Discussion on the quantity of legendary items in circulation

Based off of Steven's design philosophy, legendaries are going to have the following requirements:

High amount of effort to obtain
Group based content to gather materials/components to find the materials to craft and/or auction to others.
Not attained easily nor are they granted out in volume

I had an idea regarding the "granted out in volume" portion of legendaries that I would like to see discussed in this thread. There are groups in the community that are for everyone being able to obtain these legendaries so all people can obtain/experience the use of a legendary. For those familiar with WoW, it would be similar to WoW legendary items like Hand of Ragnaros or Thunderfury, The Blessed Blade of the Windseeker where those legendaries are more of a rare/epic in quantity. Then there are other groups in the community that are for legendaries being a unique item that only one person can own at a time. This means that if another person wanted to obtain that legendary, it would not be possible unless that legendary is programmed to detoriate or become destroyed in some fashion.

My idea is to meet both groups somewhere in the middle, but leaning slightly more towards the "unique" side of the idea. My idea for "unique" legendaries would be to drastically limit a server's capability to allow multiple unique players to obtain ownership of the legendary items. This is designed to limit people's ability to trade the item but also limit the number of those items in circulation. To do so, I recommend a "cooldown" to the legendary item. Below is an example of a made-up item and how I would implement it:

Legendary "Unique" Item materials needed:

1x Legendary Material (This material would have a cooldown placed on it)
50x Assorment of 'Epic Materials'
200x Assortment of 'Rare materials'
1000x Assortment of 'Normal Materials'

Let's make it that once the legendary material has been dropped, the material is then placed on a server wide lockdown and is not able to be dropped again. When all of the materials are gathered for crafting and the item is actually crafted, the item is placed on a 90-day cooldown (the length is debatable, but this is a length of time I think could be fair). Once the 90-day cooldown is up, then you have the chance for that item to drop again from that boss (keep in mind that you still have to have RNG luck to get the item to drop AGAIN). If the item is able to be dropped as a completed item, once the item drops from the raid boss in its already completed form, the 90-day timer starts at the time of acquisition.

I came up with this idea to increase the players possibility to experience powerful and story rich items and continue to hold onto the idea that it is a unique item.

The first player who obtains this item has the glory of being able to show the whole world that this is theirs and no one has the ability to gain this item for 90-days.
If RNG is the best RNG the world has seen, that means by the end of the first year, only 4 of this single legendary item would be in existence on that server. After 10 years, only 40 would exist. This is still a unique item when we take into consideration that servers have 8,000+ concurrent players (.5% of the concurrent players would have this item in their inventory after 10 years). In the end, it is still a truly unique item. If RNG is the worst ever, you might still only see 5 if it refuses to drop frequently.
This prevents the item from being wholly lost in the ether of the game if it was a truly unique (one of a kind, no other person could obtain it) and that person were to quit or just hold onto it so no one could get it.
It continues to make the specific Raid boss and dungeon a desirable place to clear.

Some other ideas:

Currently, it is stated that materials made to craft the item are needed to continue to repair the item. If the legendary material is needed for that purpose, then we might be in a 90-day cycle where only one of these items can exist. Either the person who owns it gets the legendary material again and repairs their item, or another person gets it (essentially transferring the ownership of the item to someone else) for the next 90-days.
This keeps the item truly a "Legendary Unique" because only one of these items will ever be "ACTIVE" because once it is used to completion, it is broken until the material can be dropped again.

Counter Points I can see people making:

This removes the item's ability to be truly legendary/unique. If it were a story item, it wouldn't make sense to have 40 copies of a legendary amulet that was used 20,000 years ago to seal away some ancient entity.
It could be seen as removing the glory of people spending a lot of time working together to actually acquire/build the item because the more copies there are, the less value it contains.
This could cause a single metropolis to become a permanent fixture in the world by the population. This could be seen as a negative thing as it would reduce the ability for the world to fully grow in newer areas because one of the 5 metropolises would never move.
90-days is way too long. It could diminish a dungeon's worth by completely removing a raid boss's big ticket item from dropping for 90-days.

I'm interested in seeing what the community thinks about this approach.

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Comments

Sylvanar

1. If there can only be 1 Unique item obtainable every 3 months, then why cant it be permanent? Because there would be 40 copies after 10 years. That highly egotistic.
I highly doubt all the people who end up obtaining that item will continue to play for 10 years. Better to make the item account bound. This would be a better way to keep the count even less.

2. I personally would prefer lower drop chance than a 3 month cooldown timer. As this would enable big guilds in all the wrong ways.

