One thing about upgrading items.
Please do not make the mistake that you need an epic item to upgrade things and to get this item you must have done the only thing the update is good for.
example: There is only one dragon in the game and if you kill him you get an item that allows you to craft equipment that gives large bonusses against dragons.
example from PoE: The adra dragon is the hardest enemy in the game (without expansions). If you kill him, you get the only item that allows you to upgrade an armor to the highest level. But since you have already beaten the hardest enemy in the game (and the dragon is much more powerful than anything else), you do not really need to upgrade your normal armor to epic.
good example:
- several unique items from BG2 (though some of them were very overpowered)
- the way how you upgrade soulbound weapons in PoE (more like a quest than normal crafting)
I doubt we'd have to worry about this since it makes little sense to make the player work towards something only to make the prize generally worthless.
Speaking of strong, unqiue mobs dropping special stuff: it'd be nice to see optional quests/battles that are horribly horribly balanced in the enemies favor splattered through out the world.
IE I want to challenge a level 15 dragon and it's spawn while it's chillin in the forest of Fort Joy as a level 1-3. There's no main story related reason to do it, just a side quest (if that) and the fact that it's optional and I may or may not lose the opportunity to try again later.
It allows optional unique content and challenges to drive up difficulty without having to necessarily balance anything such that players have reason to come back to the game for more. Some players love masochism in there games (cough Dark Souls cough) and this lets you put it there without making a new difficulty and lets you reward players that truly master the system and tactics so they can overcome such challenges.
