Class-specific lockers?

[MTaur]

[secondserpentarius]

I was thinking more about Vicious Shops replacing your current Item Prep so that those combinations don't happen. "Hey instead of using my lockered item on this run today, how about I use a Vicious Shop instead?"

I would support this because I feel that being able to prep Vicious items makes the game too easy. I just unlocked Avatar's Codex and I just curbstomped Cursed Oasis as a Monk, which previously was finding incredibly difficult. I really would not mind paying for these items to prep them.

[TheSchachter]

To be fair, both *Monk vs Cursed Oasis* and *Monk with Codex* are unusual in how they interact; they're not particularly representative of normal play. Avatar's Codex is probably the only (or one of the only) *reliable* ways of beating that dungeon with a Monk in the first place.

Preparing an item to ask it shows up in a shop has the problem that you might only find that shop on the very last tile of unexplored terrain and would lead to scumming (not unlike similar earlier suggestions of making the altar preps show up at a random spot but without penalties). Or you make the shop spawn at the entrance, but that gives added flexibility in when you want to put it in your inventory. Or you just make it so the prep gives you a starting gold penalty, which could actually be an interesting means of balancing items that are particularly stronger when prepped than when you have to buy them in a shop... but then, is that really desirable? If you don't feel like preparing that awesome item because it really limits your possibilities of using other items to adapt to the in-dungeon situation, you may as well forget about prepping anything other than a Fine Sword every time (which is easily one of the most efficient, powerful, all-purpose preps anyway)

The Vicious reward items are powerful, but also specialized; using them efficiently most often means investing into a specific strategy and also requires a fair amount of game knowledge (except maybe for Namtar's Ward). They require a very high skill level to unlock. I think their power level is fine. Personally, in terms of the whole locker debate, I always thought it would have been a nice compromise to eventually unlock special "trophy slots" for permanently housing those items after showing mastery of their respective dungeons (something like beating it with 5 classes, or purist perhaps) so that very high level players could still keep them around as a reward while having more locker space to experiment with other items... But the way things work now are just fine to me.

[Lujo]

^ Yeah, I'm down with that. Right now the more you progress the fewer locker slots you have in effect because they're acting as trophy slots which is highly unsatisfying. People would still cram their lockers with subdungeon intems, but that would still leave room open for experimentation, and you don't have to beat a tough run to get any of those (you cant scumm for them really, but you know you can just bump into them).

[MTaur]

If you had to pay for a trophy slot, how much would it be worth? Should the cost scale?

[MTaur]

"For only 10,000 gold, we can install a secure facility to house only our most epic loot. So secure that it requires two keys to open. Luckily you own both of them. Isn't that how these things are supposed to work?"

[Lujo]

If I could pay for a throphy slot, I'd pay RL money XD

They could litterally make it a single-feature expansion pack. They wouldn't do it, people would call them cheapskates and highway robbers - but it would sell XD

But in all seriousness, that should really be done at one point, especailly if the game's income from sales has doubled. There'll be people grumbling about it eventually. Instances of being "punished for progress" are really infuriating things.

[Tinker]

Hmm. I never felt that there were too few lockers. If anything, I kept catching myself preparing always the same 1-2 items, so I had to take them out of the lockers to force myself to try new stuff. I haven't played too long yet so maybe this will change, but so far I've never felt any difficulty fitting my stuff in my lockers (and actually I value return slots much more than lockers, I'm probably going to unlock all of those first before even thinking about expanding on my locker space).

That said, class-specific lockers do sound like a cool idea! I've often wanted my Assassin to start with an Amulet of Yendor, or my Vampire to start with a Sensation Stone, or my Monk to start with the Martyr Wraps, or my Paladin to start with a Soul Orb, which are items that I don't usually prepare with other classes. Not sure if it's worth the development effort, though, but still a really cool idea.

[Astral]

For me it was the exact opposite. I almost unlocked all of my lockers before even realizing that veto slots aren't completely useless. Still to this day I rarely use them, on normal runs I like having the possibility of running into random item combinations. The only thing that has a permanent seat is the Stone Sigil, it's effect is lackluster and unneeded, it's overpriced and has a bad CP value on top of this.
I do like stuffing all the bad CP fodders there when I try a CP monster strat, but I play stuff like that once every ~20 games.

Tinker, if you like high CP, instead of using the Sensation Stone, try prepping a Yendor with less glyphs and a transmutation scroll. Transmute Yendor for the 100% bonus and 45? gold (more CP fodder from shops, yay!) and convert a useless glyph for 300 CP. This works even better on classes with a starting glyph.