Edit: One of the most important aspect of MMO is the sense of achievement. If after putting so much hardwork we lose the legendary item after a certain time period why should people bother with obtaining them then?

Psomo

Yeah would like too these legendary items to be extra rare.

But in a bit of a different way. Maybe all nodes on metropolis stage spawn an epic boss every 30 or whatever days(different boss for each node) and it drops that legendary material. So people can fight over for it. Also with each node spawning other epic boss ( for different legendary item) is an extra reason to want the other's guild metropolis to go down.

Hence if i recall correctly they said there would be 5 metropolis give or take in a server. Means 5 legendary items in a server per 30 days. Just an opinion though. would be really interested to see other peoples opinions too.

Edit: i mean after the 30 days the people that had them lose the item. I would like it to be a top reward for these guilds that fought hard to get them. Then again try in a month or so.

clone63

I'd like to see legendaries quite rare and unique. If the right gating systems are implemented, there doesn't need to be artificial server counts and tallies. Tying production to population via limited crafting would be an example. Like a master smith can make one legendary type of item of a certain type, period, by means of axing some of his XP or something. In that capacity, the produced legendary items stay somewhat correlated with the population: more players, more high level smiths, more legendaries.

I would really like to NOT see much binding of gear in any sense. It just feels so artificial. What greater thrill than swanking a legendary off of someone?

CROW3

I like the idea of unique item actually being unique. That could be implemented in a number of different ways, but it would certainly add more intrigue than everyone getting a ‘legendary’ just for logging in.

QuiQSilv3r

Legendary bosses should have a small chance to drop a legendary item, say 5%, they spawn once a month within a metropolis nodes ZOI. If theres 5 metropolis then you have 5 5% chances or 25% once a month to get a legendary item. If you just have a flat 90 day CD then you remove the desire to even kill a boss after epic armor/weapons have been achieved. The armor definitely shouldn't break completely, it should need repair roughly monthly but that repair should be able to be done through epic level material instead of legendary material. This allows for legendary gear to be absolutely unique within game but still give everyone a chance to feel like they might get it.

tautau

Something is not "absolutely unique" if there is more than one of it.

Goalid

I would rather have a system where guild castles / metropolis nodes get relics over time, and those relics are OP as hell, with time conditions. Maybe a guild castle king/queen gets a sword that does 2x damage to the next best sword, but its powers can only be activated once a month for 30 minutes. Maybe the divine node reliquary has a scroll that summons a giant angel during a battle to help defend/attack during a siege, but only once every 3 months. And these legendary items can be tied to the reliquary of a metropolis node and guild castle, incentivizing node and castle sieges to steal these items. Also, I just think it would be epic as hell to have people stand in awe to seeing someone wielding a one of a kind relic right before a battle, and strategies being planned around these legendaries. Plus, they can slowly be added into the game through the reliquary, so the server never gets saturated with these weapons.

Xenra

Super unique items that could be traded or sold; sounds like a soft NFT.

Sylvanar

tautau wrote: »

Something is not "absolutely unique" if there is more than one of it.

The point is for it to be "unique enough". If 40-50 people have a legendary item in a server of 50k accounts then it is unique enough to matter. It doesnt need to be such that only 1 person in a server has an item.

Moreover legendary items from different Nodes will be different. So there would be some absolute uniqueness in there too.

On the flip side if legendary items are degradable or lost after some time period then I would not bother with this aspect of the game and would settle for the next best. Because the grind needed to obtain them...well I have better things to do with the amount of time and effort which would be required, in game or otherwise.

mcstackerson

Sylvanar wrote: »

tautau wrote: »

Something is not "absolutely unique" if there is more than one of it.

On the flip side if legendary items are degradable or lost after some time period then I would not bother with this aspect of the game and would settle for the next best. Because the grind needed to obtain them...well I have better things to do with the amount of time and effort which would be required, in game or otherwise.

I'd think that legendary items should be something you go for when you are already at the top. A lot of it would be naturally farmed along side other items. If you played classic wow, think Hand of Rag. Yes, someone needs to farm the rep for the recipe and get other materials but you get most of the key components while farming gear in MC.

The way i see it, the item should either have to degrade or become obsolete. Either way, it becomes unusable at some point.

Would being able to turn the broken legendary into a cosmetic make people feel better about losing it?

Sylvanar

mcstackerson wrote: »

I'd think that legendary items should be something you go for when you are already at the top.

