I think all materials dropped should have intentional design. There must be a purpose to why a mob drops a certain item/material. My wish for the game is that all mobs drop materials only, however killing mobs such as orcs with full gear that drop only material types would be odd. A solution for this scenario would be the items drops are essentially materials as they can be broken down, and that the item itself is of limited use (driving breakdown behavior).
This reminded me of something I 'forgot to specify' for the usual reason.
I feel that in most games, regular mobs mainly drop vendor trash. Because of this, mobs that are below the level cap are only looked at as EXP, not as sources of income or value.
The cavoite is that mobs that do produce items worth value are often over camped and farmed by both players and bots. The hard balance is making specific items dropped from mobs rare enough to have value, but not limited to a point where you have players and bots over camping. This is especially true for items dropped by mobs that are used for cap-level crafting.
Given the vast array of crafting specializations within Ashes, this may be achievable so long as each specialization has a diverse list of useful craftables in the level set. This should be done with both regular drops and rare drops from mobs found only in different regions of the world.
For cap-level crafting, recipes should require rare drops from mobs and cap-crafted items from other crafting specializations.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
As a rumor or legend would be interesting but...
Make it so that players do not feel it as an incentive to kill 100000 mobs to get an item.
I have to clarify a bit.
If the purpose is to prevent groups of players to monopolize a resource by holding farming spots, it is a good idea to leak a small amount of these powerful items in different places, also to random players.
I would not mind such events to happen more frequently when prices are going up, being controlled by a small group which provides the items.
I expect regular mobs to drop regular items. They should also have a higher % chance to drop regular items that you would expect them to have. They don't all have to have a use, kobolds for example could have junk candles on them. I don't expect any currency from non-humanoid combatants but you could give a larger chance to drop body parts that have a similar value to a humanoid who carries actual money.
Various "rare" loot could be added to all regular mobs at an extremely low drop chance just to add some excitement to the loot pool. What I don't like is when end game activities include farming a specific mob because of its special drop chance. For example, in New World everyone will farm X named enemy to get his bow or whatever and the gameplay boils down to, kill said enemy, wait for respawn, repeat. A system that was more engaging for me was way back in Arch Age after just reaching max level my friends took me to a large area with a lot of mobs that all had an equal chance to drop a token. You needed like 500 tokens and then you could trade them in for a powerful item. Although both systems take you to specific spots in the world, one incentivizes you to kill 1 guy while the other lets you tear up an entire zone with your friends. It's been awhile since I played either game so I might be misremembering exactly how the systems work.
I don't mind if materials to craft drop at .01% or something like that but keep gear for those that earn it versus RNG winners please. Keep the game player driven with reputation as a major thing and I will play a long time.
I'm going to come at this from different directions so not all of these will make since with each other.
rare items as random world drop is great I think it was called conquer online or something? that dropped dragonballs and it was a fantastic way for casual people to get a bump in gold to buy something shinny. I think the best item in a game like ashes would be something that's needed for higher end items to be crafted to help keep the spread wealth what casual people need is vastly different then top end people need and helps keep all items hold some value. as far as drop rate if your a high end crafter you there should always be someone selling in the market but not 1000's of them so they have no value (I know hard balance, maybe some unrelated sink so they are always valuable). as far as where to drop it should be global everything has a chance but I would say things that are inefficient have a higher drop so more fall into the hands of casual players.
general drops I think should be a mix of mats, rare mats and rarely gear(rare so they aren't completely worthless) but the gear shouldn't be the best better then what you craft with normal mats but worse then what you craft with rare mats.
this is a mmo with a focus on crafting so I don't think great items dropping is a good idea as why go though the effort to work on crafting if you can get the best stuff without it unless its very very rare (more time to farm for a drop then farm the mats to craft it) and/or they have a limit to how much use they can get.
The most important thing is that everything that drops has value it shouldn't matter if I'm off cutting wood for an hour or grinding some mobs an hour of play should fill my pocket with something or it feels like I'm forced to do something else instead of doing what I find fun the value of normal loot should be much more related to how many other people are killing in an area/mob type or activity then it just being "junk" loot
I think looking at other games is great way to see real world data on good ways for things to look in my eyes a mark of a good item economy is when there's very little you cant buy at any time and very few items are worthless 2 good ones are runescape and albion online doesn't really matter what you do your time has value. 2 games of the other end is wow and ff14 both are very popular games but there's a ton of things that ether noone is selling or isn't even worth picking up
(..edit)
major overall agreement that completed gear being dropped takes away from the games artisan system, there has been increasing concerns from seeing completed gear drops in multiple livestream showcases, there should be material drops only, and rare, rare recipes should ocasionally drop.
Recipes! Not completed Gear (edit..) No Legendary finished gear should drop from bosses. Only legendary mats and recipes. (edit...)
Crafters make the best shit.
I also agree with Liniker, there should be reason for artisan system. Grinding mobs should enable the player to purchase upgrades from other players.
In addition to dropping mats, perhaps potion ingredients or mats that further the player's ability to progress and enable their activity. Some basic gear may be necessary.
And it doesn't hurt if the occasional valuable mat drops, something that can be used, traded or sold - livens things up.
Regardless of what drops, if valuable stuff does drop and mobs are level specific, then there should be a distinct drop-off as player level exceeds mob level - ie: higher level players shouldn't benefit from farming low level mobs.
xoxo
Casually Serious.
LFG: Open World, tight knit coordination, multiple roles, will travel.
Grinding the same mobs for days/weeks/months on end in the hope of snagging a rare item is, in my opinion, the most negative experience in MMORPGs.
The era when an MMORPG could captivate players solely through constant grinding has passed, now players need content, not grinding.
Also, in case of random loot, most players, this can cause game tiredness and a sense of unfairness to more fortunate players.
This is definitely not the type of content I would want to see as the main or even a side part of Ashes of Creation.
Furthermore, the random drop of items feels more like a feature of Korean gacha games.
I've rarely encountered someone who was happy with a random system over a clear, logical one.
But if there is going to be a chance-based item drop system, there should also be a mechanism that allows less fortunate players to obtain the item.
For instance, if there's a 5% chance to loot a weapon from a dungeon, players should also receive a special item for each completion of the dungeon. Collecting 20 of these special items could guarantee the weapon. After all, some might get the weapon on their first try, and it can be extremely frustrating to not acquire it after more than 100 attempts.
