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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
World boss and greater loot drop idea/discussion
Voxtrium
Member, Alpha Two
Credit to [Amnesty] Chialde for putting this idea up in discord.
"When a raid defeats a Raid or world boss, they collect the boss loot. Afterwards their gatherers are able to extract resources from both the boss itself (Chopping the boss into pieces) and materials found across the boss arena (These only spawn once the boss has been defeated) . The resources gathered from the bosses remains are too large for players to transport back to town via their inventory. however they can be placed into large crates, making a guild wishing to fully benefit from the boss bring a caravan for material transportation. Once back at town players can use refining station to extract additional resources from the boss (if the boss was red dragon players could extract extra scales/meat/alchemy agent etc), these are not unique materials, they are the same materials the boss dropped, just in larger quantity.
Once a boss has been defeated they drop a trophy (head/claw/eyeball) This trophy has a rapid decay timer (3-5 mins). unless it is placed on a caravan this caravan drastically increases the duration that a trophy lasts (Caravan quality dictates trophy duration). Players can then escort this caravan back into town, where it can be placed upon a trophy pole granting all players within the node a unique boss buff for a duration, and citizens of the node receive an additional buff called Town pride (increase to health/mana/exp but only while within nodes region). If the boss that is defeated is a world boss then the buff applies to all players within the nodes zone of influence (as well as the Town pride buff). "
The primary idea being that as we saw with Firebrand for example - dropping full items or dropping just mats is a pretty tame way to include the crafters in the process.
This gives gatherers quite a significant level of integration in a raid even if they are not part of the raid itself while not being particularly crazy in the scope creep department.
This would effectively change a raid from focusing on just killing the boss and collecting its drops and crafting-> to killing the boss, gathering its and nearby mats, transporting via caravan then processing them and finally crafting them. The system sounds very immersive while still sticking to the core design philosophy of IS.
Thoughts? Counter ideas? I think in particular the first part of the idea about the boss mats has tons of value.
"When a raid defeats a Raid or world boss, they collect the boss loot. Afterwards their gatherers are able to extract resources from both the boss itself (Chopping the boss into pieces) and materials found across the boss arena (These only spawn once the boss has been defeated) . The resources gathered from the bosses remains are too large for players to transport back to town via their inventory. however they can be placed into large crates, making a guild wishing to fully benefit from the boss bring a caravan for material transportation. Once back at town players can use refining station to extract additional resources from the boss (if the boss was red dragon players could extract extra scales/meat/alchemy agent etc), these are not unique materials, they are the same materials the boss dropped, just in larger quantity.
Once a boss has been defeated they drop a trophy (head/claw/eyeball) This trophy has a rapid decay timer (3-5 mins). unless it is placed on a caravan this caravan drastically increases the duration that a trophy lasts (Caravan quality dictates trophy duration). Players can then escort this caravan back into town, where it can be placed upon a trophy pole granting all players within the node a unique boss buff for a duration, and citizens of the node receive an additional buff called Town pride (increase to health/mana/exp but only while within nodes region). If the boss that is defeated is a world boss then the buff applies to all players within the nodes zone of influence (as well as the Town pride buff). "
The primary idea being that as we saw with Firebrand for example - dropping full items or dropping just mats is a pretty tame way to include the crafters in the process.
This gives gatherers quite a significant level of integration in a raid even if they are not part of the raid itself while not being particularly crazy in the scope creep department.
This would effectively change a raid from focusing on just killing the boss and collecting its drops and crafting-> to killing the boss, gathering its and nearby mats, transporting via caravan then processing them and finally crafting them. The system sounds very immersive while still sticking to the core design philosophy of IS.
Thoughts? Counter ideas? I think in particular the first part of the idea about the boss mats has tons of value.
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Comments
Processing is normally done in freeholds not in the node, because only freeholds can have the best processing stations.
Gatherers are not special, any player can progress as a gatherer too.
True but, it does give those who have chosen grandmaster, or master for their gathering something to feel special about.
