The Tavern

Is there any correlation between the price of an unidentified randart in a shop, and its quality of characteristics or enchantment? Or is it just the rarity of the base item? I have a scorched acid dragon scales available, but it costs 1350 gold and I don’t want to dump that much if I’m not guaranteed a pretty good item.

It is not guaranteed, unknown properties don't affect item price.

No.

Buying an unidentified randart body-armor is almost invariably a bad deal, simply because the price is high (its based on the base-type as far as I can tell without code-diving, dragon armour are always 1k + gold) and there are SO many bad or unfavorable permutations available. Even just getting a low AC bonus is a deal-breaker for endgame characters.

Best advice is to save your money and buy secondary gear (boots, helmets, cloaks, etc), jewelry, and whatever else you need especially if it is already IDd. Then come back to the shop and check out the armor after you have seen all the floors that can possibly generate a shop. Definitely clear out vaults and slime and the other easy treasure-trove floors first.

Of course, if you dont have a good body armour, you need one, and you have the cash, then go for it. But nine times out of ten you are going to be at least a bit disappointed.

Thanks, I've wondered about this also.

Yeah, I was leaning towards not buying it anyway since I already have TLA and a normal acid dragon armor. I’m heading into Orc, hopefully I’ll be able to shore up my spell weaknesses or upgrade armor that way.

It depends. A really great body armour does much more than a great cloak or helmet so if I have gold, I buy all randart body armours of good base type until I get something good. Especially when I use a +2 plate armour or something similarly bad.

Related question: when purchasing the Fund-a-Shop service from Gozag (serve and protect!), does the cost of the shop have any bearing on the quality of its contents?

No. Shop cost has the fixed rule of first shop always costs 800$, 2nd shop is 1000$ etc. Item quality is affected by character level however.

Each shop costs a different amount. It's just that each one costs no more than the maximum cost needed to activate the ability.

I wouldn't buy it immediately especially if you haven't seen orc yet, but usually once you've bought the useful cheap items in shops, you'll have enough to roll the dice on one or two expensive things. It's better to try than to just sit around with 3000 gold in inventory.

Definitely buy things of known usefulness first, though.