Hi, in order to make the game permanently entertaining, I think it would be a good idea for every mop to drop a kind of business card (0.1%-0.3% Drop Changse) that tells him what his name is and what class/race he belongs to what his strengths are, etc. Furthermore, every mop card (business card) collected grants a small bonus for the collector such as: 1 point on strength or 1 point on stamina etc. This system would permanently maintain the tension and you would try to collect all the pug cards throughout Vera.
I think there should be a chance, however low, to get something special off of trash mobs- more reasons to farm and acquire control over specific mobs is a huge win for emergent gameplay- I think dropping materials used to create relevant drops from the area more commonly is the best way of handling making the complete item very rare, while also adding to immersion- IMO you should want to bring your crafter along to study the enemy’s equipment in order to use the raw materials you scavenge from their bodies to craft new items, with a rare exception of finding that pristine piece of armor or weaponry.
Few things break my immersion in a game faster than implausible creature drops.
I think creatures should drop things that they could really be carrying or hoarding. I would limit drops to:
a) items and/or valuables carried by adventurers the creatures actually killed,
b) items and/or valuables that the creatures can produce, harvest, collect, grow, equip themselves.
Creatures that would keep their valuables in a den/nest/home rather than in their pockets/backpacks/inventory etc could "drop" a track or clue as to where you can find their hoard, offering a mini-quest for a bigger payout.
If it is too challenging technically to keep track of everything that an individual monster could have looted from adverturers they killed, perhaps a compromise could be managing it by monster type.
The probability of a weak monster dropping a very rare item that is only crafted by adverturers is therefore proportional to the probability of one such monster killing an adventurer who was carrying it.
Depends, how you would define rare for item drops. I understand that there are regions on the map defined as nodes. Well lets say I ran into a mob near a node for a piece of armor. I would farm those mobs for this piece of armor getting more than one if that piece was tradeable for a guild mate. If you don't have a good balance with letting crafting have a place. Those types of people either won't want to play the game at all. Or you lose "pop", short for the number of players interested after release. My experiences have led me away from MMORPG's like this because I really wanted to be an armor crafter, we had a whole guild of crafters, but they changed how weapons and armor were received in the game. Instead of letting crafters have their place they let mobs drop it for better armor ratings. I am not in favor of letting regular mobs drop those rare items. The game eventually died out. How successful was Archeage in North America? Well, not to get into specific details. Corporate changed the game for worse. Time was added in as a mechanic. Ton's of con to this. Labor points accumulated over time. So, multiple accounts was not unheard of.
Most preferred: item drops, that come from world bosses and their ads, I would not mind get a separate form of gear types for head, arms, legs, feet, hands.
I guess I would ask myself why, what, where, when, how questions when incorporating armor and weapons for crafting. should having a max armor smith equal the world items? Should having a max weapon smith equal the world weapons?
Basic loot: 90% chance - basic glint/mattress = 1 gold (I'm using gold but that's just for the example)
Common loot: 60% chance - common glint/mattress = 3 golds
Rare loot: 10% chance - rare glint/rare mattress = 10 gold
Rare loot ++: 0.1% chance - anything (weapon/glint/mattress/preparation) = 20 gold
The idea is that each mob has its own table, depending on its type and biome.
Common mobs will only give rare++ items with a low % and the stronger the mobs, the higher the % and the higher the quality.
The earning curve needs to be controlled: the more mobs you farm, the more money you can earn.
But it has to be as interesting as the other features that allow you to make money so that players take part.
The risk aspect must also be taken, as it's dangerous to farm for long periods of time in the same area. The longer you stay in one place, the more a PK can find you and come and kill you for 20% of your glint farm.
(And when i talk about rare/common/etc item, is not the color, its about the value. Even a common sword can be on "rare loot table" because its a full item who need craft/time. So if you need 3h to craft this common sword, you need also 3h farm (so like 10% of loot) to get it....i dont know if i'm clear )
But if there is going to be a chance-based item drop system, there should also be a mechanism that allows less fortunate players to obtain the item.
For instance, if there's a 5% chance to loot a weapon from a dungeon, players should also receive a special item for each completion of the dungeon. Collecting 20 of these special items could guarantee the weapon. After all, some might get the weapon on their first try, and it can be extremely frustrating to not acquire it after more than 100 attempts.
Hahahahaha, I wrote something similar in a WoW related YouTube commentsection once.
I wrote that when you completed an instance or a raid and you did not get an item, the item's droprate gets doubled each and every single time, until you got it at least once.
A 1% drop becomes 2%, then 4%, then 8% and even up to 100% if necessary.
If you recieve the item, it resets again.
Which means mounts with a droprate of 1% and which are locked behind a +20 to +30 minute run, which you can only do once in a week, like the infamous Invincible mount of Arthas the Lichking for example, this too would get at some point "farmable" without having to kill your soul.
Then again it is the Lichking hahahahaha.
Maybe the design was spoton here, that it kills your soul! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw9H_OdcKC8
Well - the suggestion was ill recieved. A lot of stockholm syndrom players who still play WoW absolutely loathed the idea cause - as the balding Lord Asmongold said - too many people today view their wasted lifetime as a badge of honor and they love the abuse that they have grown accustomed to.
You can't free them.
They live comfortably in their chains.
A lot of stockholm syndrom players who still play WoW absolutely loathed the idea cause - because as the balding Lord Asmongold said - too many people today view their wasted lifetime as a badge of honor and they love the abuse that they have grown accustomed to.
Plus they know with their tiny-Wiener-Ego's that if they actually even "ONCE" in their Life get something that others might not get in +SEVEN. YEARS. of constantly playing every Week regarding Raid-Drops like some Mounts and Stuff,
they have something that others might never get to see and have.
It's pure, incredibly petty Disfavour and Enviousness towards other Players they don't even know.
This is why i say : Nobody and i mean "NOBODY" -> should care about the many, self-proclaimed "Kings". They care about Nobody else than themselves and hence, Nobody should care about them.
One of my pet peeves in a lot of MMOs is how many animals they make you kill to get a decent amount of crafting materials. Take WoW for example - you need to choose skinning as one of your two professions in order to procure skins and pelts. Fair enough, at least it lets you skin every relevant animal. But what then after that? You only get a meat drop once every 2-3 kills, which is absurd, and when some does drop, you only get one usable piece. How about the bones? The offal?
I think it would be a great opportunity to include some extra functionality to whatever gathering profession will include skinning, and just call it something like Animal Harvesting. Perhaps this simply falls under the Hunting profession - I could see a system in profession skill trees that makes you split your primary path of learning towards a specific purpose. When you hit a certain point, perhaps you need to choose whether to specialize in breaking down and retrieving crafting materials from higher level creatures, or taming.
