Crafted gear will be best in game, drops will not. No harm sprinkling a little on the solo players. I am not going to play solo/hard mode myself, but appreciate their subs.
Guilds will breakdown rares for mats, recipes, and craft as needed. Solos will use, or sell them, and mats to buy crafted gear. I see this as their main gear progression path.
Some great points have been made so far in this thread. With some people clearly wanting to see completed gear drops and others not wanting to see any, I believe that the solution lies somewhere in the middle. I believe that the vast majority of players who read and post on forums tend to be those who have more free time to invest in a game. However, the more casual gamers should not be ignored for a population to remain healthy. Perhaps a healthy compromise might be for standard mobs to not have any chance to drop completed gear while mini-bosses (i.e. solo-able area and quest bosses) and a select few of the more difficult quests reward players with inferior gear. The mini-boss could have a loot table that has an 85% chance to drop an uncommon item, a 13% chance to drop a rare item and a 2% chance to drop an epic item (or something along those lines). Alongside the completed gear, necessary crafting items could drop on a similar loot table that is used to create the superior crafted items, with options to make the same gear legendary or beyond (at a higher level). I think that world and raid bosses should work on a similar concept with crafted gear always remaining superior. With my schedule, I tend to have a lot of free time and prefer games to be more difficult. Nonetheless, I like to see those with more confined schedules be able to progress and enjoy the very same game alongside me. I don't believe that a "reasonable" casual gamer should ever expect to be geared as well as someone who invests a potentially exponential amount of time in the game obtaining their gear, however, you certainly can't expect someone who only gets to log-in for a few hours per week and doesn't want to spend that time crafting to run around the game leveling up in their skivvies!
I just hope that the color indicators (Uncommon=Green / Rare=Blue, etc) of the items actually mean something. More often than not in other games everyone is just running around in full epics (purples) and the items are differentiated by something like an item level. Green / Blue / Purple / Orange (or other colors) should actually indicate rarity / power, I want to see max level players using greens and blue with maybe a few purples while only the hardcore raiders actually have full epics and legendaries.
As a side note, I also thought it could be interesting if you had corrupted weapons / gear (red colored). I know you have previously said corrupted players will have diminishing damage and stats the more corrupted they get, and I thought it could be interesting if gear could become corrupted and lose stats. It could persist through death as a means to prevent players from going corrupted and then having a friend kill them to remove corruption and collect any other items they might drop. Then you would need to sanctify it or something to return it to it's original stats.
Edit: Just wanted to add a note after watching the live stream, I totally agree with Steven that I liked the old school MMO design where raid leaders would make a list of who got what to try and even out loot distribution. I like the idea of not getting an item literally every single boss kill as a consolation prize, even giving everyone some bound token feels like it's feeding into the entitlement people have (Like how in South Park Cartman's mom has to bring a present for him every time he goes to someone else's birthday party or he flips out). I think it's part of the social aspect of having to work with others to plan out who gets what loot, and can create conflict if people disagree on who gets what that can lead to people creating new guilds or show you who the real entitled people of your guild are. I do however think that there should be a public record (to everyone who participated in the raid / dungeon / guild) as to who got what items from which boss kills so it's easy to keep track of and everyone is on the same page.
I like it this way because if a rare creature drops a "normal" loot the creature wouldn't feel to me any special and I wouldn't bother to encounter it. Also I would feel frustrated if I would encounter a creature that is considered as a rare and it wouldn't drop or do anything special or valuable. It would be a same to find a gorgeus treasure chest without any booty.
So could you make rare mobs and bosses so rare that players would feel excited when encountering them?
There should be multiple ways to obtain gear, not everyone likes crafting.
Should be able to obtain gear through PVP, PVE questing, loot, crafting, raids and dungeons.
Crafting is irrelevant in other games ONLY because the gathering and crafting takes so long it's more efficient to level past whatever it is you want to craft and get it somewhere else.
Basicly: IF YOU WANT CRAFTING TO BE RELAVENT, DON'T MAKE OBTAINING THE SKILL AND RESOURCES TAKE LONGER THAN IT TAKES TO LEVEL.
Why do you want to destroy the craft?
AoC was intended to be a game with important crafting focused on cooperation between players, where warriors need craftsmen and craftsmen need warriors. What you propose will make crafting unnecessary, and if that's the case, it's a waste of time designing skills related to it. Why lie to people? Let's say crafting is unnecessary, let's eliminate crafting skills and let players earn items as rewards or buy them from NPC vendors.
There should be multiple ways to obtain gear, not everyone likes crafting.
Should be able to obtain gear through PVP, PVE questing, loot, crafting, raids and dungeons.
Crafting is irrelevant in other games ONLY because the gathering and crafting takes so long it's more efficient to level past whatever it is you want to craft and get it somewhere else.
Basicly: IF YOU WANT CRAFTING TO BE RELAVENT, DON'T MAKE OBTAINING THE SKILL AND RESOURCES TAKE LONGER THAN IT TAKES TO LEVEL.
Why do you want to destroy the craft?
AoC was intended to be a game with important crafting focused on cooperation between players, where warriors need craftsmen and craftsmen need warriors. What you propose will make crafting unnecessary, and if that's the case, it's a waste of time designing skills related to it. Why lie to people? Let's say crafting is unnecessary, let's eliminate crafting skills and let players earn items as rewards or buy them from NPC vendors.
how about this then, characters who can craft, cant fight. just because you can make the best sword, doesnt mean you can use it to slay a powerful dragon, or even a soldier with combat training.
On bosses, I’d prefer to have rare gears ; weapons or armor as complete items that drop and not only resources for crafting, especially in dungeons and raids. But the difficulty lies in finding the right balance between "too little" and "too much".
I think it could be great to establish the probability according to several criteria:
1. accessibility and rarity of the boss (boss who reappears often and in the same place versus a worldboss who you won't come across very often. Boss who requires work upstream such as a series of quests to make him appear or not, etc.)
2. boss difficulty in terms of mechanics and level
3. the number of people fighting against the boss ; the smaller the group is, the higher the drop rate should be (I know that the difficulty of bosses will evolve according to number of people and their efficiency, especially in dungeons, but I think there's a possibility of rewarding this aspect in order to avoid buses of players constantly spawnkilling bosses and ruining the game experience)
4. Eventually the group performance; the more efficient the group, the higher the chance of loot (e.g. if one person in the group dies during combat, the chance of loot is slightly reduced. Or, if the tank took less than XX% of the group's total damage, then the chance of loot is reduced because the tank didn't do its job properly, etc.).
More generally, what I'd particularly like is that rarity depends more on the "merit and difficulty" factor than on the "number of times the boss has been killed" factor. I feel like unsatisfactory to kill an easy mob/boss hundreds of times over the course of hours in order to loot one of its items, where the only thing required is « patience », that’s so boring.
Drop tag:
This may be a bit off topic sorry, but I'd like to talk about how to tag a boss/mob. Other criteria should be used to tag, not only the number of damage inflicted. Tanks/healers/supports are often the big losers in this system... It might be interesting to include other factors such as "threat generated" or "number of damage taken" by tanks and "total of healings" contributed by the healer, etc...
I think gear reward needs to be relevant to the difficulty of content! The harder it is to clear the content or kill a boss, the more rewarding the loot should be from accomplishing that! I am all in favor of low drop chances, as long as there is other means to get reasonable quality gear such as via the crafting system. Let there be a means so you feel you can progress and be stronger to some capacity... but that does not mean every boss killed, dungeon cleared, etc should result in upgraded armor/weapons/ trinkets dropping for every player.
Sounds like basic risk vs reward to me. The harder the content the more satisfying it should be to complete it. I don't like the idea of being forced to repeatedly farm content to get something I want, rather than knowing I will get something good if I can overcome the challenge of the content itself. So, I would say rare mobs should drop rare stuff more often.
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angelicshiyaMember, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
How do you feel when it comes to rare loot? Do you prefer when rare mobs and boss mobs drop something interesting often or less often?
On one hand if rare drops are not that rare they become less valuable and on the other hand if the drops are too rare I feel more people would feel the need to ninja these Items.
So I do prefer drops not being so rare, because best gear/weapons will be done by crafters anyways so especial materials do not really need to be that rare.
