Shrine of Exile

As a random chance anywhere outside of town, there's a chance to encounter a mysterious shrine (kinda like a chest), when you click it, a dialogue box opens.

"

Rumors claim that this dark shrine is a portal to the deepest pits of Wraeclast, ancient and foreboding, you feel as if you're being watched as you attempt to make out an inscription on the altar.

With great risk, comes great reward, place an item of power upon this altar, to be tested.

Hesitantly, you stand before it and open your pack.

*Trade window opens with the altar*

Any item which isn't white, counts as an item of power.

As soon as an item of power is moved to the inventory of the altar, your inventory will automatically close & a special enemy spawns, with difficulty based on the overall quality of the item given.

By overall quality I mean;
-Level
-Quality
-Rarity
-Sockets
-Links
-Number of mods
Basically, overall quality.

Without warning, the ravenous beast rushes you, leaving you with just two options;
1: Run and probably survive.
2: Stay and fight, possibly die.
Either way, that item is lost to you forever.

Upon the brutal death of the maniacal beast, a dark mist gathers around the altar...

As the mist dissipates, you notice that the shrine is gone & a rather large treasure chest has replaced it.
With loot potential (both quality and quantity), based on the difficulty of the beast you defeated.

For those who will undoubtedly want the "TL;DR" version..

TL;DR
-Randomly generated dark shrine, with the ability to spawn anywhere outside town.

-Place an item which isn't white, in the inventory of the altar.

-Fight the beast which spawns, it has strength based on the overall quality of the item you gave.

-Survive and win a big chest, with loot based on how strong the beast was.
/END TL;DR

As for what the beast is, I'm thinking something like..
1: Dragon.
2: Minotaur.
3: Hydra.
4: Cerberus.
5: Undead Colossus (mixture of body parts, from various enemies throughout the game).
6: A giant plant, with a long-range vine/branch whip attack, maybe a root attack to stop movement.
7: Elemental Demon (These could be made for all of the elements).
8: Doppelganger (Exact duplicate of your own gear/passive tree, with additional stats based on the quality of the item you sacrificed).
9: Random boss from the game
10: Giant Scorpion (Highly toxic venom, powerful creature in both attack & defense)

It could be any of them, all of them, or something entirely different. It would be interesting to see a setup where the boss that spawns, depends on the quality of the item, that would take even more work to set up though.
/END

I think it would be a fun event, it would add a use for those items which are good but not quite worth equipping.

You know, those items you just hate giving to a vendor and can't be asked to sell to players, just about everyone has hit that point in a game.

There could even be an addition for skill gems but, that's a discussion for after (if) this suggestion gains momentum.

-EDIT-

How I propose incorporating skill gems into this suggestion.

You can find the full posts for this edit on Pages 5 & 11.

/START
Step 1: Place the gems inside the piece of gear, which you're intending to sacrifice.
Step 2: Continue with the regular sacrifice.

Simple, right?

Except, make the overall gem quality add to the overall quality of the item, this includes;
1: Gem level. (Make it more useful to buy pre-leveled gems off players, or add another purpose to those gems you leveled & decided you don't want anymore.)
2: Gem quality.
3: Gem color. (I'd love to see this play a part.)

Now, what adding the gem could bring to the fight & why we should do it.
1: Starting off with color, make that add different elements to the attacks used (in addition to the base physical attack from the item), I'm thinking something along the lines of;
Color = Additional damage type
Red = Fire
Blue = Lightning
Green = Cold
White = Chaos (With a max level of 1, I would say to give this the max bonus for level.)

2: Next, we'll go to the level of the gem, each level of the gem adds something like 5-10? dps (of that type) to every attack made by that boss.

3: Last but not least, quality, I would say to make this add a solid bonus to Armor, like 5-10 for now, per % of quality. Or, just increased defense against that type, armor/resists.
/END

Thanks for the continuing support.

+1 sounds awesome

Agree, this could be fun. :)

With the addition of maps recently, I think this could be possible. Have the summoned monster be the same level as the item-level, and gain attributes based on what item type was sacrificed(boots/weapon/etc). Then have it drop randomized loot based on that item-level. Would be a nice way of getting rid of some unused rares.

Thanks for the support.

Something I forgot to mention, is with the overall item quality determining boss strength.

Think of it as a way to promote team play, get a powerhouse item and find a shrine, call in some friends and have a blast with a powerful boss fight.

If the enemies can get stronger than most players, through the use of strong enough items, it'd add something that requires team play to hit the best rewards.

Whether they would want to add something that requires a team or not, I don't know, it could add a different element of fun to the game though.

Also, those who don't want the team play can stick to sacrificing slightly lesser items, so they'll be strong enough to solo, the quantity/rarity reward just won't be quite as high.

Not to mention, it could be a great source of end-game farming/replayability, teams of players scouring maps for that elusive super boss shrine, sounds like a blast to me! :P

A very nice idea, +1.

But, I saw you just mention in your latest post that it could be an endgame thing.

I'd say that you could enjoy such a challenge early on as well.

"

Waves_blade wrote:

A very nice idea, +1.

But, I saw you just mention in your latest post that it could be an endgame thing.

I'd say that you could enjoy such a challenge early on as well.

For sure, it would be great at any level, it could just also provide some of the hardest fights in the game, if the devs choose to take it so far.

I'd love it either way. :p

The best part about it is that it would be random enough to not be abusable.

The dialog would have to be improved, obviously, but I love the idea.

"

Laimbrane wrote:

The best part about it is that it would be random enough to not be abusable.

The dialog would have to be improved, obviously, but I love the idea.

You sayin' my storytelling sucks? :p

Just threw that together in the 3-5 mins it took me to construct that post, if the idea gains momentum, we'll refine it a bit for sure lol.

Only thing I can think of currently out of my listing which could be abusable, is the Doppelganger boss option.

People could always put the excellent item on a crappy low level char, with terrible gear and no skill gems, just to make the boss weaker.

So that idea might need a bit more work still, if this is even considerd, it would probably take quite a bit of work to implement.
I think it would be totally worth it though, heh.

+1 for an idea that will expand game=play