True.

mcstackerson wrote: »

A lot of it would be naturally farmed along side other items. If you played classic wow, think Hand of Rag. Yes, someone needs to farm the rep for the recipe and get other materials but you get most of the key components while farming gear in MC.

I have played TBC somewhat and Wotlk for couple of years. But you are making some assumptions here.

Firstly, Legendries should be notoriously hard to obtain w.r.t both grind and difficulty of the grind. So while some of the materials could be collected while farming gear, rest of the grind would have those material itself as its focus.

Secondly, AoCs instanced Raids would be more lore related than progression. Some of the mats other than the legendary one would likely be dropped by world bosses only which would involve a lot of shenanigans due to its open world nature. As a result the grind already has a higher level of difficulty associated with it compared to WoW.

mcstackerson wrote: »

The way i see it, the item should either have to degrade or become obsolete. Either way, it becomes unusable at some point.

I dont mind if the item becomes obsolete wrt stats on it. Although I have an impression that unlike WoW, AoC expansions wont render its items from the older ones obsolete. Correct me if I am wrong.
But if it degrades and I lose the item as a whole, this in essence completely invalidates all my efforts which went into obtaining it. Moreover, the player would lose so much due to no fault of his/her own.

Edit: Wouldn't it be better to handle this by initiating a quest chain for all players with Legendries so that they can upgrade their current ones to match the stats of the newer models of the expansion?

CROW3

Hm... I'd really like Ashes to take us off the legendary participation trophy treadmill that WoW continuously reinforced, but it might not be a hill they want to die on.

mcstackerson

Sylvanar wrote: »

mcstackerson wrote: »

I'd think that legendary items should be something you go for when you are already at the top.

True.

mcstackerson wrote: »

A lot of it would be naturally farmed along side other items. If you played classic wow, think Hand of Rag. Yes, someone needs to farm the rep for the recipe and get other materials but you get most of the key components while farming gear in MC.

I have played TBC somewhat and Wotlk for couple of years. But you are making some assumptions here.

Firstly, Legendries should be notoriously hard to obtain w.r.t both grind and difficulty of the grind. So while some of the materials could be collected while farming gear, rest of the grind would have those material itself as its focus.

Secondly, AoCs instanced Raids would be more lore related than progression. Some of the mats other than the legendary one would likely be dropped by world bosses only which would involve a lot of shenanigans due to its open world nature. As a result the grind already has a higher level of difficulty associated with it compared to WoW.

mcstackerson wrote: »

The way i see it, the item should either have to degrade or become obsolete. Either way, it becomes unusable at some point.

I dont mind if the item becomes obsolete wrt stats on it. Although I have an impression that unlike WoW, AoC expansions wont render its items from the older ones obsolete. Correct me if I am wrong.
But if it degrades and I lose the item as a whole, this in essence completely invalidates all my efforts which went into obtaining it. Moreover, the player would lose so much due to no fault of his/her own.

Edit: Wouldn't it be better to handle this by initiating a quest chain for all players with Legendries so that they can upgrade their current ones to match the stats of the newer models of the expansion?

The issue isn't figuring out how to keep them around, it's that they need to eventually go away if they are supposed to be rare. Everyone, or at least most people, will eventually have them if they aren't being removed in some way, wither it's through irrelevance or destruction. They would become another part of the gear grind if they don't, which I don't think they are supposed to be.

QuiQSilv3r

@mcstackerson If you have them dissipate they are weak, instead implement extremely rare legendary item drops, For example a lvl 6 node is the only node to spawn a legendary creatrure which in turn offers a 5% chance to drop a legendary. There should be roughly 5 lvl 6 nodes in a server. Each legendary creature should take a minimum 1 month to respawn giving the server a 25% monthly to earn 1 legendary item, meaning it would take 30 years for 100 legendary items to be in game. If they just deteriorate you remove the desire for them. Introducing a 5% chance 5 times a month means your going to have massive guilds fighting eachother for that legendary forcing awesome open world pvp

tautau

Five is the maximum number of top-level nodes on a server. It may turn out to be rare to reach that maximum, we may find that three or four metros per server is more common. We don't know, but my point is that if your proposed system were implemented that the legendary items would be even rarer than you calculate.

Which is fine with me.