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Chilly OGMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Balance.... it is all about balance.
It needs to be rare enough to be envied and a little struggle to obtain....
BUT!!!
It also has to be within some reach for even a solo player. Now the solo player may need to get a group together to get the rare but it should not be restricted to 30 man guilds zerging a rare mob over and over until they all have one.
I don't know the formula - I have played every MMO worth talking about - I have seen the cheapness of rares that aren't actually rare and the frustration of never even thinking I could get one.
If I was working there full time I am sure I could find this balance - come up with a solution but I will leave that to you the professionals!!!! I hope you come up with something good!
Grinding for gear is depressing, if grinding a boss is required for the "good" loot. Guild of Wars 2 did this right, you grind the tokens and then exchange them in a NPC vendor, the player should opt for what is preferable for his/her playstyle
Such GW2 design is preferable instead of grinding the same boss dozens of times with the risk of getting twice the same piece of gear
PvE means: A handful of coins and a bag of boredom.
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TawniMember, Braver of Worlds, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Ideally there is some really rare drops, but there should always be a "catch up" mechanism. For example the longer you don't get anything rare, the higher the chance of such becomes. Or the boss should always drops X amount of tokens, and you can trade these tokens for guaranteed reward.
In the end, I couldn't figure out how to answer this question properly relative to Ashes, and for that, I'm sorry.
What follows here is basically just going to be 'stuff the team is probably already doing' because it is 'The Feedback we were going to give NCSoft about how to fix what we presumed was their placeholder Crafting system'. I'll skip the explanation of the TL 'crafting system' since I'm confident that anyone at Intrepid working on this already knows how it goes.
Working backwards from the Bosses/Elites therefore:
Queen Bellandir Skin is Purple Grade, or should be, or she drops a Purple Grade 'Leather'. This should always be a special leather with a specific property that differentiates it from 'regular Purple Grade Leather', and adds some semi-consistent property to Leather Gear when it is used to make it.
There shouldn't be just one 'regular' Purple Grade Leather either. If you wanted, you can make it so that Queen Bellandir Skin isn't a specific item, but like, 'Epic Tier Flexible Skin', and then there's lower tiers of Flexible Skin that drop from things like 'weaker Worm mobs', and whatever else. BDO manages this much, they just do little with it.
You need at least four of these per material type and they can't transform into each other, but they can be substituted to change the properties of the gear you make with them. So, to focus on Drop Rarity. Ashes 'Giant Scorpion' mob should drop some kind of Blue Tier 'Scorpion Shell' or 'Arthropod Shell' basically 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time, maybe it drops 2, maybe it drops 1 and a recipe (I tend to think of these as 'being able to look at the mob and the way it fought and took damage and get a new armor idea), maybe it drops a Venom Sac, maybe it drops some other thing.
The Recipe drop should have a system that makes it so that this specific recipe can alter some stats for the product you make with it, similar to the base gear crafting in Legend of Mana (see below). It takes up a space in the recipe book (I can't remember if this recipe book thing is 'my' idea or an Ashes idea that was mentioned sometime, and not breaking flow to check...)
Legend of Mana uses a system where a gear TYPE has a set of 'multipliers' that are applied to the PROPERTIES of the material used to make it, to get the final stats.
So a "Light Flexible Armor" has "Slashing", "Piercing", "Blunt", "Magic Defense" multipliers, and a Sheep Leather has like, "Hardness", "Thickness", "Cushioning", "Resistance" Properties. But Boar Leather has different ones.
So "Boar Leather Light Armor" and "Sheep Leather Light Armor" might even be almost the same, but they get created with some underlying properties that affect 'how their stats increase when enhanced' or change which sockets or abilities they get.
It isn't really about any need for separate Slashing/Piercing/Blunt resistance on the armor itself, but moreso like 'high blunt resist values increase certain CC resistance'. Same for weapons. Ashes should probably not go as far as Mana does and let you make Sheep Leather Swords, though.
Go here and read section 9.5 "Material Properties List" if for some reason this isn't clear/sufficiently equivalent to whatever you're making now based on SWG.
So, I say give the 'single party encounter' Rares and Elites drops that fall into Blue Tier, and change three specific things based on how rare or difficult the mob is:
If the mob is part of the normal ecosystem, spawns often with minimal conditions, then if it's a thing that WEARS armor or uses a weapon, let it drop some component or damaged deconstructible version of some armor it wears or weapon it uses. If it's a 'natural' mob like a Tiger, it can just drop 'Blue Grade Tiger Hide'.
If it is limited enough to appear only during a certain season or under some special condition, and it is made to be fairly unique but not difficult, then have it drop similar things to above, but with higher chances of special Recipe drops. You fought it under a condition, you probably learned something. Don't care if you need to bring a crafter to the fight.
If it's limited in the above way but actually strong, or some other setup (long quest, Pop item that you have to wrangle, rare story triggered condition) then go up to Purple Tier. Start making the specialized stuff here, but if it's just 'a stronger version of a mob that already exists', guarantee some Blue quality drops maybe. If it's a unique mob let it drop a fitting Unique Material (Blue Tier is fine, whatever balances right). It's already rare due to some limit condition, and it's hard to fight, but Unique Blue doesn't wreck things economically as much as 'Consistent Purple'. I think rare spawns of hard mobs can drop Purple Mats if you bring the spoiler though.
If it's a semi-unique or entirely unique mob, it's probably hard (but I've played games where these have an easy version that is just 'testing the waters content that there isn't then any reason to remove). If it is hard, it should drop Purple Unique obviously, or even 'legendary'. If it isn't intended to be particularly hard, it can drop Blue, and if it's a humanoid, it can drop Purple but not Unique, like "Damaged Purple Grade Sheep Leather Light Armor" that you then deconstruct. A good way to fill out simplified item tables where there IS no 'Purple Grade Sheep' out in the world for you to kill to get that, only from Animal Husbandry, per se, and rare even there. But you can throw these on Humanoid enemies. Immersion!
If you don't want a market flood of 'receiving something on every kill' for these (I don't see why, this is Ashes, I'd figure you need the 'Queen Bellandir's Hide' to repair the 'Bellan Leather Armor' main part) then again tweak the drop options to be like "Purple Material, or Blue Materials, or sometimes Recipe only since the fight destroyed the material but gave you a really good idea of how it should be used when you get it".
If you want a pity drop system, I say make it a 50/50 thing where it drops 'Giant Desert Scorpion Combat Notes' which you CAN sell, and this is an item that makes it so that if you activate it during the fight with the enemy, it guarantees better drops. Bonus because people who specialize in hunting it can save these up and then join parties who want to fight it, mercenary style, if they don't want to just sell them off or whatever. If you want, these could even be the "Bind on Pickup" style item, because one could reasonably say 'well the notes are helpful but without the person who was actually there watching the fight they're not effective'.
As always, please weight this structure according to however much faith you have in my Econ Design input. This one took about 4 days to develop from the TL side and about 2 more days to 'convert to Ashes and smooth out the kinks'. I dropped a lot of 'potential pain point' aspects though, since I still don't fully understand the target audience desires for this game.
Good luck, Itemization and Balance teams! I hope this helped even a little. Looking forward to Talon Daggers and Wyrmscale Cloak and all that!
Bosses and mobs that are grindable should have the good loot drop rarely but perhaps crafting/upgrade materials drop frequently. So you are getting materials to craft or improve your gear but if you are lucky you get a rare gear piece drop.
IF the mob is a rare mob that is like once a week on a server gear should always drop or very powerful materials should drop.
I think the hard part of loot, rare or common, is to make sure you are not diminishing its value.
For example, if you give the hardest boss in the hardest content a 10% chance to drop the best weapon for a class, you should not go give some easy content a lower chance to drop the same weapon.
It is okay for a game to have items that not EVERYONE has access too. It is okay to have exclusive and elusive loot.
So while you can make easy content drop good loot, it needs to have some sort of system to make it feel rewarding and add value to the content needed to get the item. Example: you have a rare drop a mount , but the rare is an easily soloable rare in a cave by itself. Instead of making it so anyone can walk up and farm it on every respond, add a lock out timer, or a puzzle needed to activate it to add value to doing the content and the reward.
