Loot Weights, Tagging and Non-DPS Classes -- Thoughts and Hopes

I had just finished watching the most recent developer update with Ashes' new combat systems that look phenomenal so far with the daggers and greatswords, but as we got to the Q&A section, one came up that really resonated with me. Around 1:16:30 someone had asked about loot distribution, if more support-based classes would wind up having a bit of a balance in terms of who gets loot and their weights in drop chance.

Steven responded in that they have a hybrid system in the works, both a DPS and a tagging system, that basically allows everyone to basically opt-in to a base percentage loot chance just by tagging an enemy, but that also DPS will contribute to the rest of the percentages there on.

Now this is fine for allowing for everyone to have a chance, this system would still highly favor DPS players in the loot pools, since their chances would be higher by a significant margin, even if characters like tanks, healers, or buff/debuff supporters are active in the fight and contributing just as much effort to the enemy being felled for longer standing fights.

The longer a fight goes on, the bigger difference in damage will take place between a dps and a support, and thus I wanted to share a few ideas I had to perhaps offset this depending on how much effort any support delivers. Keep in mind this is just my opinions, they could be totally wrong, I could be misunderstanding that this is just only for short open world fights, and not for anything bigger like world bosses or pvp fights.

Tanks

So tanks are probably the easiest ones to add to this weight in terms of metrics, I believe. They specialize in damage mitigation, and so that can be used in determining their weight. When a tank takes an attack in place of a dps, their contribution is in how much damage was reduced, how much damage would have otherwise been done if the enemy attacked a normal DPS. This reduction in damage can be reduced to a percentage boost to their loot drop chance to correspond with that effort.

Healers

So Healing is a bit more complex, but I believe it can be boiled down to how much non-overhealing restoration to players in proximity to the kill that is done. It may have healers being a bit more competitive to make sure they boost their own loot chances, but hey, a healer that is carrying their weight and keeping the party topped off deserves a good chance at the loot. Also I say non-overhealing just so people can't just spam AOE heals on fully healed groups and boost their numbers.

Supports (Buff/Debuff/ETC)

Supports outside of healing would probably be the hardest to quantify, but taking it from the view of a bard player, most of their help would either be from doing small amounts of regeneration, or boosting damage, damage reduction, or increasing damage an enemy takes (I'm speculating mostly here, forgive me.) If it can be calculated how much of a damage increase a buff gives, we can take a portion of each ally doing damage with the buff and add it to the support's loot modifier, along with damage reduction. When the party takes damage, just like tanks, you can take that reduced damage as effort the bard has put in, and again for lowering an enemy's damage.

TLDR; There are ways you can add weight to other roles than DPS, but I'm not sure how much overhead that creates for balance, coding and preventing exploitations. In a game that wants to promote hybrid roles, I think it's a necessary thing to look into.

Am I weird for wanting this? Probably. But as someone who tends to like to play non-dps roles more than not in MMOS it just felt important to get out there. Open to all thoughts, tear it apart if you'd like.

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Comments

Dygz

Yeah, I didn't understand how Steven's reply satisfactorily answered the question.
How does a Cleric's tag help track how Heals benefited the group?
How does a Bard's tag help track how Support benefited the group?

Atori

Just gotta let it known we want to see a bit more. Nothing's set in stone, so long as there's enough voices asking for something.

Ludullu

I personally don't see any problems with looting in a game that doesn't have bounded/untradeable gear (well, it'll have a few afaik, but nothing impactful). And a party-based game on top of that.

Obviously I'm quite biased towards a particular gameplay style from my L2 days, but back then if you had a party that you played with - everyone would get their gear equally and the order would be discussed within each party. Some parties knew that they didn't need too much defense, so they'd start farming weapons for the DPS classes first. Some parties knew that their dps was good, so they made gear for their supports first, so that their survivability was much better.

No one cared about who picked up the loot because the loot was shared. And with Ashes promoting guild and party play a lot, I'd hope people come to know and like that kind of gameplay. It not only makes the looting process much easier, but it also adds a much bigger sense of community, because you have your own "family" in the form of your constant party, and a bigger family in the form of your guild (and even bigger with alliance). And Ashes is even adding the umbrella of the node family on top of that, so if the design works out how Intrepid wants it to - we might have tight-knit node communities that farm stuff together and share loot amongst each other (even outside of the guild ties). I know I'll be doing just that in my node.

Noaani

So, the reason Stevens answer seemed off is because the question was off.

The mechanic referred to in the question is only really intended to be put to use in group or raid settings - it isn't intended for solo play (though it is in force there).

The reason for this is that if you are deep in a dungeon and come across a group killing a mob you want, you may not want to get corruption as that will have a massive impact on your ability to farm that dungeon. Instead, they put in this looting scheme as a form of competition between players.

That system is not intended to be used for distribution of loot within a group. The game will have NBG, round robin, master looter or FFA options for groups.

The assumption is there will rarely (if ever) be a case where a solo tank or healer will attempt to compete with another player for loot using this mechanic.

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