of actually fighting as melee. As we are well on our way to melee classes not being horrible anymore this crutch is no longer needed.
The redesigned version gives a small bonus melee attack on random targets (not the same target) in range 10 on melee hit. Sort of a weird AoE variant with no relation to the old functionality. Number of targets is calculated by material level and each target can only be hit once.
True Grit: A huge problem on NPCs and awkward design for PCs. Redesigned a bit. Now the stamina cost starts at 1 and goes up by 0.3 every turn at all levels, the resistance apply on activation not just at the start of your next turn, and the cooldown and sustain cost are reduced. This is still ridiculous on NPCs if it can't be removed, but at least you have the option of running them out of stamina. After like infinity turns. Or something. Feels much better on PCs. Also upgraded to disable on runrest.
Greater Weapon Focus: Too strong in all cases, and kinda awkward for PCs ever since I made it not instant. This strictly limits the duration to scale to 8 at player talent levels and not much higher for NPCs, limits it to once per turn per weapon, and reverts it to be no_energy.
Shield Slam: Cooldown and stamina decreased. No idea what I was thinking with the original numbers.
Last Stand: Adjusted the defense scaling to match the dex part of Shield Wall and also made it add armor. Updated to disable on runrest. Increased cooldown to 8 but removed all energy costs.