Also, put hidden loot in the game, encourage players to explore. Have a random chest in a level 10 cave have a .00001% chance to drop a best in slot item that encourages people to reuse the world you develop and to make the world feel more alive.
You need at least four of these per material type and they can't transform into each other, but they can be substituted to change the properties of the gear you make with them. So, to focus on Drop Rarity. Ashes 'Giant Scorpion' mob should drop some kind of Blue Tier 'Scorpion Shell' or 'Arthropod Shell' basically 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time, maybe it drops 2, maybe it drops 1 and a recipe (I tend to think of these as 'being able to look at the mob and the way it fought and took damage and get a new armor idea), maybe it drops a Venom Sac, maybe it drops some other thing.
The Recipe drop should have a system that makes it so that this specific recipe can alter some stats for the product you make with it, similar to the base gear crafting in Legend of Mana (see below). It takes up a space in the recipe book (I can't remember if this recipe book thing is 'my' idea or an Ashes idea that was mentioned sometime, and not breaking flow to check...)
I disagree with the recipe portion because even with the reasoning of being something you understand from combat, it doesn't explain how you would end up stacking a lot of these. And if you don't stack them (you only get 1 because it's Knowledge) then how does that work in a party system? Would this turn into getting "useless recipes" or into changing the drop pool? You end up with a lot of variables here that could be good but they're a lot more work than dropping a specific lower tier item useful for another craft like a venom sac or similar. I can imagine that hunting a particular normal mob could get you something you really want for one craft rarely, and a lower tier for other folks, which diversifies the economy for the given monster.
Not to say the recipes can't work, but they're hard to get right.
If it is limited enough to appear only during a certain season or under some special condition, and it is made to be fairly unique but not difficult, then have it drop similar things to above, but with higher chances of special Recipe drops. You fought it under a condition, you probably learned something. Don't care if you need to bring a crafter to the fight.
This ends up making more sense, it's escalating all the way down to average mobs where it starts to get complicated.
If you want a pity drop system, I say make it a 50/50 thing where it drops 'Giant Desert Scorpion Combat Notes' which you CAN sell, and this is an item that makes it so that if you activate it during the fight with the enemy, it guarantees better drops. Bonus because people who specialize in hunting it can save these up and then join parties who want to fight it, mercenary style, if they don't want to just sell them off or whatever. If you want, these could even be the "Bind on Pickup" style item, because one could reasonably say 'well the notes are helpful but without the person who was actually there watching the fight they're not effective'.
Maybe it's my own lucky bias but I think I'd rather they not drop something at all for normal field mobs, than to add pity drops to them.
For anything that's unique or high tier it should always drop something, not so much for common mobs.
Grilled cheese always tastes better when you eat it together!
In the end, I couldn't figure out how to answer this question properly relative to Ashes, and for that, I'm sorry.
What follows here is basically just going to be 'stuff the team is probably already doing' because it is 'The Feedback we were going to give NCSoft about how to fix what we presumed was their placeholder Crafting system'. I'll skip the explanation of the TL 'crafting system' since I'm confident that anyone at Intrepid working on this already knows how it goes.
Working backwards from the Bosses/Elites therefore:
Queen Bellandir Skin is Purple Grade, or should be, or she drops a Purple Grade 'Leather'. This should always be a special leather with a specific property that differentiates it from 'regular Purple Grade Leather', and adds some semi-consistent property to Leather Gear when it is used to make it.
There shouldn't be just one 'regular' Purple Grade Leather either. If you wanted, you can make it so that Queen Bellandir Skin isn't a specific item, but like, 'Epic Tier Flexible Skin', and then there's lower tiers of Flexible Skin that drop from things like 'weaker Worm mobs', and whatever else. BDO manages this much, they just do little with it.
You need at least four of these per material type and they can't transform into each other, but they can be substituted to change the properties of the gear you make with them. So, to focus on Drop Rarity. Ashes 'Giant Scorpion' mob should drop some kind of Blue Tier 'Scorpion Shell' or 'Arthropod Shell' basically 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time, maybe it drops 2, maybe it drops 1 and a recipe (I tend to think of these as 'being able to look at the mob and the way it fought and took damage and get a new armor idea), maybe it drops a Venom Sac, maybe it drops some other thing.
The Recipe drop should have a system that makes it so that this specific recipe can alter some stats for the product you make with it, similar to the base gear crafting in Legend of Mana (see below). It takes up a space in the recipe book (I can't remember if this recipe book thing is 'my' idea or an Ashes idea that was mentioned sometime, and not breaking flow to check...)
Legend of Mana uses a system where a gear TYPE has a set of 'multipliers' that are applied to the PROPERTIES of the material used to make it, to get the final stats.
So a "Light Flexible Armor" has "Slashing", "Piercing", "Blunt", "Magic Defense" multipliers, and a Sheep Leather has like, "Hardness", "Thickness", "Cushioning", "Resistance" Properties. But Boar Leather has different ones.
So "Boar Leather Light Armor" and "Sheep Leather Light Armor" might even be almost the same, but they get created with some underlying properties that affect 'how their stats increase when enhanced' or change which sockets or abilities they get.
It isn't really about any need for separate Slashing/Piercing/Blunt resistance on the armor itself, but moreso like 'high blunt resist values increase certain CC resistance'. Same for weapons. Ashes should probably not go as far as Mana does and let you make Sheep Leather Swords, though.
Go here and read section 9.5 "Material Properties List" if for some reason this isn't clear/sufficiently equivalent to whatever you're making now based on SWG.
So, I say give the 'single party encounter' Rares and Elites drops that fall into Blue Tier, and change three specific things based on how rare or difficult the mob is:
If the mob is part of the normal ecosystem, spawns often with minimal conditions, then if it's a thing that WEARS armor or uses a weapon, let it drop some component or damaged deconstructible version of some armor it wears or weapon it uses. If it's a 'natural' mob like a Tiger, it can just drop 'Blue Grade Tiger Hide'.
If it is limited enough to appear only during a certain season or under some special condition, and it is made to be fairly unique but not difficult, then have it drop similar things to above, but with higher chances of special Recipe drops. You fought it under a condition, you probably learned something. Don't care if you need to bring a crafter to the fight.
If it's limited in the above way but actually strong, or some other setup (long quest, Pop item that you have to wrangle, rare story triggered condition) then go up to Purple Tier. Start making the specialized stuff here, but if it's just 'a stronger version of a mob that already exists', guarantee some Blue quality drops maybe. If it's a unique mob let it drop a fitting Unique Material (Blue Tier is fine, whatever balances right). It's already rare due to some limit condition, and it's hard to fight, but Unique Blue doesn't wreck things economically as much as 'Consistent Purple'. I think rare spawns of hard mobs can drop Purple Mats if you bring the spoiler though.
If it's a semi-unique or entirely unique mob, it's probably hard (but I've played games where these have an easy version that is just 'testing the waters content that there isn't then any reason to remove). If it is hard, it should drop Purple Unique obviously, or even 'legendary'. If it isn't intended to be particularly hard, it can drop Blue, and if it's a humanoid, it can drop Purple but not Unique, like "Damaged Purple Grade Sheep Leather Light Armor" that you then deconstruct. A good way to fill out simplified item tables where there IS no 'Purple Grade Sheep' out in the world for you to kill to get that, only from Animal Husbandry, per se, and rare even there. But you can throw these on Humanoid enemies. Immersion!
If you don't want a market flood of 'receiving something on every kill' for these (I don't see why, this is Ashes, I'd figure you need the 'Queen Bellandir's Hide' to repair the 'Bellan Leather Armor' main part) then again tweak the drop options to be like "Purple Material, or Blue Materials, or sometimes Recipe only since the fight destroyed the material but gave you a really good idea of how it should be used when you get it".
If you want a pity drop system, I say make it a 50/50 thing where it drops 'Giant Desert Scorpion Combat Notes' which you CAN sell, and this is an item that makes it so that if you activate it during the fight with the enemy, it guarantees better drops. Bonus because people who specialize in hunting it can save these up and then join parties who want to fight it, mercenary style, if they don't want to just sell them off or whatever. If you want, these could even be the "Bind on Pickup" style item, because one could reasonably say 'well the notes are helpful but without the person who was actually there watching the fight they're not effective'.
