I wanna start by saying I really love D:OS2, it's already one of my favourite games and I'm super glad I backed the KS, so I'm not bashing the game as a whole but some things leave me frustrated and others are just kinda taking me out of the fun of the experience.
The game economics are frustrating and I've ended up using an exploit in order to have relatively at-level gear which you really need because the armour values on gear and the damage numbers from enemies rise very steeply level by level so if you don't keep up with your gear you're in trouble. And of course in a game where a lot of the fun in combat is about tactical skill combinations and experimenting to find them, figuring out new builds and such... well I kinda want to be able to afford to buy skill books.
I asked in a few places how to solve my problem and everyone just told me to stack thievery and steal pickpocket tens of thousands of gold worth of stuff. This is a totally viable strategy and I like that it's a valid skill path with some benefits and especially with a gear set specifically for stealing you can really become a master thief (which is great!) [b]but it shouldn't be the only (or at least easiest and most efficient/optimal) path.[/b] You should be able to have an honest party that can subsist itself through adventuring if you so desire, not one that comes in to town after battling horrors, raiding an ancient treasury and so on and find out that the sum total of all of the gold and loot that you found on that adventure is worth less than a couple of new skill books or a weapon that a random merchant at a stall in a village whose entire economy produces about 500g of fish a year is selling for more than the total property value of the entire Reaper's Coast.
There are a couple of methods in game to generate more wealth for yourself without stealing - Bartering and Lucky Charm and both of them need some changes, I think. First there's a bug (at least I assume it's a bur or at least a design oversight) with npc disposition where any gifts you give to an npc goes to whoever initiated the conversation regardless of the fact that you may be controling multiple characters and have switched to a different person on the barter screen in order benefit from their bartering skill because there's literally no point ever trading with any character other than the one whose civil points you're dumping into bartering. This is pretty frustrating when it isn't your main player-avatar who is the barterer and you forget to select Ifan or whoever to initate the conversation then waste some gold getting disposition with the npc only to have it not apply to your merchant party member. And then there's the problem that, say Ifan is my merchant, well Ifan can only sell stuff in his inventory so I have to go through everyone else's inventory and send him all the garbage I want to sell. [b]I think the simplest and most sensible thing to do is to have the game always use the highest bartering skill available in your party (or at least in some number of meter range around the person talking to the npc) for vendor prices. [/b] There seems to be no real reason to not do this and it'll save a lot of bother.
And then we come to the other thing, which is Lucky Charm. Lucky Charm is definitely how you can go to a dungeon and come back absolutely overwhelmed with loot if you stack it high enough. Like it starts sorta "meh" but at higher levels it becomes insanely good. My biggest problem with lucky charm is how "gamey" it feels. Not only because it feels very necessary to use it if I don't want to use an exploit on the vendor and I don't wanna steal then this is my only other option, but also because it becomes this sorta checklist: "OK here's a container... have I selected the party member with points invested into lucky charm? Check. Ok next equip the lucky gear set... Check. Ok now drink some booze, did I get drunk or not? Drunk! Check. Now loot as much as I can before the luck goes away." This probably works much better in a multiplayer game where you can just assign someone to be your main looter but even that seems like it'd feel rather gamey, and mostly it'd go the same as it does in my single player game where about 50% of the time I end up saying "Fuck I opened the box with the wrong character selected" or in multiplayer it'd be "Fuck sorry Bob, I opened the box, you were supposed to open all the boxes weren't you?" or "Goddamnit Bob stop opening boxes! They only contain shit when you open them but when Tim opens them they contain epics" - yeah frustration either way. And again I think the simplest solution is to have lucky charm apply to the whole party at its highest value.
Also honestly I think there should be some rebalancing of loot levels. Default 0 lucky charm looting feels awful because you rarely if ever find anything good. It should always feel good and rewarding to loot a chest you managed to find hidden somewhere or at the bottom of a dungeon. And on the flip side if it's made so you get more good/useful stuff without lucky charm then it'd be fine to nerf lucky charm a bit. Especially I'd like to see it flattened out a bit so it'd be a bit less "a few points: kinda ok, lots of bonuses stacked up from your gear: insanely good" like make having up to 5 lucky charm which is the most you can have allocated be most of the power and then have any points past 5 which you'd only reach with gear bonuses anyway have some diminishing returns. That way it'd be less gamey "leave all containers, put on lucky gear for looting" and more natural flowing adventuring.