I mean by that logic no grandmaster in any of the 3 professions is special... its not really about making anyone special so much as it is about integrating every aspect of the game, tying systems together like this can make games really fun.
this is a lot of drops for one boss xD
Ive always liked the idea of gathering mats from bosses using the profession system (since I usually go hunting/skinning in games where that is available) but the mats dropped shouldn't probably be too many.
don't like the idea of a caravan run after each boss. maybe only some special bosses, but not all of them.
according to steven, gatherable monsters will be different from the regular mobs you fight for exp or loot. killing the boss already counts as the gathering part of the crafting loop, then you have to refine the mats and then craft the gear. the loop is already there. maybe animal husbandry could be used to get and breed a temporary mount of the raid boss instead.
The event could also open up a limited time for farming mats. Think we’ve seen some of this in other streams dealing with corruption zones.
I like the idea as it keeps master gather's relevant!
Note that you should be including all types of Gatherables and thus proffessions and they could be dispersed over time.
Chopping up the Dragon directly could be the work of Hunters immediatly following its death.
After the body rots the Dragons bones remain and need to be mined the next day.
Exotic Herbs grow from the ground the dragons blood has watered in subsequent days, etc.
Basically the kill spot could be pushing out distinct waves of resources over time each bringing different gatherers.
But I think those who destroy a caravan can summon one without having to launch it from the town. I don't like that and I would prefer players to have to carry some caravan components in their inventory and assemble the caravan on the spot. And those components to drop in case of PvP death.
There was a old game about 20 years ago I don't know if anyone still remembers because its launch was so horrible. Age of Conan.
One of the most sought after swords in the game was something that you got from one of the Raid bosses. However you didn't just kill the boss and collect loot and boom you have the sword.
No, you had to have a crafter leveled of the right kind.
You had to have THAT crafter get the recipe from another boss somewhere else.
You had to have THAT crafter get the ingredients from another separate boss elsewhere for that craft.
And then the best part, during the the boss fight, there was a specific mechanic happening where the boss was channeling magic against the raid. It was a tricky thing to do but you could utilize things in the room to use that boss mechanic to power up and activate a magical crafting station.
And that was the only time and place you could craft that item, and it was not a simple matter to do so either.
Have someone standing still in the middle of a rage inducing raid fight, other people working to activate and keep active the crafting station, and the craftsman hastily trying to complete the craft.
It was kind of cool.
Love the depth of this! That is actually a really cool way to make a raid more than just a group of players killing something!
I believe caravans can be launched from anywhere it just takes more time to launch the further from a node u are
Sounds like hell I love it, that kind of mechanic would probably be best suited for a 1 of a kind artifact though if I am honest!
Their current design plan is to only let it launch from a specific building in a node and I haven't heard any rumors to the contrary, so any decayable trophy loot would have to be lugged back manually by an induvial before the expiration.
When you destroy a caravan, you can create a new one right there to take all the loot, we saw as much during the pvp caravan stream
Not sure if it was locked to only after destroying a caravan, but they did wait like 5 minutes for the caravan to arrive
That's not creating it right there though, you're calling it up from the nearest town where you've already set one up, hence that wait time based on distance from the node. So while a rapid decay sounds interesting, it wouldn't work out due to caravans not arriving/spawning quickly at the dungeon area (which I wouldn't want them to, to be clear. Wouldn't be good for the spying/plotting systems they want when it could be done on a whim). I'm also pretty sure it'll just be for successful Caravan attacks, since as far as I could tell the cargo was loaded up before the original Caravan actually launched from town.
I'd much rather a generous timer (15 minutes or so) and it require a manual trek back to the node the player wants to buff up, at risk of dropping on death.
The decay timers were just a idea, it would obviously need balancing
There wasn’t any indication on wether the new caravan to collect from the looted one, and the crates were on the ground until the new caravan finished setting up
I based it more on the first caravan video where we saw the caravan being loaded up before the team went out of town to call to it to launch from the town, and I can’t remember if there was any UI system brought up for placing the cargo of a defeated caravan into that empty one they called from town.