As always, please weight this structure according to however much faith you have in my Econ Design input. This one took about 4 days to develop from the TL side and about 2 more days to 'convert to Ashes and smooth out the kinks'. I dropped a lot of 'potential pain point' aspects though, since I still don't fully understand the target audience desires for this game.
Good luck, Itemization and Balance teams! I hope this helped even a little. Looking forward to Talon Daggers and Wyrmscale Cloak and all that!
From a gameplay stand point I have a few things I'd add that are either disagreements or emphasize the importance of certain aspects of design to me. I agree with most of the things in this post from an economic stand point.
I think part of what separates ashes from everything else is how much potential immersion there is in it's itemization. I don't need very specific labels for crafting recipes, but general major categories with some denotation of the location or 'quality' the drops will bias the crafting recipe like Azherae mentioned in the post would help that a lot for me.
That being said, part of my concern with Ashes as a whole when it comes to mob farming gameplay is that to me drop rates and tier matter because a game without 'exclusivity to targeted mob.' Games with exclusive target systems on non-boss mobs are still fairly competitive regarding farming, but it kind of raises the bar of intent and effort. Without getting rid of this 'non-exclusivity' drops and tier of drops are one of the main ways to influence the person strong enough to EASILY steal a less geared or lower level player's mobs less incentivized to stick around. This has a huge underlying impact on where PvPers will feel it is most lucrative to hang out so I trust the IS team to factor this part of drops into the overall incentive structure versus player experience.
I like the combat note system Azherae brought up regarding elite mobs. I think I disagree about it being optional though. I think this is a system that would really help long term retention for players in Ashes without making things easy or flooding the market with higher drop rates. I'd also argue even further that this should probably be tied to character as a sure thing and not require a specific bag slot. You are still risking everything including your time in this model nor are you 'increasing your reward' per say, but your mitigating the 'cost to retry' in terms of TIME.
Regular Mobs: Having very rare "world drop" items that drop off any monster within a lvl range for that item are fun and exciting. These items should never be best in slot, just a nice upgrade for leveling or to sell.
Rare Spawns: a unique mob that only spawns every 3~ hours could contain unique cosmetic items or a higher rate to get a very rare world drop, but should never drop really good end game gear.
Crafting: Please don't make super rare materials/drops required for crafting that would require hours of grinding to get or find. These items should be obtainable via endgame content or have a reasonable rate of dropping from normal gathering. Rare gatherables are fine, so long as they don't spawn in the same location for people to camp them.
Raid Bosses: How many pieces of gear or unique crafting materials that drop should scale with the number of people participating, though the encounter should be scaled in a way that the number of people you bring doesn't make the fight any less or more difficult (scaling hp/dmg etc). 20% for each person participating is a great rate, so a 40 person raid would drop 8 pieces of gear, 20 person raid drops 4 pieces, 10 person raid drops 2 pieces, etc. Uneven numbers like 19 would result in 3 pieces with a 80% chance to drop the 4th piece.
I've played WoW off and on for 19 years and have experienced the drop rate changes throughout it's life and can confidently say this system they currently use is the most I've enjoyed in how it trickles gear in at a frequent enough rate to keep you happy, but slow enough that it keeps you motivated to keep pushing for more loot. Clearing an entire raid and not getting a single piece of loot feels really bad. Clearing an entire raid and getting 5 pieces of gear and having full best in slot within 4 weeks would remove my desire to raid any further.
The last thing you want to do is release raid content that most people clear within the first 4 weeks and then force them to grind that same content over and over just to get gear when the challenge is gone. To get the absolute best gear in the game, it should require you to be a top PVP'er or to do raid content that takes the average player the entire patch to fully clear the raid of. Loot shouldn't be the sole reason to drive people to play, it should be the challenge of the content as well. Various raid difficulties would be good to satisfy both the casual and hardcore audience.
I prefer it when rare mobs drop something good every time. A rare item from a rare mob in the open world is too rng for me and I don't like it. That's assuming 1 person/group gets the tag on the rare mob out in the open world.
For bosses, presumably ones you can kill once a week or maybe more often, I'd prefer that they drop good usable loot each time, but that they have a rare drop or 2 as well.
I like classic WoW's approach. Named rare mobs in the open wild will always drop a higher tier item and then some of the bosses in the raid have rare drops(legendary or mounts).
Do you prefer when rare mobs and boss mobs drop something interesting often or less often?
Often. But it depends. Not so often, or in such quantity, that a piece of content removes itself from being worthy of being contested, because people are done with it after one kill.
And "interesting" could be many things, not just the main loot item you're killing the boss or rare mob for. Other worthwhile secondary mats or items could drop instead, and that's fine. But no in general, I don't want to kill rare mobs and get nothing at all interesting. I'd want something to have made it worthwhile, and to make it worth contesting and being contested for.
I believe high value items should drop from end dungeon and raid boss’s however depending on the rarity and quality of the drop it should be at a low % to add value to the item.
After years of playing WoW and killing the same boss over 1300 times and not getting the mount, I can clearly state that I’m a big fan of bad luck protection.
I’m also a big fan of progression. So if I need 10 rare relics to craft my next big upgrade, and I can only kill that boss once a week, I expect to be guaranteed 1 relic per kill/week, via a personal loot system.
Killing bosses with 10 people for 3 random pieces isn’t fun, and it’s not progression. Getting nothing multiple weeks in a row isn’t fun.
Masterlooting where someone is doling out 3 random pieces to 10 people, also isn’t fun.
If I need 10 relics to craft my next piece, and I’m guaranteed to get one per kill/week; with a rare chance to get 2/3/5 pieces, that’s fun and exciting; to have my progression randomly sped up.
For cosmetic drops, one per week/kill for a group is fine, assuming it always drops on kill. Good luck to be the first, and worst case scenario, my bad luck is that I’m the last to get it - but fun progression. Means I’ll get it eventually.
Pure randomness and 1300 kills without the prize just isn’t fun. There is no happiness at getting the thing at that point, just relief that the hunt is over and I can go do something else that’s actually fun.
Just do NO COOLDOWNS on Dungeons, so people can go into it as much as they want, but Lower the Drop of Rare items to the Minimum!!
So if People really wants that piece of Gear or Weapon they have to be either really really Lucky or Grind it.
Back in the Original Aion Days, a friend of mine went over 200x into Barkarma to get his Extented Weapon, after 200x he still didnt get it, but after a while he got it and it was really Rare at the Time he got that, and you had a feeling you Achieved something Great.
Dont do it like other MMO's that you go in a Dungeon and have 100% drop of item, this ruins the Game, when people get the items the dungeon is literally "useless" for the players after that.
Im sure people will cry over that, that they went 200x in a Dungeon and didnt get his item, BUT if you WANT something YOU have to WORK FOR IT!! THEN you Deserve it!!
TLDR: Rare Drops from Rare mobs is awesome. Items should be extraordinarily good, but wear out so you cant be extraordinarily better forever. They should be tradable before binding so you can choose between gold and awesomeness.
As someone who spent countless hours killing gnolls to get the polished granite tomahawk in EQ, super rare drops are painful but I love it . After years of MMO's with different takes, here is my opinion.
Rare Drops give a feeling of surprise and delight at the end of a fight. They should be limited to rare/tough mobs, not common mobs. Rare items should really be rare, hard to find and hard to get. The harder and rarer... the better the items.
Rare drops should be end use items, crafting items and consumable items. Weapons/Armor? of course. Unique crystal used in a rare crafted necklace? For sure. Vial of Charged Demon Blood that you can drink that gives you +1000 strength and lightning shoots out of an orifice for 5 mins? awesome.
In my opinion, Rare drops should eventually wear out, get used up or break permanently... though you can still hang them on the wall of your house. I know the current philosophy is to have items be a material sink and not get destroyed... but I would make legendary rare drops end use items like weapons not be repairable... or require an item of equal or greater rarity to repair. Or just put a straight up use timer on the item... once equipped it only lasts for 3 hours in game time, or for 1000 hits. I am sure your lore folks can work in some great reasoning as to why.
