An Update On The Various Rarities And Editions

The loot system in Grrbls is constantly under flux. And for good reason, it’s at the heart of the entire experience. I want the player to always have that rush of excitement of finding better loot but it also has to be tempered by still allowing “room to grow”. If you find the best possible gear and there’s nothing better to find, the game gets boring. So I’ve been working on making a system where there is always better gear and harder monsters to tackle.

I wanted not only differing tiers of rarity, but also differing tiers of rarity within those rarities (yes I am crazy). The issue with this became the redundancy in that if something was “just” more powerful, it really wasn’t that interesting of a loot system. Yes it feels good to find a Legendary, but not if it’s exactly the same as the Epic but just +5 damage. It’s ok, but it’s not AMAZING! And I want Grrbls to have most intricate and amazing loot system possible.

Towards that end, I have devised two aspects of rarity. The first is the rarity of the card itself (and that means the Class Card, Weapon Card, or Armor Card). These are the rarities you’ve come to know and love (Common, Uncommon, Rare, [a few other rarity types], Legendary). These are actually functionally different than their predecessor. I won’t get into details here, but suffice to say that finding a rarer card is not just more powerful, but it actually allows more customization or more functionality that it’s predecessor was lacking. So the first solution to redundancy is that rarer cards provider more depth.

But I wanted a way to differentiate cards of the same rarity. Games like Diablo and Borderlands do this with random stat ranges, so you might find the same weapon, but one rolled better than the other. This sometimes leads to hard to understand optimizations and I wanted a way to clearly distinguish gear that “is the same but better”. Towards that end I have come up with the edition system. This is unique to Grrbls (as far as I can tell), where each card drop has a chance to be of a higher edition. A higher edition is always better than it’s predecessor, it’s literally just more powerful. This is exciting to me because it’s hard to find the rare cards you want, but then finding a rare card and then finding that rare cards better edition is exciting. It’s a more powerful version of a rare card. Some of the editions are Standard, Bronze, Silver, Gold.

So by having both rarity (functional improvements) and editions (power improvements) working together I think Grrbls will have an intuitive rarity system where rarer cards are generally better, and better editions are always better.

Now you might be wondering what happens when you find the rarest gear and the best editions of them, the games over right, you’ve got the best loot? Nope, not even close. There’s also a rank system, and a world system tied to rank. I’ll dive into ranks and worlds in another post, but just know for now, finding the best gear is a great goal to beat the main boss for the world you’re in, but there will always be a harder world (a higher rank) after that — so you need to find even better gear now!

What do you love about loot games like Diablo and Borderlands? What do you wish was different/better? What do you think of this approach to a loot system. Share with me your thoughts!