RNG Drops should be based on in-battle RNG rather than post-battle RNG

Azherae

Change my mind.

More seriously, I'm tired of games where you just dice roll at the end of a fight to see if you got something. This isn't a requirement of MMOs. Teamwork should be rewarded. Even if you limit it so I can't get every drop that is triggered this way, from the same encounter.

Fight a giant bull, crit with blunt damage during some charge ability, get the horn. Maybe that changes what it does so some other ability doesn't get used so you can't get something else.

Maybe not exactly like that either, but something. Give new players a chance to understand how to get a drop instead of just letting it come down to complete luck. RNG is still involved, after all. You did the ability and didn't crit, so no horn for you. Try again. Let us do something other than 'down the boss as fast as possible'. People can still just get lucky and do the required thing accidentally as a consequence of fighting and get something anyway.

If Intrepid is willing to 'make us want to have one of each Archetype in a party', then I'd assume anyone okay with that is also okay with not perpetuating this 'go, dice roll!' system that results in that stupid gameplay of 'I got lucky so I don't need to do this much anymore and I can get ahead' with no power over the issue or place where skill makes up a gap.

The economics and competitive aspects of MMOs have been 'suffering' for decades because of this outdated system, and I'd really like Ashes to be the second MMO I play to do away with it as much as possible.

Sathrago

I mean at that point you may as well treat it like a monster hunter fight where you target and destroy certain parts of the body to gain different materials. I wouldn't be against this approach it's just so much work to have multiple hitbox/health pools within one model, and then do that for all bosses/creatures in the game.

tautau

Except that these ideas seem to be based on damage done, so the high damage characters get the loot and the buffers and healers do without. If this was a loot option, good luck finding a non-boxed competent healer to go with you on that raid!

Dygz

I think we shall have to see how it actually works out, but...
In Ashes, I think Steven's expectation is that if you want a better chance at scoring a horn, you bring along a Crafter who excels at Gathering horns from dead animals.
A Crit makes it very likely you will kill something. Doesn't mean you are great at butchering. And...butchering typically happens at the end of combat - not during. Same with looting, in general.

Boanergese

I am confused by your question. Are you saying you don't like how loot is distributed in a party or how loot is distributed by the game? I believe in a raid or an 8-person party that the group can set how loot is distributed. So, you can set it as master looter and give the person who needs the item the most the item based on archetype rather than loot roll. So, if three people can use a sword and fie people can't use it at all, the three people can roll on it. Of course, with loot not being soul bond, the sword could be sold on the markets so the weapon could benefit anyone in the party. Alternatively, you can also set the loot distribution to need over greed and then it would be a random dice roll. If you are talking about loot drops from a loot table, the simple way to fix that issue would be tokens. In the Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft the raid bosses dropped tokens which could be traded into NPC vendors for items which was great. This way there was no wasted loot. You saved up the tokens and got what you wanted. With crafting the mobs could drop mats which could then be crafted into the item you desire.

Azherae

tautau wrote: »

Except that these ideas seem to be based on damage done, so the high damage characters get the loot and the buffers and healers do without. If this was a loot option, good luck finding a non-boxed competent healer to go with you on that raid!

No reason it has to be based on damage. The other game I play that does this, the damage is less relevant than the action.

Sathrago wrote: »

I mean at that point you may as well treat it like a monster hunter fight where you target and destroy certain parts of the body to gain different materials. I wouldn't be against this approach it's just so much work to have multiple hitbox/health pools within one model, and then do that for all bosses/creatures in the game.

There are no requirements for extra health pools, it's a timing and state vs action taken thing.

Everything still drops for the whole party to loot on using whatever loot system they choose, the thing determined is, 'does the thing drop from the enemy at all'.

So in the case of the 'giant bull', the skilled group knows that of the options of Mane, Horn, Heart (just semirandom examples), they get the Horn by stopping the Charge, the Heart by dealing Fire damage (don't get hung up on this, I'm trying NOT to just 'detail the FFXI system' because it doesn't work as well in Ashes, the Mane by some other method or maybe even by just 'not doing enough of the other two things'.

So the unskilled group gets the Mane maybe, unless they bring a Fire mage and then some indicator tells them that 'the mane burns away, the creature's rage does X' (an indicator that you will get the Heart drop). The skilled group can manipulate which drop they get by, for example, 'holding off their Fire damage until the Horn is broken'.

An unskilled group with no idea what is actually happening will probably 'proc' SOME condition before the end of the fight depending on what Archetypes they brought, and probably get SOMETHING.

Economy can then be built around things 'often dropping one of multiple high end items that the players can control with their skill'.

No system is perfect, but I consider 'fight a boss and then roll 1d20 to see if you and your group get to progress or make extra $$' to be the WORST system, so I'm offering/complaining relative to another.

Hutchy1989

I'd like the opposite as a system, you can make a fight easier by chopping off parts but it leaves the loot pool or you get an inferior version

Makes more sense for a creature to have more loot if its corpse is in pristine condition so you can surgically harvest all the parts.

Noaani

When it comes to games with mobs that drop crafting components rather than items, my preference is that a specific mob drops a specific item.

When you kill that mob, you get that item. When you want a specific item, you kill the specific mob that has it.

I see no reason to complicate things more than this, especially since there is no guarantee that the mob itself will even be unlocked.

maouw

Hutchy1989 wrote: »

I'd like the opposite as a system, you can make a fight easier by chopping off parts but it leaves the loot pool or you get an inferior version

Makes more sense for a creature to have more loot if its corpse is in pristine condition so you can surgically harvest all the parts.

Or better yet:
2 types of loot depending on which method you go for!

It doesn't need to be based on damage dealt either - it could be trying to make a boss stand in lava for longer to get higher grade Obsidian Scales, or exposing the fangs of a live boss so that expert artisans can extract living venom.

This idea is a good way to encourage diversity when approaching a boss fight.

Azherae

Ashes is modeled to us as having great diversity, and as I said, I absolutely don't want to say 'do what FFXI does', it's not the same, but we can still take some lessons from it. In that game, this system is based on magic, weaponskills, and debuffs, and most importantly, you sometimes need to bring a class that is not 'the absolute optimal' for doing damage and downing the boss, because that's the one with the easiest access to the magic or weapon skill you need to get the 'proc' to get the drop.

This helps to handle the 'you will want one of each Archetype' situation more often, and even can cause changes to which groups are built, if the market is flooded with MegaTaurus Hearts because for some reason Mages are the fastest way to kill it, then at least adding a Ranger on the day you want the Mane because the Mane barely ever ends up being the drop, is a good thing.

The more baseline tools Intrepid can work in to make the 'meta' less singular, the closer they get to the goal that I figure most of us are here to support.

Noaani

Azherae wrote: »

This helps to handle the 'you will want one of each Archetype' situation more often, and even can cause changes to which groups are built

I don't think it would have this effect at all.

lets assume the mob in question needs fire damage done to it to get the desired reward. Every class has access to mage secondary, and that is where fire damage will be.

This means that the best group to run this content with the intention of getting this reward would be one of each primary, all with mage secondary.

I don't see how this would be favorable in Ashes. I can see it working for other games though.