Rare Drops should have a significant advantage over the same class of item. 50%-200% DPS increase for weapons for example is fine as long as there was some kind of timer on the usage. It gives those "Hero moments" where you can play better than you did otherwise and creates fun memories that really make the game great.
With regards to tradability... I am in the make it tradeable camp as well, as long as the above is true. If you get "Allakhazams Wand of Petrification" that will freeze any target for 1 min, but only 5 times... having the choice of using it or essentially gaining a pile of gold gives another level of depth that is good. Even just seeing them on the store will draw people in..."500 gold for a stupid wand? wait... 1 min stun? where do you get that?" Its all great stuff for an mmo and immersion in the world in my opinion.
Actually, I believe that this topic is more deep and important that it seems at first sigh.
Drops are the reward that motivate the players to do the most part the content in a MMO and finding the sweet point where the players feels fulfilled with a drop that matches his effort and time, but without making it frustrating because of making it too easy, too hard, the drop matching your expectations, etc... Can be a big challenge (not to mention that this supposed ideal point is subjective and will vary across the community).
To address this topic, I think that we must inquiry about what a "rare drop is". This term is a little bit unspecific because rarity is not the only thing that defines a drop and before to determinate if a rare drop rate should be higher or lower there are other aspects that must be taking in count:
TIER: I suppose that this game will follow the common, unusual, rare, epic and legendary formula which is totally fine for me, it is a good way to classify the loot and a quick way to players to know what are aiming for and what are they receiving when they get their loot. From my perspective we are talking about "rare drops" starting from epic to legendary tiers, but that depends of how the games that i have played works with their loot system. For example in retail WoW, blue items that are supposed to be "rare tier" don´t feel like rare at all because is too easy to get them.
TYPE: What the drop is. Is it a cosmetic? Is it a BiS? Is it an equipment? A weapon? I consider that depending of the influence that the drop will have in your character it has to be treated different. For example a cosmetic being more inaccesible would not generate as many frustration as a quest drop that is required to progress you character.
OBTAINING METHOD: The activity that the player has to do to obtain that rare drop is a huge deal too, and the content that AoC pretends to create for the player will as well condition how rare drops should work. Apart from the obvious differences from a gathereable rare drops or mobs rare drops, we have to consider the differences in between drops coming from similar activities. For example In Monster Hunter (which i believe that even if its not an MMO his rewards system works very well) players don´t mind doing the same boss again and again to obtain the drop because its easy to engage the activity and the battles against them are really fun. But in an MMO raid boss drops players need time to find a party and prepare, and also you have to clean all the pulls and the previous bosses to engage the fight with the one that has the drop you want, and also you have to consider that when playing in group the battle result don´t depends entirely on you. Even if both examples are boss fights, the reward given from them has to be different due to their differences, although I know this case is pretty obvious i wanted to make clear some characteristics that can modify an activity and if the activity is slightly different maybe it should change they way the rewards are given too.
Taking all this into account and to answer the topic: How do you feel when it comes to rare loot? Do you prefer when rare mobs and boss mobs drop something interesting often or less often?
I believe that theres no a unique correct answer, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of things to consider and the way that the game will work with some aspects that we cant experience for now will condition this matter. But I believe that is a great idea to plan as many different kind of rare drops as its possible, not because of preventing all the possible scenarios, It´s because having different drops that match the different circumstances you will find at the game is going to enrich it a lot.
I believe It´s ok for an important drop that is obtainable through a hard fight to have a low rate to drop. And also is ok for an important drop that is also obtainable through a fight, but harder than the previous one, to have a higher chance to drop. It´s all about how you want to design it, maybe in the first case the drop is something about one profession so it feels less painful to depend on the luck of the drop rate and in the second case the drop has something to do with your freehold progress so you prefer make it a "rare drop" through the player skill because It´s rare not because of your luck with the drop rate, It´s because not so many people could kill that mob. So the players that have better freeholds are also more likely to be the ones who has beaten the harder mobs.
As you can see, based on what you want to do, you can use all the characteristics mentioned before to create different sensations of what a "rare drop" means and how the player feels when they get their hands on it.
I don´t agree with some post that states a formula in which if the mob take more time to respawn it has to have a higher drop chance and if it takes less time it can have lower chance. Of course, the accessibility of the activity is something that has to be consider (as i mentioned at the OBTAINING METHOD) but, i don´t see why two mobs with the same respawn time can both have a rare item with very different drop chances, as long as, you plan out carefully WHAT TYPE of items they are and what impact will they have in our character.
I think both situations can co-exist in the same game, more than that, it would be beneficial for the game to have different rewards systems in order to encourage the player to pick the activities that suit them as well.
To finish, I would like to comment some quick notes that I would like to point out about the drop rarity:
Tiers, must have his own identity in AoC. As it happens in other games, when a player see an article and his color, at first sight he should have an idea of how much time, effort or luck it has to get one of that items and I believe that is important to not let that sensation disappear among new actualisations with new drops.
Frustration is part of the rewards system. Of course this is a hot topic in games and it always will be hard to balance but, failures makes successes meaningful and so happens with obtaining or not a reward.
About accessibility, when it happens to be an open world activity, from my perspective not many MMOs handle it very well. I think It´s good to use some rare rewards to make attractive an open world activity and make it a hot spot to people to meet and do pvp, cooperate, etc... But I think that also there must be some alternatives to don´t let the amount of players make It annoying and to don´t disturb the fundamentals of the activity. For example, if there exist the best hunting zone that has a lot of beast to kill and gather a special material from them, there should be another zones but with some disadvantage, maybe they are far away, maybe it has less beasts, etc... I think the node system area is a beautiful opportunity to finally create a world with different opportunities to grow and don´t feel like the path has been stablished beforehand. Letting the player choose the way he want to obtain some rare drops can be a plus to archive this.
Same applies to rare mobs or rare gather points that are supposed to give something special, for me, as long as the location goes into a wiki and all the people start to camp the same spot It no longer feels "rare" and also the loot it provides. Would like that kind of things to maybe have a random spawn system using the node system and maybe the season system to change the spawns or something like that. Also creating more than one mob or spot is a good idea but then it looses some identity I feel that it would be cool to have unique monsters or gathereables along the world but their loot and location must be planned carefully.
That´s all, sry for the long post, I hope it helps. The game is looking pretty good and I hope we can see more about this topic in the next stream .
While I like the idea of having recipe drops with varied stats, I'm somewhat concerned that this will create a situation where I have too many variant recipes available when crafting in a way that makes it difficult to select the one you're interested in.
If you have a small pool of fixed recipes, what will I use the recipe drops for when I've gotten several? If I can sell them on auction, I feel like they lose immersion value as well as remove the regional specialization that would be a large part of the point. If I can't, what are the duplicates for?
I suppose it's fine if they have limited durability, for the more common ones, but then they simply become another crafting material, which feels a bit odd. "Do I forget how to make this item because I've practiced it too much?" is a little immersion breaking. "Wait, so I got this recipe on an old scroll that's crumbled away over time, and I somehow didn't think to copy it?" for time-limited recipes isn't much better.
In all, the customization is good, but I feel like the management would be bad. But hey, if you can solve that, go for it! This'll result in regional specialties and traveling masters, all the while making immigrants and guests more interesting. That's a plus in my book.
I believe that the drop of rare items used in the creation of armor, weapons and others should be very rare. The less frequently such items drop out and appear on the market the more valuable the items created using them will be. this will have a positive effect on the interest of players in finding and farming these values.
Comments
Guilds will breakdown rares for mats, recipes, and craft as needed. Solos will use, or sell them, and mats to buy crafted gear. I see this as their main gear progression path.
As a side note, I also thought it could be interesting if you had corrupted weapons / gear (red colored). I know you have previously said corrupted players will have diminishing damage and stats the more corrupted they get, and I thought it could be interesting if gear could become corrupted and lose stats. It could persist through death as a means to prevent players from going corrupted and then having a friend kill them to remove corruption and collect any other items they might drop. Then you would need to sanctify it or something to return it to it's original stats.