If you take that path as a Hunter, or at lower levels before you split off, when you fell a beast, you can decide how much to gather of its bones, meat, organs, and skin, and how much to leave behind. This can then interact with the local land management system. If a player leaves some meat behind, whether trained in animal harvesting or not, the meat and skin left behind will feed other omnivores and carnivores in the local area and slightly increase their spawn rate. If you leave the bones behind, one could argue they'll eventually fertilize the ground and perhaps the spawn rate of flora gets a slight increase. A very slight bump every time some of this stuff is left behind, so it doesn't overwhelm the system. This way the system isn't truly wasting anything that should theoretically be there, even if you don't want it or run out of bag space.
As you increase in level, your ability to determine meat, offal, pelt, and bone quality should go up, as well as your ability to minimize waste while breaking down the animal, unlocking the ability to procure higher quality gatherables more often.
Larger animals that are able to defend themselves well should be able to actually put up a decent fight - wolves, bears, etc. This should even out the increased amount of resources collectible from those larger corpses for those trained in animal harvesting. For a quantity of lootable goods example, a player that doesn't train any of these things, or out-levels their knowledge level, could expect random fair-quality and the occasional uncommon-quality gatherable to drop from corpses at a rate of around 0-2 pieces of random loot per corpse depending on the size of the creature, while someone highly trained in animal harvesting could get 1-6 pieces of meat, 1 assortment of offal, 1-3 pieces of usable hide, and 1-3 piles of bones depending on the size of the beast, all at various qualities, increasing on average as their animal harvesting skill increases.
Meat and offal would obviously be used for cooking (assortment of offal could just be a generic recipe ingredient applicable to multiple specific organ recipes), hide would obviously be for tanning, and the bones could perhaps be sold to weapon and armor crafters, or alchemists for potion recipes / to processed into fertilizer. Base item quality obviously determines the processed and crafted item quality.
Humanoids
When it comes to common enemies, I really detest a wide array of garbage loot that clutters up your bags. If I wouldn't realistically pick up the shoddy armor they're wearing or the weird trinkets they're carrying, just leave that junk on the ground. I understand that this was originally put into MMOs to make the money the game is trying to give you for killing enemies more believable (not every random humanoid subrace uses your currency) but I would suggest making up for this by having common mobs occasionally drop higher value items instead, that actually appear cool and interesting, or could be used for crafting. This way, our bags don't get cluttered up so much, the idea that we'd actually loot those items off their corpses is more believable, and we get more useful loot off mobs instead of useless junk.
I also like really low drop chance items that start short quests or spawn short-term public group event chains similar to the dynamic, multi-stage, compounding events in GW2 that result in boss fights, temporary jumping puzzles, or other challenges that grant unique cosmetic or toy rewards for the people who happened to be there at the right moment. I really detest the belief that every item in the game should theoretically be attainable by any player at any time. I prefer a bit of chance, awe, and wonder in my games. There can be plenty of these items in the game to keep people from feeling like they'll never experience one, just as long as they don't drop often enough to feel common and repetitive. Like... Seriously, rare. Enough to the point where people might not believe that it actually happened because they tried to recreate the event for so long after you told them about it that they gave up. The events shouldn't be realistically farmable, averaging a spawn maybe once a month per server, and perhaps only occurring in certain seasons or certain times of day if relevant for the item drop that spawns it all.
Items of power like weapons, armor, or high level crafting materials should be reserved for higher level enemies. That being said, very rare recipe drops to craft unique and relevant cosmetic or functional armor and weapon pieces would be a great option for common enemies. You have to kill a goblin craftsperson, cook, or alchemist every once in a while, right?
What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs? Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
I like it when mobs drop some small items I can sell and on rare occasions something unusual that is not a full piece of gear. Especially if it is something that turns into a quest. Examples:
Finding a strange looking arrowhead stuck in the fur of a wolf -> quest to find out more about that arrow, where it came from and how it was made -> reward: A recipe for an arrow buff item that temporarily increases armor penetration.
You find an almost empty but very beautifully crafted flask in the bag of a fallen goblin -> depending on your professions you could get a quest to finding the remains of the former owner of the flask or a quest to analyze the remaining liquid -> the reward would either be a piece of equipment, a skin or a new alchemy recipe for an alchemist
You find the splinter of a weapon on a mob -> you get a quest to find out more about the weapon or to collect more pieces -> you get rewarded with a new processing method or weapon recipe or a piece of gear
A creature you have slain in the Underrealm has an unusual patch of hide -> you have a quest to find more of those hides and can use those to -> (reward) increase your chance to find more of this leather (does not increase the drop chance only the amount you can harvest each time), new recipies with that type of leather or to increase your reputation with a scientific faction that researches the Underrealm
On very rare occasions would I actually want to find a piece of gear directly and even then I'd enjoy it more to find a weaker version of it, that an artisan can improve for me with the right materials.
I like drops that make sense for the mob that you're fighting. I remember the jokes about the Barren Quests in WoW that revolved around how the mobs you were supposed to collect quest drops from felt like they didn't have the hooves or paws you were looking for. You would either luck out and finish the quest early thanks to the RNG gods or you'd be stuck farming those animals for hours while competing with others to tag any new spawns first. Likewise, it would be more confusing than exciting when animal mobs would drop armor, at least if it's a weapon you can rationalize the thing somehow being stuck in the beast from a previous battle. I guess that I enjoy seeing intention behind drops rather than a large, haphazard loot table that is best equated to my kitchen 'junk' drawer.
I like the fact that glint make a lot more sense that looting gold off of some random cervid, and I enjoy having some logical direction on where and how to find specific looking gear and other items based on who and what I'm fighting. Example, it would be very cool to be able to pick up a weapon with similar looks to the Goblin Sapper weapon FROM the mob that actually uses it. I feel like the rarity of drops should scale with the difficulty and level of the mobs as well as the level of player skill in applicable artisan professions.
It completly removes the immersion if a mob drops an item, that logically makes no sense for it to drop.
A basic cow should drop leather either in rarity poor, common or uncommon. A Wyvern should drop leather either in rarity rare, heroic and epic. And a dragon either in rarity epic, legendary or for world bosses even artifact.
The chance to drop high rarity loot should be affected by the level of the individual mob. A level 10 Wyvern should only rarely drop epic leather and a level 50 Wyvern should drop it significantly more often.
A cow shouldn't drop full gear. An armored orc should drop it, by chance.
Apply that to all mobs and you have the best system in my opinion.