Check the pvp caravan stream, we didn’t see anything that indicates only after destroying an enemy caravan
Still think the gather from everything in the boss arena, including the boss to fill a caravan would be the best way to make raiding and world bosses more satisfying and have a risk/reward
Need/greed on random shit items each boss kill is boring and if it’s gear, well then there is no risk on getting it back to the node to sell/ breakdown/wear, since it can’t be dropped on death
On this we definitely agree. I think Steven’s comment about Hunters not having any interaction with the dragon is a huge backpedal. It started as ‘you’ll want to bring Gatherers to get the best drops’ to ‘Hunters will just be hunting specific mobs and get nothing extra from world bosses’
On this we definitely agree. I think Steven’s comment about Hunters not having any interaction with the dragon is a huge backpedal. It started as ‘you’ll want to bring Gatherers to get the best drops’ to ‘Hunters will just be hunting specific mobs and get nothing extra from world bosses’[/quote]
This is the primary point I wanted to be considered, I feel like bosses should include more than just a greed pickup system. Especially with how much effort has gone into making all of the systems intertwined to begin with, this model follows much of their design philosophy and adds a good element to the game imo.
Yeah. At the loot pull there was a very distinct feeling of ‘Where’s the rest of it?’
No dragon hide? No scales? No horns? No heart? Where’s the interdependency with crafters that was hyped up? A giant corpse is sitting on the ground and all we’re pulling from it is a couple bits of gear (that we were told was going to be a rare occurrence at first, and is now ‘you can expect it to drop from world bosses’)
Some games gives a special trigger effect on the weapon related to the boss you killed. Some gives an extra effect which is linked to a specific skill, an extra colored attribute outside the basic attributes, etc. I know that fight was more a proof of concept, but i hope the stats on high tier gear or uniques, will get some unique traits rather than just a + number in the char attributes. It also contributes in making unique builds because of unique traits that a gear can have. It's a mmorpg in the end, not ark survival with basic attributes.
Also some text description on how the item was obtained, which gives you a moment of joy, " obtained by slaying the Devouring Flame ". Just enough to not feel bland, item1, item 2.
ps. this is feedback
Second part I'll mention is about needing a caravan to transport. While it's not a bad idea, I don't necessarily agree it should be required 100% of the time. I would say only for raid bosses since they are so massive, not regular bosses and even then give players the option to use mules as well.
Lastly, I'll throw my own ideas into the pot that compliment it. I believe there should be different kinds of bosses that require different gatherers. For example a giant rock golem raid boss requires miners to gather the resources when downed, or a giant Ent that requires lumberjacking and/or herbalism. Additional rare resources could spawn throughout the boss area and/or dungeon that match the theme of the boss. Then there can be humanoid bosses that do not have anything for gatherers to get, but they have other things to compensate like additional item drops, increased rarity drops, gold/glint, recipes, or they just drop the unique materials and players roll on them.
The challenge would be that anyone carrying this loot becomes a target for other players, creating tension and excitement. If another player defeats the loot carrier, they can pick up the loot, but in doing so, they too become flagged and must carry it back to town.
This dynamic would encourage risk-taking, strategy, and teamwork as players would have to defend their valuable cargo from others while trying to safely deliver it to town.
It adds an extra layer of thrill, making these events both high-stakes and rewarding.
And you would have to trust who you fight with!
PS: maybe even pickup up multiple others look increases the value of the one you have! Then last man standing back to town!
Also, having the boss's corpse there would allow ninja salvaging from non-raiders and people who behave like vultures to show up and just like vultures they could ninja salvage materials, this would create drama and fights that are good things for the game.
It's best for the raiders if they calculate the ammount of time they will need to finish the boss and then summon the caravan before the boss dies, if they fail to kill the boss in time an the caravan arrives then the boss could also destroy the caravan, creating even more drama which is good for the game
Would be fantastic if the immediate area around the corpse could flag everybody for PvP, creating more fights and more drama that are good things for the game.
Caravans are already a free pvp zone