From what I can tell, pretty much everyone agrees that archaeology is a bit too powerful. This comes from the fact that it synergizes really well with itself: the fourth level skill lets you put a ridiculous number of enchantments on a single item, and the third level skill lets you re-roll that mega item until all the enchantments do what you want. What I would suggest is to change the fourth level Archaeology skill; instead of it being an Ancient Kronian Ritual, make it the Ancient Lutefisk Eating Competition, with the same fundamental effect except it works on Lutefisk Shrines. This would keep Archaeology from single-handedly proving a persistent player with mega items, though it would give them a bit of an XP boost which is OK, I think. Since the art and coding has already been done for the Ancient Kronian Ritual, it would be very thematic if it were moved to somewhere in the Smithing skill tree. Probably as the ultimate skill, since that level doesn't grant anything in particular. Alchemy and Tinkering would need something to make up for this, but then all the crafting skills need a buff right now. Of course, a player could still take both Smithing and Archaeology in order to make mega items - but then, that's an investment of six skill points in two trees, instead of three skill points in a single tree.
Ancient Kronian Ritual really should be in Smithing, I think. I like your idea for the Lutefisk shrines. Or, it could be something to do with quest items needed for Inconsequentia shrines.
Rerolling randomly degrades the items, which is a pretty good limiter on its own. You really need to settle for "good enough" rather than hunting for a perfect roll.
I hardly ever get anything good from quests or lutefisk shrines. I find all the good artifacts from shops and evil chests. If the 4th level skill made shrines give items on the level of evil chests, that might be good. still might be broken though.
I just keep re-rolling my spare weapon/ring/armor until I get what I want. And it does seem to increase number of stats time to time. Though I'm still relatively low level that it doesn't matter much.
I'm confused about why the 4th power is supposedly that good? I ended up getting a negative enchantment on a shield, so I re-rolled it. Got another negative enchantment, re-rolled again. Ended up re-rolling dozens of times, every single time I got a negative enchantment. It seemed like if an item got enchanted negatively, you can't re-roll to make it positive. Unless I had the worst luck in existence, that would seem to negate the 4th power as being that great, as once you end up with a negative bonus on your item, it seems to stay for life.
Re-rolling doesn't degenerate items, and it doesn't increase the number of stats. The way it seems to work is that re-rolling will, well, randomly re-roll the artifact. This means that the artifact might come out with conflicting abilities, like +crushing resistance and -crushing resistance. When that happens, the game doesn't display the conflicting attributes, it silently merges them. So, for instance, if you have something with a total of three enchantments on it and you re-roll it, two of those enchantments might conflict with one another and it looks like the item was degraded - it comes out with only one enchantment. However, if you keep on re-rolling, you'll see the extra enchantments show up again. This is also how it might seem to increase the number of stats, if stats that were previously conflicting suddenly stopped conflicting. And I don't think re-rolling on its own is overpowered; you can't choose what you get, and if the result is particularly nasty you won't be able to use the item until you can roll it again.
Archaeology isn't overpowered imo. Some people also argue that unarmed + vamp is op, or that fungal is op, clearly they are just really good in the correct situations, as are nearly all skills.
Re-rolling is not overpowered. RE-ROLLING DISPLEASED KRONGS AND CORRUPTION IS OVERPOWERED. Tacroy is absolutely correct in the way that the ability works.
Not over powered at all in fact it's kinda broken I had a pretty good item get corrupted so I want to re-roll it, first time it rolled new set of mods however I tried again and nothing happened, like twelve attempts later it didn't change mods once. Also kinda off topic but anyone else notice that anvils won't stack mods like if you get more dodge and the item already had dodge the mod on the item stays the same, shouldn't that stack on?
It's overpowered, but only because of the poorly designed stat/gear system in this game. With as many attributes as there are in this game, it's very difficult to stack a specific stat with naturally found gear. Archeology lets you reroll until all your gear has +counter or something else of that nature and reroll away negative attributes of significance gain at an altar of krong. Recharging the ability takes at most 10 seconds of pacing back and forth in a room with closed doors. It's hardly noticeable at all. Any character with archeology is going to be much stronger than any character without archeology. It's a no brainer. It also helps that the fedora and +trap affinity is very useful in the early game.
As far as I can tell, mods have a different probability of appearing on specific items. A sword might have a high probability of spawning Acidic Damage and a low chance of spawning Righteous Damage. Because of this, an item with a lot of mod slots will repeatedly have high numbers of common mods. However I can and have rerolled cursed and corrupted items until there are no listed negatives at all. None.
Re-rolling is awfully, incredibly, game-breakingly overpowered. Pick any artifact weapon, preferably one that's been buffed up by a few Krongs. Re-roll it several times regardless of what it re-rolls to. Watch it's damage. You'll soon see why it's OP.
If the artifact reroll is causing a net change in the item's stats, then that's certainly a bug and not evidence that the ability itself is overpowered. I'll admit that I haven't seen this happen, but probably because I only enchant and reroll amulets.
@Krivicide Done it. Hundreds of times. It stays about the same with only a little variation, probably a result of mod slots being filled with +2/-1 effects.
I can confirm as well after several rerolls of an artifact staff from quest reward, I have the baddest bad-ass staff level 4 has ever seen. Wow.