What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs? Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
I have and have had many problems with regular mobs dropping powerful items. As such, my primary problem is "forced" farming.
If the rare item is valuable enough to be wanted by enough people then those mobs will become required hunting. Sure at discovery, the drop will only be considered the lucky drop the few got lucky enough to get the cool rare item, but as time passes that item will become more and more required. It will go from, "wow, cool item you got where you get it?" To, " wow you don't have RareDrop_X, I can't group with underequipped losers."
Sure you will still get this with boss mob drops, but for a rare item off some random nothing mob that I will have to invest a massive amount of time to farm or a massive about on money to buy, that will never feel good.
In addition, having RareDrop_X added into a normal mob's drop pool means it will attract players to kill the mob that might not even be looking to acquire the normal drops or would normally never be in that area farming that mob. So now, I am not only trying to not get PKed from rando wanderers, and competing for mob kills against players that also want the drops I want, but I am also competing against players who, are way over-leveled for the farm, who just want the rare drop. And who could also easily turn into a PKer whom I stand no chance against. That just ruins a day.
Instead, I feel the "rare drop" should just be increased drop amount. Planning out an hour to go farming for some item off regular mobs and getting done earlier than expected will always feel good. In addition, it will incentivize only the people who are looking for that particular drop to be your competition for farming that mob.
As far as for what items and upgrades in particular, as long as the items keep the economy balanced I don't have any strong feelings.
Hi, in order to make the game permanently entertaining, I think it would be a good idea for every mop to drop a kind of business card (0.1%-0.3% Drop Changse) that tells him what his name is and what class/race he belongs to what his strengths are, etc. Furthermore, every mop card (business card) collected grants a small bonus for the collector such as: 1 point on strength or 1 point on stamina etc. This system would permanently maintain the tension and you would try to collect all the pug cards throughout Vera.
What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs?
enhancement materials (like + 7 fire damage or +5 range etc)
could add a xp item so people that play alot can help there friends/guild mates level
gold
broken/bad weapons / broken/bad armour (could be used as materials) could be used as coastmetic
(note: normal materials should be obtained from artisan )
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
for the nodes/guilds
i think classic wow sistem is perfect in this. while lvling u can get some even epic things from regular mobs. but 90% its not BIS items in endgame but very coll in lvling. some of them for some builds are best but it have very low chance to drop, and no one specialy dont farm it. Some one get it and can sell or give for enother one pers. So i think in some areas, or from some group of mobs "like centaurs lvl 44-48" u can get realy cool things, with very litle chance to drop. ore some epic ingridients thet needed for emezing euqip to craft. and will cost much. very much. very very very much amount of money. and it will be only one way to get thet.
I think mobs dropping rare materials that craft great items would be a great foundation to the overall gameplay loop. Rare equips would make the most sense out of rare mobs that have a higher-than-average stat list. I don't like the idea of unimmersive world drops of items that don't fit the particular lore of why a creature would have such an item. If goblins had superior light armor gear because of their tendency to be spellcasters and thieves, then it would be nice to seek superior gear through them.
I still prefer crafted items to retain the best stats. world drops with unique/niche effects is always fun.
A system in another game I really liked on this topic was the idea of cards in Ragnarok Online, every mob had a .01% chance to drop their card. Different cards were able to be used in different item slots, that monster may drop a card that can only be slotted into a chest armor piece and each card gave a specific buff. Some card sets also provided additional set bonuses.
I like this system for a couple of different reasons, it isn't the item but rather a way to buff your current gear. Also, some people chose to go for cards that would increase agility while others wanted the vitality cards. It also gave super high value to the ultra rare MVP mobs that could also drop their card at the same rate as the normal mobs. I feel this system was better than just rare items dropping.
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!
Adding now:
Gemstones usually lose their meaning in games fairly early, though there is no specific reason this needs to be so, especially since Gems can be inset into the hilts of various weapons, wands, and armor. If Gemstones are, then in turn, treated as the 'enchantment slot' items, and Scribing is used to create Magic Schema which can be infused into Gems, the 'slot system' appears.
This makes sense in almost all fantasy worlds, since Gems specifically have crystalline structures and one can always reason that the specific crystalline structures they contain are what allow for certain forms of magic. Gems can also be reasonably pried out of gear that a player obtains from a humanoid or 'beastman' mob's gear, without having to reason that we can in any way wear the armor.
I wouldn't advise having Scribes or anyone else 'need to encounter or check or use every gem to get the idea of how', that's a pain point. Just leveling and practicing would be sufficient.
This also ties well enough to the 'distinction of Summoners pre-25 by Rings'.
Beyond this, the huge Materials discussion response comes back. Mobs generally should drop their materials at between 50 and 35% droprate when approximately at-level. Would suggest 'three levels above' droprates to be 50% if the mobs are strong/slow, resulting in a mob falling every 30s, and a player therefore obtaining 30 items in a session, which is a manageable economic inflow. Adjust for 'Glint' vs 'meaningful, non-Glint drop', with rarities as described above.
With the current solo TTK design mentioned offhandedly in another thread, droprates would have to be too low, or swingy, but if this design is vital to appeal to some player type, Glint should be the only thing that drops from these, and then need to go through that painful '10x of White Tier to get Green Tier'.
Strange herbs, roots, etc, that can only be obtained from Goblins/Minotaurs, make sense because of their very different lifestyles, and people having no good reason to devote time to what are essentially inferior or less flexible products, when they can simply be collected from monsters that will need to be culled anyway.
This then drives ecosystem design a bit better than most games.
Solo game in location - white items and consumables
Group game in an open location - white - green items and consumables.
Group game in a dungeon - white - blue items and consumables.
Dungeon raid - white - gold items and consumables.
World bosses - white - purple items and consumables.
There must be levels within the quality of an item, the highest level can only be crafted
Something like this, although I am against monsters dropping items, I would like all the items in the game to be created by crafters
I'm going to assume these as item rarities: Poor, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Heroic, Epic, Legendary, and Artifact.
Normal mobs drop up to uncommon.
"Mob leaders" (I don't mean world bosses, just mob leaders like mini bosses if they are going to be a thing) drop up to rare.
Dungeons, world bosses, exchanges for some form of currency (the PvP or the religious currency, for example) in high-level nodes drop/give Heroic and Epic items.
Craftable items range from Poor to Legendary, with Legendary items requiring ingredients from all seasons and different biomes, only gatherable by max tier gatherers as well as fully upgraded crafting stations.
