If I were king? Lol. Here goes...
Nothing in a store counts as Rare. Period. Take the best store items, like JoF ands QSD, and make them winnable (i.e. quest reward or boss drop), or make them just common items. If the latter, nerf it if absolutely necessary, but better to make the good stuff winnable. I considered the possibility of coding shops so that Rare items would only be there x% of the time, but then you'd just have people running back and forth between a shop and the nearest bed until it appears. Yawn.
If you really want to mark out Blue Light Special Deals in stores, call them something else besides Rare. They're not. Exceptional, maybe? But I hope we can cut out this whole class, as described above.
Rare items that are low-chance non-boss drops are fine as they are. In fact, move some of the lesser store-bought Rares into this category by changing which kind of drop list they are placed in. Say, 1-5% drops by boss-lieutenants or other tough-but-respawning monsters.
Winnable Extraordinary items are fine just as they are, I believe. I think they are all unique. This is a good thing.
The 7 random Extraordinary and 3 Legendary items (plus any future additions) could stay as they are, except I'd love to see a different name for winnable Extraordinaries and random Extraordinaries, if they both continue to exist.
Or...
Perhaps they could be made unique by tweaking the code to keep track of whether one has already appeared in the game or not. Sorry to everyone who has, or wants to have, 2 RoL etc to use at once, but I'm more interested in long term design than 100% backward compatibility.
Or make them all winnable, with the Legendaries toughest to get. I'm not really fond of the idea of really powerful stuff being random drops anyway.
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Pyrizzle wrote:Tom: Something like this maybe?
Legendary - The .01% drop items like the RoLS
Extraordinary - The .1% drop items
Unique - Items dropped by bosses or items that you can only get once
Rare - Powerful items from shops
Standard - Items dropped by NPCs (high drop rate) & Items that can be bought
Also a good list, and more straightforward than what we have now, though I still don't like calling something in a store Rare, when you can buy as many as you want, eventually, even if they are expensive. Unlike winnable or found things, the player doesn't need to be warned not to sell an item they can buy back at a slight loss. Price and stats should tell them all they need to know about whether it is a powerful item or not.