Edit: Just wanted to add a note after watching the live stream, I totally agree with Steven that I liked the old school MMO design where raid leaders would make a list of who got what to try and even out loot distribution. I like the idea of not getting an item literally every single boss kill as a consolation prize, even giving everyone some bound token feels like it's feeding into the entitlement people have (Like how in South Park Cartman's mom has to bring a present for him every time he goes to someone else's birthday party or he flips out). I think it's part of the social aspect of having to work with others to plan out who gets what loot, and can create conflict if people disagree on who gets what that can lead to people creating new guilds or show you who the real entitled people of your guild are. I do however think that there should be a public record (to everyone who participated in the raid / dungeon / guild) as to who got what items from which boss kills so it's easy to keep track of and everyone is on the same page.
If a rare mob or boss is killed it should always drop something rare and interesting items such as weapons, armors or resources depending on what kind of creature it is. 🤩
I like it this way because if a rare creature drops a "normal" loot the creature wouldn't feel to me any special and I wouldn't bother to encounter it. Also I would feel frustrated if I would encounter a creature that is considered as a rare and it wouldn't drop or do anything special or valuable. It would be a same to find a gorgeus treasure chest without any booty.
So could you make rare mobs and bosses so rare that players would feel excited when encountering them?
Why do you want to destroy the craft?
AoC was intended to be a game with important crafting focused on cooperation between players, where warriors need craftsmen and craftsmen need warriors. What you propose will make crafting unnecessary, and if that's the case, it's a waste of time designing skills related to it. Why lie to people? Let's say crafting is unnecessary, let's eliminate crafting skills and let players earn items as rewards or buy them from NPC vendors.
how about this then, characters who can craft, cant fight. just because you can make the best sword, doesnt mean you can use it to slay a powerful dragon, or even a soldier with combat training.
On bosses, I’d prefer to have rare gears ; weapons or armor as complete items that drop and not only resources for crafting, especially in dungeons and raids. But the difficulty lies in finding the right balance between "too little" and "too much".
I think it could be great to establish the probability according to several criteria:
1. accessibility and rarity of the boss (boss who reappears often and in the same place versus a worldboss who you won't come across very often. Boss who requires work upstream such as a series of quests to make him appear or not, etc.)
2. boss difficulty in terms of mechanics and level
3. the number of people fighting against the boss ; the smaller the group is, the higher the drop rate should be (I know that the difficulty of bosses will evolve according to number of people and their efficiency, especially in dungeons, but I think there's a possibility of rewarding this aspect in order to avoid buses of players constantly spawnkilling bosses and ruining the game experience)
4. Eventually the group performance; the more efficient the group, the higher the chance of loot (e.g. if one person in the group dies during combat, the chance of loot is slightly reduced. Or, if the tank took less than XX% of the group's total damage, then the chance of loot is reduced because the tank didn't do its job properly, etc.).
More generally, what I'd particularly like is that rarity depends more on the "merit and difficulty" factor than on the "number of times the boss has been killed" factor. I feel like unsatisfactory to kill an easy mob/boss hundreds of times over the course of hours in order to loot one of its items, where the only thing required is « patience », that’s so boring.
Drop tag:
This may be a bit off topic sorry, but I'd like to talk about how to tag a boss/mob. Other criteria should be used to tag, not only the number of damage inflicted. Tanks/healers/supports are often the big losers in this system... It might be interesting to include other factors such as "threat generated" or "number of damage taken" by tanks and "total of healings" contributed by the healer, etc...
2. how often should mobs drop something? logically if you kill a wolf then=wolf pelt. However, some people may want to grind in forest and kill 100 wolves. I don't want to keep looting every corpse manually. So solution, either have auto-loot corpse feature, that when you kill mob, automatically goes into bag. Or have a feature where the non-combat pet you can own loots for you. That will also give some utility to that creature and not just some statue that follows you.
On one hand if rare drops are not that rare they become less valuable and on the other hand if the drops are too rare I feel more people would feel the need to ninja these Items.
So I do prefer drops not being so rare, because best gear/weapons will be done by crafters anyways so especial materials do not really need to be that rare.
It needs to be rare enough to be envied and a little struggle to obtain....
BUT!!!
It also has to be within some reach for even a solo player. Now the solo player may need to get a group together to get the rare but it should not be restricted to 30 man guilds zerging a rare mob over and over until they all have one.
I don't know the formula - I have played every MMO worth talking about - I have seen the cheapness of rares that aren't actually rare and the frustration of never even thinking I could get one.
If I was working there full time I am sure I could find this balance - come up with a solution but I will leave that to you the professionals!!!! I hope you come up with something good!
Chilly
Chillys Tavern
Such GW2 design is preferable instead of grinding the same boss dozens of times with the risk of getting twice the same piece of gear
What follows here is basically just going to be 'stuff the team is probably already doing' because it is 'The Feedback we were going to give NCSoft about how to fix what we presumed was their placeholder Crafting system'. I'll skip the explanation of the TL 'crafting system' since I'm confident that anyone at Intrepid working on this already knows how it goes.
Working backwards from the Bosses/Elites therefore:
Queen Bellandir Skin is Purple Grade, or should be, or she drops a Purple Grade 'Leather'. This should always be a special leather with a specific property that differentiates it from 'regular Purple Grade Leather', and adds some semi-consistent property to Leather Gear when it is used to make it.
There shouldn't be just one 'regular' Purple Grade Leather either. If you wanted, you can make it so that Queen Bellandir Skin isn't a specific item, but like, 'Epic Tier Flexible Skin', and then there's lower tiers of Flexible Skin that drop from things like 'weaker Worm mobs', and whatever else. BDO manages this much, they just do little with it.
You need at least four of these per material type and they can't transform into each other, but they can be substituted to change the properties of the gear you make with them. So, to focus on Drop Rarity. Ashes 'Giant Scorpion' mob should drop some kind of Blue Tier 'Scorpion Shell' or 'Arthropod Shell' basically 60% of the time. The other 40% of the time, maybe it drops 2, maybe it drops 1 and a recipe (I tend to think of these as 'being able to look at the mob and the way it fought and took damage and get a new armor idea), maybe it drops a Venom Sac, maybe it drops some other thing.
The Recipe drop should have a system that makes it so that this specific recipe can alter some stats for the product you make with it, similar to the base gear crafting in Legend of Mana (see below). It takes up a space in the recipe book (I can't remember if this recipe book thing is 'my' idea or an Ashes idea that was mentioned sometime, and not breaking flow to check...)
So a "Light Flexible Armor" has "Slashing", "Piercing", "Blunt", "Magic Defense" multipliers, and a Sheep Leather has like, "Hardness", "Thickness", "Cushioning", "Resistance" Properties. But Boar Leather has different ones.
So "Boar Leather Light Armor" and "Sheep Leather Light Armor" might even be almost the same, but they get created with some underlying properties that affect 'how their stats increase when enhanced' or change which sockets or abilities they get.
It isn't really about any need for separate Slashing/Piercing/Blunt resistance on the armor itself, but moreso like 'high blunt resist values increase certain CC resistance'. Same for weapons. Ashes should probably not go as far as Mana does and let you make Sheep Leather Swords, though.
Go here and read section 9.5 "Material Properties List" if for some reason this isn't clear/sufficiently equivalent to whatever you're making now based on SWG.
So, I say give the 'single party encounter' Rares and Elites drops that fall into Blue Tier, and change three specific things based on how rare or difficult the mob is:
If the mob is part of the normal ecosystem, spawns often with minimal conditions, then if it's a thing that WEARS armor or uses a weapon, let it drop some component or damaged deconstructible version of some armor it wears or weapon it uses. If it's a 'natural' mob like a Tiger, it can just drop 'Blue Grade Tiger Hide'.
If it is limited enough to appear only during a certain season or under some special condition, and it is made to be fairly unique but not difficult, then have it drop similar things to above, but with higher chances of special Recipe drops. You fought it under a condition, you probably learned something. Don't care if you need to bring a crafter to the fight.
If it's limited in the above way but actually strong, or some other setup (long quest, Pop item that you have to wrangle, rare story triggered condition) then go up to Purple Tier. Start making the specialized stuff here, but if it's just 'a stronger version of a mob that already exists', guarantee some Blue quality drops maybe. If it's a unique mob let it drop a fitting Unique Material (Blue Tier is fine, whatever balances right). It's already rare due to some limit condition, and it's hard to fight, but Unique Blue doesn't wreck things economically as much as 'Consistent Purple'. I think rare spawns of hard mobs can drop Purple Mats if you bring the spoiler though.