Special server events or great achievements yield Artifact items. These are very rare, once per server items, or maybe a weapon as a reward for the number one arena spot every month (that changes every month unless the same player is number 1 again in the next month. I'm not saying introduce a new artifact weapon into the server every month for the top arena player).
The better gear should not be attainable by just grinding basic mobs for hours. Maybe an artifact cape for the first player to slay like a million mobs would be fun, but not just dropping an epic weapon off a wolf or something like that. While it does feel great in the moment, in the end, it brings down the value of the item since your story with this item is really just "I've put a playlist on and farmed mobs for 8 hours".
For the more rare items, it should be a whole story in itself to attain them, having to explore different areas for materials, working together with people to get all the refined materials or to clear dungeons or fight wars or spread your religion. When you look at your epic armor or your epic sword or whatever, these are the things that you should remember, not just "this dropped from X if you want this too, farm X for a couple of hours".
Giving legendaries to crafting instead of dungeons, etc., is a design choice that values players working together over players separating or soloing. I think it's the better way.
Artifacts are there because they are a huge part of world-building and giving character and writing stories. The biggest part won't benefit from them directly because they are so rare, but just having them be a thing and having the actual chance to get one if you really work for it and have a little bit of luck makes the world much more immersive and interesting.
All mobs you kill will drop glint depending on the quality of the mob killed, which is good. It also means you don't have to have mobs drop gold directly unless it makes sense for the mob. So no more wolves with pocket money.
I would like weapon and armor drops to make sense as well. If you want to farm swords, kill swordfighters; if you want to farm bows, kill rangers; if you want to farm wands, kill mages. This can be somewhat ignored for some mobs and especially bosses, but in general, I think it adds a lot of immersion and it just makes sense.
What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs?
For immersion purposes, I expect regular mobs to drop items that are relevant to who they are and what they are. If I am fighting a skeleton with a sword/shield, I expect the ability to loot something relating to a sword/shield. It doesn't necessarily have to be a COMPLETED version of the sword/shield, but let it be something related to it. "Damaged shield, shatter shield, sword hilt". It would feel odd to go through an entire goblin camp, kill 75 goblins and then come out with glint.
Why is it when a player dies they actually drop non-glint related items, but NPC's don't. It's just an odd break in immersion for me there.
As a player of the Souls franchises, I really enjoyed fighting specific mobs in an attempt to acquire their entire armor set, or their weapon because it looks awesome. Being able to see a group of minotaurs with an awesome axe and then farming them fort he raw materials to create that axe would be fun. However, since currently they drop glints right now, i could just go farm a rapid spawn of weaker rabbits and take their glint. Convert it to gold and then buy the materials/axe from players and never once did i have to interact with the minotaurs to get it.
In my option, I could either A) farm anything for money and then buy it or Farm the actual minotaurs, get glint and/or resources to make the same axe. I would rather prefer option B.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
Going back to the earlier discussion referencing the Souls like games, I think as long as the item is "relevant" to the creature type, the region or dungeon I think it would be fine. For any WoW Classic/Vanilla players that were agility based, I am pretty sure most everyone remembers the https://www.wowhead.com/classic/item=1718/basilisk-hide-pants. It was weird that a beast had these pants on them, but made sense based off the basilisk hide. However, people farmed the crud out of these mobs because the pants were bananas! that caused a lot of conflict in the area too because if you had 4 people farming it, people had to make the decision to PvP them and face the ire of the other people and cause a mini war or just spend even more time hoping to get mobs you need.
I can see that being frustrating for others, but that is just one aspect I enjoyed when it came to "Rare drops" from "Regular mobs". I don't think every mob or mob type should contain such things, but having them exist in general can introduce interesting dynamics.
Comments
This reminded me of something I 'forgot to specify' for the usual reason.
So, just in case...
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Goblin_Mask
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Goblin_Helm
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Yagudo_Necklace
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Antican_Robe
https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Antican_Pauldron
Etc.
The cavoite is that mobs that do produce items worth value are often over camped and farmed by both players and bots. The hard balance is making specific items dropped from mobs rare enough to have value, but not limited to a point where you have players and bots over camping. This is especially true for items dropped by mobs that are used for cap-level crafting.
Given the vast array of crafting specializations within Ashes, this may be achievable so long as each specialization has a diverse list of useful craftables in the level set. This should be done with both regular drops and rare drops from mobs found only in different regions of the world.
For cap-level crafting, recipes should require rare drops from mobs and cap-crafted items from other crafting specializations.
I have to clarify a bit.
If the purpose is to prevent groups of players to monopolize a resource by holding farming spots, it is a good idea to leak a small amount of these powerful items in different places, also to random players.
I would not mind such events to happen more frequently when prices are going up, being controlled by a small group which provides the items.
Various "rare" loot could be added to all regular mobs at an extremely low drop chance just to add some excitement to the loot pool. What I don't like is when end game activities include farming a specific mob because of its special drop chance. For example, in New World everyone will farm X named enemy to get his bow or whatever and the gameplay boils down to, kill said enemy, wait for respawn, repeat. A system that was more engaging for me was way back in Arch Age after just reaching max level my friends took me to a large area with a lot of mobs that all had an equal chance to drop a token. You needed like 500 tokens and then you could trade them in for a powerful item. Although both systems take you to specific spots in the world, one incentivizes you to kill 1 guy while the other lets you tear up an entire zone with your friends. It's been awhile since I played either game so I might be misremembering exactly how the systems work.
rare items as random world drop is great I think it was called conquer online or something? that dropped dragonballs and it was a fantastic way for casual people to get a bump in gold to buy something shinny. I think the best item in a game like ashes would be something that's needed for higher end items to be crafted to help keep the spread wealth what casual people need is vastly different then top end people need and helps keep all items hold some value. as far as drop rate if your a high end crafter you there should always be someone selling in the market but not 1000's of them so they have no value (I know hard balance, maybe some unrelated sink so they are always valuable). as far as where to drop it should be global everything has a chance but I would say things that are inefficient have a higher drop so more fall into the hands of casual players.
general drops I think should be a mix of mats, rare mats and rarely gear(rare so they aren't completely worthless) but the gear shouldn't be the best better then what you craft with normal mats but worse then what you craft with rare mats.
this is a mmo with a focus on crafting so I don't think great items dropping is a good idea as why go though the effort to work on crafting if you can get the best stuff without it unless its very very rare (more time to farm for a drop then farm the mats to craft it) and/or they have a limit to how much use they can get.
