Legendary Items and Enhanced items for the main game

[mareykan]

Legendary Items and T4 Enhanced items are incredibly fun in Street Brawl.

Those items should be added to the main game mode under specific circumstances...
Like if you defeat the Midboss, or Deliver an Urn your most expensive item gets upgrade to the Enhanced version and/or you get a random Legendary item.

This would help speed up the slogfest that is the mid-end game of the regular game mode.
If the guy who got the final hit on the Rejuvenator also got like a Mystic Conduit in a special 13th slot, they can end the game right then and there.

Or if you're Victor, and you somehow manage to deliver an Urn, and your Infuser gets upgrade into Enhanced Infuser, and boom you're nigh unkillable.

It adds a bit of team strat too, because you'll need to quickly coordinate with your team to determine who gets the omega buff... and if you're too slow, the enemy might swoop in and steal the final hit on the Rejuvenator.

 

[Ukie]

wait I love this idea
One thing I would add is a timer to special items, either they disappear with rejuv or on death

 

[Uncle Baller]

Divine rapier anyone?

 

[Kit Carson]

Major agree from me, though I think that instead of tying it to Urn or similar objective based mechanics or randomization, I'd like to offer a solution that's a bit more straightforward and makes it so that in those very long games, their presence is entirely tied to spending decisions.

The idea is simple: Any item can be upgraded to its enhanced version for double the cost. Only one item per each of the 3 categories can be upgraded in this way (so only one weapon, one vitality, and one spirit item) keeping in the trend of encouraging diversification as with the 4.8k investment spikes. If a lower tier component is upgraded to its enhanced version, upgrading to the higher tier item it builds into also costs double.

So for example, if I buy Spirit Burst for 800, I can upgrade it to enhanced for an additional 800 (total of 1600), but doing so will make Tankbuster enhanced automatically and cost 4800 to upgrade to (unless I sell the enhanced Spirit Burst and rebuy it in standard form). For the purposes of investment bonuses, enhanced items are worth the same as their base amount, and depending on balance considerations can either sell for half their enhanced value, or half their normal value (25% of what was actually spent on them) to encourage committing to an enhanced item for the entire match.

And as stated previously, player can do this with one item per category, so 1 weapon item, 1 spirit item and 1 vitality item at once.

For Legendary items, I would suggest adding a new, 4th tab to the item catalogue containing all of them. None should count towards shop investment, and all should be considered "Tier 5". Each player can only purchase 1 of these items, and they should cost double T4 items in keeping with the item cost progression. However in the case of these tier 5 legendaries, instead of costing 12,800 (exactly double T4) they should instead cost 13,000 even, both to differentiate them more from standard items in the other 3 categories, and as a nod to the occult significance of the number 13. Finally, they too can be upgraded to their enhanced versions for double their initial cost (and additional 13,000, for a total of 26,000).

There are some additional considerations that can be made, such as requiring enhancements and legendaries to only be obtained from the secret shops, disallowing the resale of legendaries (basically forcing players to commit to one if they opt to get one) and whether enhanced items would refund half their base item cost or their enhanced cost when sold, but I think this is a pretty straightforward way of giving further spending opportunities in long games, and brining over the super fun enhancement mechanic and game changing Legendaries to the main game. Obviously most Legendary items will need to be balanced differently for standard, but there is already a precedent for doing that with the Street Brawl exclusive ability stat values, so I think it is not only feasible but would add a ton of new opportunities for decision making and build variety.

 

[joiij]

I like the idea and it definitely seems worth trying. The main concern is how to balance it, especially with the snowball factor. From another angle, if the team that’s already ahead gets access to these items, they’ll just snowball even harder.

overall, I understand the concept and I do think it sounds fun, but there probably needs to be some additional balancing layer. for example, having them drop from the 2nd or 3rd Midboss, or something along those lines. You could even scale the item tiers based on the drop source, similar to how Dota 2 handles it.