If it's a semi-unique or entirely unique mob, it's probably hard (but I've played games where these have an easy version that is just 'testing the waters content that there isn't then any reason to remove). If it is hard, it should drop Purple Unique obviously, or even 'legendary'. If it isn't intended to be particularly hard, it can drop Blue, and if it's a humanoid, it can drop Purple but not Unique, like "Damaged Purple Grade Sheep Leather Light Armor" that you then deconstruct. A good way to fill out simplified item tables where there IS no 'Purple Grade Sheep' out in the world for you to kill to get that, only from Animal Husbandry, per se, and rare even there. But you can throw these on Humanoid enemies. Immersion!
If you don't want a market flood of 'receiving something on every kill' for these (I don't see why, this is Ashes, I'd figure you need the 'Queen Bellandir's Hide' to repair the 'Bellan Leather Armor' main part) then again tweak the drop options to be like "Purple Material, or Blue Materials, or sometimes Recipe only since the fight destroyed the material but gave you a really good idea of how it should be used when you get it".
If you want a pity drop system, I say make it a 50/50 thing where it drops 'Giant Desert Scorpion Combat Notes' which you CAN sell, and this is an item that makes it so that if you activate it during the fight with the enemy, it guarantees better drops. Bonus because people who specialize in hunting it can save these up and then join parties who want to fight it, mercenary style, if they don't want to just sell them off or whatever. If you want, these could even be the "Bind on Pickup" style item, because one could reasonably say 'well the notes are helpful but without the person who was actually there watching the fight they're not effective'.
As always, please weight this structure according to however much faith you have in my Econ Design input. This one took about 4 days to develop from the TL side and about 2 more days to 'convert to Ashes and smooth out the kinks'. I dropped a lot of 'potential pain point' aspects though, since I still don't fully understand the target audience desires for this game.
Good luck, Itemization and Balance teams! I hope this helped even a little. Looking forward to Talon Daggers and Wyrmscale Cloak and all that!
IF the mob is a rare mob that is like once a week on a server gear should always drop or very powerful materials should drop.
For example, if you give the hardest boss in the hardest content a 10% chance to drop the best weapon for a class, you should not go give some easy content a lower chance to drop the same weapon.
It is okay for a game to have items that not EVERYONE has access too. It is okay to have exclusive and elusive loot.
So while you can make easy content drop good loot, it needs to have some sort of system to make it feel rewarding and add value to the content needed to get the item. Example: you have a rare drop a mount , but the rare is an easily soloable rare in a cave by itself. Instead of making it so anyone can walk up and farm it on every respond, add a lock out timer, or a puzzle needed to activate it to add value to doing the content and the reward.
Also, put hidden loot in the game, encourage players to explore. Have a random chest in a level 10 cave have a .00001% chance to drop a best in slot item that encourages people to reuse the world you develop and to make the world feel more alive.
I disagree with the recipe portion because even with the reasoning of being something you understand from combat, it doesn't explain how you would end up stacking a lot of these. And if you don't stack them (you only get 1 because it's Knowledge) then how does that work in a party system? Would this turn into getting "useless recipes" or into changing the drop pool? You end up with a lot of variables here that could be good but they're a lot more work than dropping a specific lower tier item useful for another craft like a venom sac or similar. I can imagine that hunting a particular normal mob could get you something you really want for one craft rarely, and a lower tier for other folks, which diversifies the economy for the given monster.
Not to say the recipes can't work, but they're hard to get right.
This ends up making more sense, it's escalating all the way down to average mobs where it starts to get complicated.
Maybe it's my own lucky bias but I think I'd rather they not drop something at all for normal field mobs, than to add pity drops to them.
For anything that's unique or high tier it should always drop something, not so much for common mobs.
From a gameplay stand point I have a few things I'd add that are either disagreements or emphasize the importance of certain aspects of design to me. I agree with most of the things in this post from an economic stand point.
I think part of what separates ashes from everything else is how much potential immersion there is in it's itemization. I don't need very specific labels for crafting recipes, but general major categories with some denotation of the location or 'quality' the drops will bias the crafting recipe like Azherae mentioned in the post would help that a lot for me.
That being said, part of my concern with Ashes as a whole when it comes to mob farming gameplay is that to me drop rates and tier matter because a game without 'exclusivity to targeted mob.' Games with exclusive target systems on non-boss mobs are still fairly competitive regarding farming, but it kind of raises the bar of intent and effort. Without getting rid of this 'non-exclusivity' drops and tier of drops are one of the main ways to influence the person strong enough to EASILY steal a less geared or lower level player's mobs less incentivized to stick around. This has a huge underlying impact on where PvPers will feel it is most lucrative to hang out so I trust the IS team to factor this part of drops into the overall incentive structure versus player experience.
I like the combat note system Azherae brought up regarding elite mobs. I think I disagree about it being optional though. I think this is a system that would really help long term retention for players in Ashes without making things easy or flooding the market with higher drop rates. I'd also argue even further that this should probably be tied to character as a sure thing and not require a specific bag slot. You are still risking everything including your time in this model nor are you 'increasing your reward' per say, but your mitigating the 'cost to retry' in terms of TIME.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Rare Spawns: a unique mob that only spawns every 3~ hours could contain unique cosmetic items or a higher rate to get a very rare world drop, but should never drop really good end game gear.
Crafting: Please don't make super rare materials/drops required for crafting that would require hours of grinding to get or find. These items should be obtainable via endgame content or have a reasonable rate of dropping from normal gathering. Rare gatherables are fine, so long as they don't spawn in the same location for people to camp them.
Raid Bosses: How many pieces of gear or unique crafting materials that drop should scale with the number of people participating, though the encounter should be scaled in a way that the number of people you bring doesn't make the fight any less or more difficult (scaling hp/dmg etc). 20% for each person participating is a great rate, so a 40 person raid would drop 8 pieces of gear, 20 person raid drops 4 pieces, 10 person raid drops 2 pieces, etc. Uneven numbers like 19 would result in 3 pieces with a 80% chance to drop the 4th piece.
I've played WoW off and on for 19 years and have experienced the drop rate changes throughout it's life and can confidently say this system they currently use is the most I've enjoyed in how it trickles gear in at a frequent enough rate to keep you happy, but slow enough that it keeps you motivated to keep pushing for more loot. Clearing an entire raid and not getting a single piece of loot feels really bad. Clearing an entire raid and getting 5 pieces of gear and having full best in slot within 4 weeks would remove my desire to raid any further.
The last thing you want to do is release raid content that most people clear within the first 4 weeks and then force them to grind that same content over and over just to get gear when the challenge is gone. To get the absolute best gear in the game, it should require you to be a top PVP'er or to do raid content that takes the average player the entire patch to fully clear the raid of. Loot shouldn't be the sole reason to drive people to play, it should be the challenge of the content as well. Various raid difficulties would be good to satisfy both the casual and hardcore audience.
For bosses, presumably ones you can kill once a week or maybe more often, I'd prefer that they drop good usable loot each time, but that they have a rare drop or 2 as well.
I like classic WoW's approach. Named rare mobs in the open wild will always drop a higher tier item and then some of the bosses in the raid have rare drops(legendary or mounts).
Often. But it depends. Not so often, or in such quantity, that a piece of content removes itself from being worthy of being contested, because people are done with it after one kill.
And "interesting" could be many things, not just the main loot item you're killing the boss or rare mob for. Other worthwhile secondary mats or items could drop instead, and that's fine. But no in general, I don't want to kill rare mobs and get nothing at all interesting. I'd want something to have made it worthwhile, and to make it worth contesting and being contested for.
I’m also a big fan of progression. So if I need 10 rare relics to craft my next big upgrade, and I can only kill that boss once a week, I expect to be guaranteed 1 relic per kill/week, via a personal loot system.
Killing bosses with 10 people for 3 random pieces isn’t fun, and it’s not progression. Getting nothing multiple weeks in a row isn’t fun.
Masterlooting where someone is doling out 3 random pieces to 10 people, also isn’t fun.