The most important thing is that everything that drops has value it shouldn't matter if I'm off cutting wood for an hour or grinding some mobs an hour of play should fill my pocket with something or it feels like I'm forced to do something else instead of doing what I find fun the value of normal loot should be much more related to how many other people are killing in an area/mob type or activity then it just being "junk" loot
I think looking at other games is great way to see real world data on good ways for things to look in my eyes a mark of a good item economy is when there's very little you cant buy at any time and very few items are worthless 2 good ones are runescape and albion online doesn't really matter what you do your time has value. 2 games of the other end is wow and ff14 both are very popular games but there's a ton of things that ether noone is selling or isn't even worth picking up
I also agree with Liniker, there should be reason for artisan system. Grinding mobs should enable the player to purchase upgrades from other players.
In addition to dropping mats, perhaps potion ingredients or mats that further the player's ability to progress and enable their activity. Some basic gear may be necessary.
And it doesn't hurt if the occasional valuable mat drops, something that can be used, traded or sold - livens things up.
Regardless of what drops, if valuable stuff does drop and mobs are level specific, then there should be a distinct drop-off as player level exceeds mob level - ie: higher level players shouldn't benefit from farming low level mobs.
xoxo
LFG: Open World, tight knit coordination, multiple roles, will travel.
The era when an MMORPG could captivate players solely through constant grinding has passed, now players need content, not grinding.
Also, in case of random loot, most players, this can cause game tiredness and a sense of unfairness to more fortunate players.
This is definitely not the type of content I would want to see as the main or even a side part of Ashes of Creation.
Furthermore, the random drop of items feels more like a feature of Korean gacha games.
I've rarely encountered someone who was happy with a random system over a clear, logical one.
But if there is going to be a chance-based item drop system, there should also be a mechanism that allows less fortunate players to obtain the item.
For instance, if there's a 5% chance to loot a weapon from a dungeon, players should also receive a special item for each completion of the dungeon. Collecting 20 of these special items could guarantee the weapon. After all, some might get the weapon on their first try, and it can be extremely frustrating to not acquire it after more than 100 attempts.
Kind regards
marquis
I think creatures should drop things that they could really be carrying or hoarding. I would limit drops to:
a) items and/or valuables carried by adventurers the creatures actually killed,
b) items and/or valuables that the creatures can produce, harvest, collect, grow, equip themselves.
Creatures that would keep their valuables in a den/nest/home rather than in their pockets/backpacks/inventory etc could "drop" a track or clue as to where you can find their hoard, offering a mini-quest for a bigger payout.
If it is too challenging technically to keep track of everything that an individual monster could have looted from adverturers they killed, perhaps a compromise could be managing it by monster type.
The probability of a weak monster dropping a very rare item that is only crafted by adverturers is therefore proportional to the probability of one such monster killing an adventurer who was carrying it.
Most preferred: item drops, that come from world bosses and their ads, I would not mind get a separate form of gear types for head, arms, legs, feet, hands.
I guess I would ask myself why, what, where, when, how questions when incorporating armor and weapons for crafting. should having a max armor smith equal the world items? Should having a max weapon smith equal the world weapons?
Each mob has a loot table based on item value.
Basic loot: 90% chance - basic glint/mattress = 1 gold (I'm using gold but that's just for the example)
Common loot: 60% chance - common glint/mattress = 3 golds
Rare loot: 10% chance - rare glint/rare mattress = 10 gold
Rare loot ++: 0.1% chance - anything (weapon/glint/mattress/preparation) = 20 gold
The idea is that each mob has its own table, depending on its type and biome.
Common mobs will only give rare++ items with a low % and the stronger the mobs, the higher the % and the higher the quality.
The earning curve needs to be controlled: the more mobs you farm, the more money you can earn.
But it has to be as interesting as the other features that allow you to make money so that players take part.
The risk aspect must also be taken, as it's dangerous to farm for long periods of time in the same area. The longer you stay in one place, the more a PK can find you and come and kill you for 20% of your glint farm.
(And when i talk about rare/common/etc item, is not the color, its about the value. Even a common sword can be on "rare loot table" because its a full item who need craft/time. So if you need 3h to craft this common sword, you need also 3h farm (so like 10% of loot) to get it....i dont know if i'm clear
Hahahahaha, I wrote something similar in a WoW related YouTube commentsection once.
I wrote that when you completed an instance or a raid and you did not get an item, the item's droprate gets doubled each and every single time, until you got it at least once.
A 1% drop becomes 2%, then 4%, then 8% and even up to 100% if necessary.
If you recieve the item, it resets again.
Which means mounts with a droprate of 1% and which are locked behind a +20 to +30 minute run, which you can only do once in a week, like the infamous Invincible mount of Arthas the Lichking for example, this too would get at some point "farmable" without having to kill your soul.
Then again it is the Lichking hahahahaha.
Maybe the design was spoton here, that it kills your soul!
Well - the suggestion was ill recieved. A lot of stockholm syndrom players who still play WoW absolutely loathed the idea cause - as the balding Lord Asmongold said - too many people today view their wasted lifetime as a badge of honor and they love the abuse that they have grown accustomed to.
You can't free them.
They live comfortably in their chains.
Plus they know with their tiny-Wiener-Ego's that if they actually even "ONCE" in their Life get something that others might not get in +SEVEN. YEARS. of constantly playing every Week regarding Raid-Drops like some Mounts and Stuff,
they have something that others might never get to see and have.
It's pure, incredibly petty Disfavour and Enviousness towards other Players they don't even know.
This is why i say : Nobody and i mean "NOBODY" -> should care about the many, self-proclaimed "Kings". They care about Nobody else than themselves and hence, Nobody should care about them.
Animals
One of my pet peeves in a lot of MMOs is how many animals they make you kill to get a decent amount of crafting materials. Take WoW for example - you need to choose skinning as one of your two professions in order to procure skins and pelts. Fair enough, at least it lets you skin every relevant animal. But what then after that? You only get a meat drop once every 2-3 kills, which is absurd, and when some does drop, you only get one usable piece. How about the bones? The offal?
I think it would be a great opportunity to include some extra functionality to whatever gathering profession will include skinning, and just call it something like Animal Harvesting. Perhaps this simply falls under the Hunting profession - I could see a system in profession skill trees that makes you split your primary path of learning towards a specific purpose. When you hit a certain point, perhaps you need to choose whether to specialize in breaking down and retrieving crafting materials from higher level creatures, or taming.