I also wouldn't mind if the items entered the world through some mechanism besides boss drops. Boss drops means they go to the dominant guilds or players, which is traditional. What if one went to the most productive crafter per year, another to the cleric who healed the most HP that year, one to the Bounty Hunter who killed the most corrupt players, one to the best fisherman, one to the player with the most 1v1 PvP wins, and so forth?

mcstackerson

QuiQSilver wrote: »

@mcstackerson If you have them dissipate they are weak, instead implement extremely rare legendary item drops, For example a lvl 6 node is the only node to spawn a legendary creatrure which in turn offers a 5% chance to drop a legendary. There should be roughly 5 lvl 6 nodes in a server. Each legendary creature should take a minimum 1 month to respawn giving the server a 25% monthly to earn 1 legendary item, meaning it would take 30 years for 100 legendary items to be in game. If they just deteriorate you remove the desire for them. Introducing a 5% chance 5 times a month means your going to have massive guilds fighting eachother for that legendary forcing awesome open world pvp

Yes, that would make them rare but that is also changing what they are. Instead of a large project a guild or person could work towards, it come down to luck. Even if there is a grind component, you are still gated by the rng drop from those bosses. With the limited number of attempts, law of averages doesn't have much of a chance to play a role either.

In Sylvanar's post, they mentioned it would not be worth farming if they lost it. In that scenario, you don't have the option to farm for it unless your guild is able to kill the boss, they are lucky enough to get the item, and you are lucky enough to receive it.

I'd prefer the rarity being created by the resources required and limited use then rng.

For those numbers to stick, there could never be another source of legendaries. it would always have to be those bosses or whichever ones that replace them. You could never have legendaries that might come from more accessible areas but are balanced by the number of resources required to get and the amount of time they last.

Where i'm coming from, i think there should be a class of item that is a large investment, special, and limited. I think the idea of legendaries fits this. I don't think they should be the next quality of item everyone shoots for.

QuiQSilv3r

@mcstackerson I think the final class of armor for 99% of players should be epic, Legendaries should permeate a select few players in the game, that way when you see a player wearing legendary plate you see it and go holy fawk that dude has plaaaaaayed

Fisher

The only way "legendary" items could meet my expectations for the name is if there's only one of that item per server, and it's absurdly powerful, to the point of being overpowered.

If I see two people wielding the same "legendary" sword, it's not the legendary sword, it's just a good sword.

Dygz

The Legendary sword is not necessarily the same thing as a Legendary sword.
Ashes terms may be different than what you expect. The Ashes official definition of class being one example.

Seems fairly unlikely that a Master Crafter would Craft the exact same Legendary item, since it's probably going to include enchantments and other specs requested by the wielder.

My expectation is that a server may have at least a couple of Legendary swords Crafted from the eyes of the Winter Dragon Legendary World Boss.

Sylvanar

QuiQSilver wrote: »

If they just deteriorate you remove the desire for them.

Thanks for putting what I wanted to say in better words. Sense of achievement is a major reason players grind in MMOs. Remove that and you would remove the desire that follows it as well.

mcstackerson wrote: »

Even if there is a grind component, you are still gated by the rng drop from those bosses.

In Sylvanar's post, they mentioned it would not be worth farming if they lost it. In that scenario, you don't have the option to farm for it unless your guild is able to kill the boss, they are lucky enough to get the item, and you are lucky enough to receive it.

In a raid of size 40 aiming to down a world boss who is going to drop a legendary material, with open world PvP being a involved, I am absolutely sure there wont be only one person per raid group aiming for it if it drops. LUCK would always be a BIG factor for obtaining a legendary item in the first place. By big I mean 95+% or more. Let me explain why.

- In a server of 50k accounts there would always be at least if not more than 100 top tier players (humble assumption on my part) gunning for that material every time the relevant event would happen. Many of those top tier players would be in the same raid. So unless the guild downing the boss is a cult, I dont see how this gets resolved without RNG being involved. Now that RNG has entered the scene, why not make the material drop RNG as well. At least this way big guilds cant monopolize the legendries.

- Grind can be done by anyone willing to put in the effort. So does this mean everyone who grinds deserves legendary items? So when someone does get THE material needed to craft it, yes you are lucky enough to receive it because there are other deserving players too.

mcstackerson wrote: »

Where i'm coming from, i think there should be a class of item that is a large investment, special, and limited. I think the idea of legendaries fits this. I don't think they should be the next quality of item everyone shoots for.

Absolutely.

But I abhor the idea of "absolute unique item" or "The Legendary item". There are 5 Mayors and 5 Castle Lords (I dunno if this is the exact term for that position) This is a game where there is no "Absolutely Unique" player or "The Legendary" player. The why does the item need to be so?

I dunno if I have conveyed what I am trying to say properly, but this idea of being "The only one" in a game of 50k accounts just sounds like a way of boosting their own ego with no real significance to the game and everything involved with it.

Child Item