If I need 10 relics to craft my next piece, and I’m guaranteed to get one per kill/week; with a rare chance to get 2/3/5 pieces, that’s fun and exciting; to have my progression randomly sped up.
For cosmetic drops, one per week/kill for a group is fine, assuming it always drops on kill. Good luck to be the first, and worst case scenario, my bad luck is that I’m the last to get it - but fun progression. Means I’ll get it eventually.
Pure randomness and 1300 kills without the prize just isn’t fun. There is no happiness at getting the thing at that point, just relief that the hunt is over and I can go do something else that’s actually fun.
Thanks for reading!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP31ixSBO7GHKLBefWVcJaA
So if People really wants that piece of Gear or Weapon they have to be either really really Lucky or Grind it.
Back in the Original Aion Days, a friend of mine went over 200x into Barkarma to get his Extented Weapon, after 200x he still didnt get it, but after a while he got it and it was really Rare at the Time he got that, and you had a feeling you Achieved something Great.
Dont do it like other MMO's that you go in a Dungeon and have 100% drop of item, this ruins the Game, when people get the items the dungeon is literally "useless" for the players after that.
Im sure people will cry over that, that they went 200x in a Dungeon and didnt get his item, BUT if you WANT something YOU have to WORK FOR IT!! THEN you Deserve it!!
www.Twitch.tv/ShreddedFPS
www.Twitch.tv/ShreddedFPS
How do you feel when it comes to rare loot?
Important.
Do you prefer when rare mobs and boss mobs drop something interesting often or less often?
Yes. Higher the rarity, lower the drop chance.
As someone who spent countless hours killing gnolls to get the polished granite tomahawk in EQ, super rare drops are painful but I love it
Rare Drops give a feeling of surprise and delight at the end of a fight. They should be limited to rare/tough mobs, not common mobs. Rare items should really be rare, hard to find and hard to get. The harder and rarer... the better the items.
Rare drops should be end use items, crafting items and consumable items. Weapons/Armor? of course. Unique crystal used in a rare crafted necklace? For sure. Vial of Charged Demon Blood that you can drink that gives you +1000 strength and lightning shoots out of an orifice for 5 mins? awesome.
In my opinion, Rare drops should eventually wear out, get used up or break permanently... though you can still hang them on the wall of your house. I know the current philosophy is to have items be a material sink and not get destroyed... but I would make legendary rare drops end use items like weapons not be repairable... or require an item of equal or greater rarity to repair. Or just put a straight up use timer on the item... once equipped it only lasts for 3 hours in game time, or for 1000 hits. I am sure your lore folks can work in some great reasoning as to why.
Rare Drops should have a significant advantage over the same class of item. 50%-200% DPS increase for weapons for example is fine as long as there was some kind of timer on the usage. It gives those "Hero moments" where you can play better than you did otherwise and creates fun memories that really make the game great.
With regards to tradability... I am in the make it tradeable camp as well, as long as the above is true. If you get "Allakhazams Wand of Petrification" that will freeze any target for 1 min, but only 5 times... having the choice of using it or essentially gaining a pile of gold gives another level of depth that is good. Even just seeing them on the store will draw people in..."500 gold for a stupid wand? wait... 1 min stun? where do you get that?" Its all great stuff for an mmo and immersion in the world in my opinion.
Drops are the reward that motivate the players to do the most part the content in a MMO and finding the sweet point where the players feels fulfilled with a drop that matches his effort and time, but without making it frustrating because of making it too easy, too hard, the drop matching your expectations, etc... Can be a big challenge (not to mention that this supposed ideal point is subjective and will vary across the community).
To address this topic, I think that we must inquiry about what a "rare drop is". This term is a little bit unspecific because rarity is not the only thing that defines a drop and before to determinate if a rare drop rate should be higher or lower there are other aspects that must be taking in count:
- TIER: I suppose that this game will follow the common, unusual, rare, epic and legendary formula which is totally fine for me, it is a good way to classify the loot and a quick way to players to know what are aiming for and what are they receiving when they get their loot. From my perspective we are talking about "rare drops" starting from epic to legendary tiers, but that depends of how the games that i have played works with their loot system. For example in retail WoW, blue items that are supposed to be "rare tier" don´t feel like rare at all because is too easy to get them.
- TYPE: What the drop is. Is it a cosmetic? Is it a BiS? Is it an equipment? A weapon? I consider that depending of the influence that the drop will have in your character it has to be treated different. For example a cosmetic being more inaccesible would not generate as many frustration as a quest drop that is required to progress you character.
- OBTAINING METHOD: The activity that the player has to do to obtain that rare drop is a huge deal too, and the content that AoC pretends to create for the player will as well condition how rare drops should work. Apart from the obvious differences from a gathereable rare drops or mobs rare drops, we have to consider the differences in between drops coming from similar activities. For example In Monster Hunter (which i believe that even if its not an MMO his rewards system works very well) players don´t mind doing the same boss again and again to obtain the drop because its easy to engage the activity and the battles against them are really fun. But in an MMO raid boss drops players need time to find a party and prepare, and also you have to clean all the pulls and the previous bosses to engage the fight with the one that has the drop you want, and also you have to consider that when playing in group the battle result don´t depends entirely on you. Even if both examples are boss fights, the reward given from them has to be different due to their differences, although I know this case is pretty obvious i wanted to make clear some characteristics that can modify an activity and if the activity is slightly different maybe it should change they way the rewards are given too.
Taking all this into account and to answer the topic: How do you feel when it comes to rare loot? Do you prefer when rare mobs and boss mobs drop something interesting often or less often?I believe that theres no a unique correct answer, as I mentioned before, there are a lot of things to consider and the way that the game will work with some aspects that we cant experience for now will condition this matter. But I believe that is a great idea to plan as many different kind of rare drops as its possible, not because of preventing all the possible scenarios, It´s because having different drops that match the different circumstances you will find at the game is going to enrich it a lot.
I believe It´s ok for an important drop that is obtainable through a hard fight to have a low rate to drop. And also is ok for an important drop that is also obtainable through a fight, but harder than the previous one, to have a higher chance to drop. It´s all about how you want to design it, maybe in the first case the drop is something about one profession so it feels less painful to depend on the luck of the drop rate and in the second case the drop has something to do with your freehold progress so you prefer make it a "rare drop" through the player skill because It´s rare not because of your luck with the drop rate, It´s because not so many people could kill that mob. So the players that have better freeholds are also more likely to be the ones who has beaten the harder mobs.
As you can see, based on what you want to do, you can use all the characteristics mentioned before to create different sensations of what a "rare drop" means and how the player feels when they get their hands on it.
I don´t agree with some post that states a formula in which if the mob take more time to respawn it has to have a higher drop chance and if it takes less time it can have lower chance. Of course, the accessibility of the activity is something that has to be consider (as i mentioned at the OBTAINING METHOD) but, i don´t see why two mobs with the same respawn time can both have a rare item with very different drop chances, as long as, you plan out carefully WHAT TYPE of items they are and what impact will they have in our character.
I think both situations can co-exist in the same game, more than that, it would be beneficial for the game to have different rewards systems in order to encourage the player to pick the activities that suit them as well.
To finish, I would like to comment some quick notes that I would like to point out about the drop rarity:
That´s all, sry for the long post, I hope it helps. The game is looking pretty good and I hope we can see more about this topic in the next stream
While I like the idea of having recipe drops with varied stats, I'm somewhat concerned that this will create a situation where I have too many variant recipes available when crafting in a way that makes it difficult to select the one you're interested in.
If you have a small pool of fixed recipes, what will I use the recipe drops for when I've gotten several? If I can sell them on auction, I feel like they lose immersion value as well as remove the regional specialization that would be a large part of the point. If I can't, what are the duplicates for?
I suppose it's fine if they have limited durability, for the more common ones, but then they simply become another crafting material, which feels a bit odd. "Do I forget how to make this item because I've practiced it too much?" is a little immersion breaking. "Wait, so I got this recipe on an old scroll that's crumbled away over time, and I somehow didn't think to copy it?" for time-limited recipes isn't much better.
In all, the customization is good, but I feel like the management would be bad. But hey, if you can solve that, go for it! This'll result in regional specialties and traveling masters, all the while making immigrants and guests more interesting. That's a plus in my book.