If you take that path as a Hunter, or at lower levels before you split off, when you fell a beast, you can decide how much to gather of its bones, meat, organs, and skin, and how much to leave behind. This can then interact with the local land management system. If a player leaves some meat behind, whether trained in animal harvesting or not, the meat and skin left behind will feed other omnivores and carnivores in the local area and slightly increase their spawn rate. If you leave the bones behind, one could argue they'll eventually fertilize the ground and perhaps the spawn rate of flora gets a slight increase. A very slight bump every time some of this stuff is left behind, so it doesn't overwhelm the system. This way the system isn't truly wasting anything that should theoretically be there, even if you don't want it or run out of bag space.
As you increase in level, your ability to determine meat, offal, pelt, and bone quality should go up, as well as your ability to minimize waste while breaking down the animal, unlocking the ability to procure higher quality gatherables more often.
Larger animals that are able to defend themselves well should be able to actually put up a decent fight - wolves, bears, etc. This should even out the increased amount of resources collectible from those larger corpses for those trained in animal harvesting. For a quantity of lootable goods example, a player that doesn't train any of these things, or out-levels their knowledge level, could expect random fair-quality and the occasional uncommon-quality gatherable to drop from corpses at a rate of around 0-2 pieces of random loot per corpse depending on the size of the creature, while someone highly trained in animal harvesting could get 1-6 pieces of meat, 1 assortment of offal, 1-3 pieces of usable hide, and 1-3 piles of bones depending on the size of the beast, all at various qualities, increasing on average as their animal harvesting skill increases.
Meat and offal would obviously be used for cooking (assortment of offal could just be a generic recipe ingredient applicable to multiple specific organ recipes), hide would obviously be for tanning, and the bones could perhaps be sold to weapon and armor crafters, or alchemists for potion recipes / to processed into fertilizer. Base item quality obviously determines the processed and crafted item quality.
Humanoids
When it comes to common enemies, I really detest a wide array of garbage loot that clutters up your bags. If I wouldn't realistically pick up the shoddy armor they're wearing or the weird trinkets they're carrying, just leave that junk on the ground. I understand that this was originally put into MMOs to make the money the game is trying to give you for killing enemies more believable (not every random humanoid subrace uses your currency) but I would suggest making up for this by having common mobs occasionally drop higher value items instead, that actually appear cool and interesting, or could be used for crafting. This way, our bags don't get cluttered up so much, the idea that we'd actually loot those items off their corpses is more believable, and we get more useful loot off mobs instead of useless junk.
I also like really low drop chance items that start short quests or spawn short-term public group event chains similar to the dynamic, multi-stage, compounding events in GW2 that result in boss fights, temporary jumping puzzles, or other challenges that grant unique cosmetic or toy rewards for the people who happened to be there at the right moment. I really detest the belief that every item in the game should theoretically be attainable by any player at any time. I prefer a bit of chance, awe, and wonder in my games. There can be plenty of these items in the game to keep people from feeling like they'll never experience one, just as long as they don't drop often enough to feel common and repetitive. Like... Seriously, rare. Enough to the point where people might not believe that it actually happened because they tried to recreate the event for so long after you told them about it that they gave up. The events shouldn't be realistically farmable, averaging a spawn maybe once a month per server, and perhaps only occurring in certain seasons or certain times of day if relevant for the item drop that spawns it all.
Items of power like weapons, armor, or high level crafting materials should be reserved for higher level enemies. That being said, very rare recipe drops to craft unique and relevant cosmetic or functional armor and weapon pieces would be a great option for common enemies. You have to kill a goblin craftsperson, cook, or alchemist every once in a while, right?
I like it when mobs drop some small items I can sell and on rare occasions something unusual that is not a full piece of gear. Especially if it is something that turns into a quest. Examples:
On very rare occasions would I actually want to find a piece of gear directly and even then I'd enjoy it more to find a weaker version of it, that an artisan can improve for me with the right materials.
I like the fact that glint make a lot more sense that looting gold off of some random cervid, and I enjoy having some logical direction on where and how to find specific looking gear and other items based on who and what I'm fighting. Example, it would be very cool to be able to pick up a weapon with similar looks to the Goblin Sapper weapon FROM the mob that actually uses it. I feel like the rarity of drops should scale with the difficulty and level of the mobs as well as the level of player skill in applicable artisan professions.
A basic cow should drop leather either in rarity poor, common or uncommon. A Wyvern should drop leather either in rarity rare, heroic and epic. And a dragon either in rarity epic, legendary or for world bosses even artifact.
The chance to drop high rarity loot should be affected by the level of the individual mob. A level 10 Wyvern should only rarely drop epic leather and a level 50 Wyvern should drop it significantly more often.
A cow shouldn't drop full gear. An armored orc should drop it, by chance.
Apply that to all mobs and you have the best system in my opinion.
Of course, rare mobs should have a chance to have lucky drops. Normal ones? Well, maaaaaybe, but only if you can prevent bots from having free farm.
I have and have had many problems with regular mobs dropping powerful items. As such, my primary problem is "forced" farming.
If the rare item is valuable enough to be wanted by enough people then those mobs will become required hunting. Sure at discovery, the drop will only be considered the lucky drop the few got lucky enough to get the cool rare item, but as time passes that item will become more and more required. It will go from, "wow, cool item you got where you get it?" To, " wow you don't have RareDrop_X, I can't group with underequipped losers."
Sure you will still get this with boss mob drops, but for a rare item off some random nothing mob that I will have to invest a massive amount of time to farm or a massive about on money to buy, that will never feel good.
In addition, having RareDrop_X added into a normal mob's drop pool means it will attract players to kill the mob that might not even be looking to acquire the normal drops or would normally never be in that area farming that mob. So now, I am not only trying to not get PKed from rando wanderers, and competing for mob kills against players that also want the drops I want, but I am also competing against players who, are way over-leveled for the farm, who just want the rare drop. And who could also easily turn into a PKer whom I stand no chance against. That just ruins a day.
Instead, I feel the "rare drop" should just be increased drop amount. Planning out an hour to go farming for some item off regular mobs and getting done earlier than expected will always feel good. In addition, it will incentivize only the people who are looking for that particular drop to be your competition for farming that mob.
As far as for what items and upgrades in particular, as long as the items keep the economy balanced I don't have any strong feelings.
enhancement materials (like + 7 fire damage or +5 range etc)
could add a xp item so people that play alot can help there friends/guild mates level
gold
broken/bad weapons / broken/bad armour (could be used as materials) could be used as coastmetic
(note: normal materials should be obtained from artisan )
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
for the nodes/guilds
I still prefer crafted items to retain the best stats. world drops with unique/niche effects is always fun.
I like this system for a couple of different reasons, it isn't the item but rather a way to buff your current gear. Also, some people chose to go for cards that would increase agility while others wanted the vitality cards. It also gave super high value to the ultra rare MVP mobs that could also drop their card at the same rate as the normal mobs. I feel this system was better than just rare items dropping.
Adding now:
Gemstones usually lose their meaning in games fairly early, though there is no specific reason this needs to be so, especially since Gems can be inset into the hilts of various weapons, wands, and armor. If Gemstones are, then in turn, treated as the 'enchantment slot' items, and Scribing is used to create Magic Schema which can be infused into Gems, the 'slot system' appears.
This makes sense in almost all fantasy worlds, since Gems specifically have crystalline structures and one can always reason that the specific crystalline structures they contain are what allow for certain forms of magic. Gems can also be reasonably pried out of gear that a player obtains from a humanoid or 'beastman' mob's gear, without having to reason that we can in any way wear the armor.
I wouldn't advise having Scribes or anyone else 'need to encounter or check or use every gem to get the idea of how', that's a pain point. Just leveling and practicing would be sufficient.
This also ties well enough to the 'distinction of Summoners pre-25 by Rings'.
Beyond this, the huge Materials discussion response comes back. Mobs generally should drop their materials at between 50 and 35% droprate when approximately at-level. Would suggest 'three levels above' droprates to be 50% if the mobs are strong/slow, resulting in a mob falling every 30s, and a player therefore obtaining 30 items in a session, which is a manageable economic inflow. Adjust for 'Glint' vs 'meaningful, non-Glint drop', with rarities as described above.
With the current solo TTK design mentioned offhandedly in another thread, droprates would have to be too low, or swingy, but if this design is vital to appeal to some player type, Glint should be the only thing that drops from these, and then need to go through that painful '10x of White Tier to get Green Tier'.
Strange herbs, roots, etc, that can only be obtained from Goblins/Minotaurs, make sense because of their very different lifestyles, and people having no good reason to devote time to what are essentially inferior or less flexible products, when they can simply be collected from monsters that will need to be culled anyway.
This then drives ecosystem design a bit better than most games.
Group game in an open location - white - green items and consumables.
Group game in a dungeon - white - blue items and consumables.
Dungeon raid - white - gold items and consumables.
World bosses - white - purple items and consumables.
There must be levels within the quality of an item, the highest level can only be crafted
Something like this, although I am against monsters dropping items, I would like all the items in the game to be created by crafters
Normal mobs drop up to uncommon.
"Mob leaders" (I don't mean world bosses, just mob leaders like mini bosses if they are going to be a thing) drop up to rare.
Dungeons, world bosses, exchanges for some form of currency (the PvP or the religious currency, for example) in high-level nodes drop/give Heroic and Epic items.
Craftable items range from Poor to Legendary, with Legendary items requiring ingredients from all seasons and different biomes, only gatherable by max tier gatherers as well as fully upgraded crafting stations.
Special server events or great achievements yield Artifact items. These are very rare, once per server items, or maybe a weapon as a reward for the number one arena spot every month (that changes every month unless the same player is number 1 again in the next month. I'm not saying introduce a new artifact weapon into the server every month for the top arena player).
The better gear should not be attainable by just grinding basic mobs for hours. Maybe an artifact cape for the first player to slay like a million mobs would be fun, but not just dropping an epic weapon off a wolf or something like that. While it does feel great in the moment, in the end, it brings down the value of the item since your story with this item is really just "I've put a playlist on and farmed mobs for 8 hours".
For the more rare items, it should be a whole story in itself to attain them, having to explore different areas for materials, working together with people to get all the refined materials or to clear dungeons or fight wars or spread your religion. When you look at your epic armor or your epic sword or whatever, these are the things that you should remember, not just "this dropped from X if you want this too, farm X for a couple of hours".
Giving legendaries to crafting instead of dungeons, etc., is a design choice that values players working together over players separating or soloing. I think it's the better way.
Artifacts are there because they are a huge part of world-building and giving character and writing stories. The biggest part won't benefit from them directly because they are so rare, but just having them be a thing and having the actual chance to get one if you really work for it and have a little bit of luck makes the world much more immersive and interesting.
All mobs you kill will drop glint depending on the quality of the mob killed, which is good. It also means you don't have to have mobs drop gold directly unless it makes sense for the mob. So no more wolves with pocket money.
I would like weapon and armor drops to make sense as well. If you want to farm swords, kill swordfighters; if you want to farm bows, kill rangers; if you want to farm wands, kill mages. This can be somewhat ignored for some mobs and especially bosses, but in general, I think it adds a lot of immersion and it just makes sense.
For immersion purposes, I expect regular mobs to drop items that are relevant to who they are and what they are. If I am fighting a skeleton with a sword/shield, I expect the ability to loot something relating to a sword/shield. It doesn't necessarily have to be a COMPLETED version of the sword/shield, but let it be something related to it. "Damaged shield, shatter shield, sword hilt". It would feel odd to go through an entire goblin camp, kill 75 goblins and then come out with glint.
Why is it when a player dies they actually drop non-glint related items, but NPC's don't. It's just an odd break in immersion for me there.
As a player of the Souls franchises, I really enjoyed fighting specific mobs in an attempt to acquire their entire armor set, or their weapon because it looks awesome. Being able to see a group of minotaurs with an awesome axe and then farming them fort he raw materials to create that axe would be fun. However, since currently they drop glints right now, i could just go farm a rapid spawn of weaker rabbits and take their glint. Convert it to gold and then buy the materials/axe from players and never once did i have to interact with the minotaurs to get it.
In my option, I could either A) farm anything for money and then buy it or
Going back to the earlier discussion referencing the Souls like games, I think as long as the item is "relevant" to the creature type, the region or dungeon I think it would be fine. For any WoW Classic/Vanilla players that were agility based, I am pretty sure most everyone remembers the https://www.wowhead.com/classic/item=1718/basilisk-hide-pants. It was weird that a beast had these pants on them, but made sense based off the basilisk hide. However, people farmed the crud out of these mobs because the pants were bananas! that caused a lot of conflict in the area too because if you had 4 people farming it, people had to make the decision to PvP them and face the ire of the other people and cause a mini war or just spend even more time hoping to get mobs you need.
I can see that being frustrating for others, but that is just one aspect I enjoyed when it came to "Rare drops" from "Regular mobs". I don't think every mob or mob type should contain such things, but having them exist in general can introduce interesting dynamics.