What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs?
To answer this I think we first need to establish design philosophy behind the purpose that regular mobs serve.
In my mind regular mobs or trash mobs or whatever we want to call them exist for a few reasons.
They provide consistent experience gain.
They serve as an obstacle or segue to more challenging foes or encounters.
They stand as a power check. If you can't kill the trash mobs in a given area, you have no business going after the elites.
They can play into power fantasy and limit testing. In games with no mob aggro limit, it can feel awesome to bite off potentially more than you can chew, pull 30-50 mobs and see if you can survive.
Given this mindset, I think that regular mobs should primarily drop currency (glint,etc.).
Although seemingly necessary, these monsters are mundane in nature and should have a loot table reflecting that.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
To avoid getting semantic I'm going to interpret "powerul" as all-encompassing rare items. In general, I think regular mobs have no business dropping powerful items. Powerful items should drop from powerful, challenging enemies. The more rare/challenging the mob, the rarer the reward.
If we're talking about raw materials or slightly processed materials, I think that can be okay in moderation but
should never drop at rate that could prove to be more efficient than gathering those materials outright. If regular mobs are to drop materials, those drops should be geographically and temporally relative (iron ore dropping from mobs near the mountain, moon opal dropping from mobs at night, etc.)
If we're talking about rare recipes or cosmetics, I think regular mobs having an extremely low chance of dropping these items is okay as long as these drops are regional and not part of a global loot table.
In conclusion,
Regular mobs serve a purpose outside of dropping us rare items. Let rare/elite/boss monsters serve their purpose in being the most attractive targets from the loot table perspective. The more targeted the loot tables are, the more meaningful and purpose driven the grind feels. It would be anti-climactic if we end up in a spot where farming endless packs of respawning trash mobs becomes the most efficient means of powerful item acquisition.
IMO the very best 100% legendary stuff should not drop at all. That should be a grind and require a certain commitment or achievement. These items should also be somewhat limited.
However a very good 90-95% item can drop very rarely, where 80-90% is Norm.
only thing that I am requesting is when its junk for selling please make it known that I can sell it.. I love collecting things. as I need to see someone about my Hoarding addictions! and hire a space organizer
I dislike it when the mob drops something it had no reason to carry. Like a wolf dropping a dagger. Had they swallowed it? Or even worse, a wolf dropping a spear that could never even fit in them. And If a goblin drops a weapon, it should be the weapon it was fighting with.
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 prefer that normal mobs just drop greens, and other usable items that can help a character get a basic level of gearing in all slots. This doesn't mean that a wolf should drop green plate armor. Rather that wolf can drop items/tokens that can be traded for gear in town, without you having to get a quest first
I wouldn't mind if certain areas or types of mobs had mob specific drops with fixed (good) stats. This usually causes an overfarming situation, where a pre-BiS item spawn is monopolized for selling. If this kind of "small farm contention" is a goal of the game, then that's fine. Otherwise, those item could be made BoP
I very much dislike the WoW system of "world drops", where powerful items have an ultra-small chance to drop from any mob. Or even the L2 system where a whole weapon (worth millions) has a very very small chance to drop. IE, I want to work towards my powerful items, not just get them from being ultra-lucky (or rich)
Guessing you are talking about the global loot table. Or zone loot tables or, Lets say level ten dungeouns having a loot table that they all have access to plus their own unique dungeound loot table.
Well think best way to approach this is have tier 1 loot tables and tier 2 loot tables and so on. But how should they be set up specifically.
Wel before we get into all that let me share my personal experience. The lack of variety in the regular mob makes the game kind stagnant and tedious. In some mmos the loot table allows for items like small magical items like rings. Well when these type of loot table is implemented ther is a hope of getting a rare or semi rare item; when the player it up and about int the open world that is. Typically you already know all the loot items from lets say bear. Typically fur, bear claws, bear meat, and so on. Seen posts how loot should make sense. Like should bears be not dropping.
bows or magical items.
Thing is a transitional item can be implemented. Like magical essence basically a currency. Lets say you are in highly magical forest that drops nature essence or life essence that you can use to buy loot from local druid. Think this type of system is alright.
Wild life in general could of ingested small gems. But think loot table for wild life is kind of limited unless you want them to drop other items, which kind of breaks the immersion but there should be some rare item or rare items that they should drop.
Aslo think there should be like a bountiful drop. or a critical drop where sometimes you get extra loot. For example if most of the time you get 3-5 bear meat. Sometimes you get 10 bear meat. Just a pleasant surpise. Plus if the have a wolrd that is heavily imbued with magic. Then bear claws could have chance to be imbued with magical essence, From eating magical cretures. Or magical berries.
As far as humanoid mobs well there is a lot more room for variety. Think humanoid mobs should be allowed to have rare items like rare material, rare potions, rare weapons, gems, recipes, not like up to the level of legendary items. For humanoid mobs really the loot table should be pretty big so that you never know what you are going to get.
Really like the way dungeouns and dragons does it. You roll a d20 for loot then if 20 gets rolled got to another loot table for chance to better loot and if you roll 20 againd then it is a special item. Now this just a general structure. But this type of structure can be taken and be used for loot tables hundreds of items or for however number of items you have.
As far as magical monsters like that kind of fit into the regualr mob category. Like Hydras, Psuedo dragons, feyrs, corrupted monsters then they should have magical loot that fits the monster. For example droping monster magica essence that can be transmuted into another component that is useful to creat a magical item like a potion.
Plus there are regular undead, and regular monsters form lets say other planes.
Lets just take demonic bunnies from the abyss or the void should have loot that is related to what they are.
Already stated this in another post but, video game companies have different level loot cards like bronze loot cards silver gold platinum and son on. Kind of playing the lottery. Talking about lottery tickets that have games on them that have like one in five hundred chance of winning. So if you were to combine this type of system regular mobs think it would be pretty good.
So what would look like in game. Really simple infact lets say on average every 20 mobs you kill get a chance to get better loot or whatever number Intrepid Studios deems appropriate. Putting some RNG into loot tables makes things interesting in my opinion.
Very strong opinions on this one, will also share input I collected from discussions I had within my community,
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
gear should only come from starting questlines up to level 10~15 and introduce players to their first crafted set, from there players should need to either work together to craft, or trade for their gear, with a strong focus on upgrading along the way using the enchant system as well,
mobs should Not drop gear, now, if you want to have some mini bosses/bosses with rare chance of dropping completed gear, which is unfortunate, at least they SHOULD be low quality RNG stats mainly for deconstruction, absolutely no T5 items and no item should drop with a quality above rare/heroic.
No Legendary finished gear should drop from bosses. Only legendary mats and recipes.
all NPC and quest item drops including bosses should be non-repairable and only crafted gear should be repairable, this would make it so it is worth deconstructing and giving dropped gear a time-limit instead of being a viable long term gear option. But again, recipes should be the way.
Crafters make the best shit.
I can't stress how important this is. Crafters need to be important for more than just repairing gear! They need to create it to!
The only thing I will add is that IF the overall community demands full item drops from the world, at least make a black market system like Albion Online has, so all the items are still player crafted.
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Obviously you want rewards to be balanced. You have to give players some good reason to kill normal mobs while out exploring the world. But you don't want there to be too high a reward for farming regular mobs.
I personally love exploring and killing random mobs. Others will only do it if the rewards are there.
You also have the option to reward mob-killing with the many quests available from nodes and the world at large. The issue with this is that it's very localized and requires you to run back and forth to town (or the quest giver), it doesn't really encourage exploration and generalized adventuring throughout the world, rather the nearby area.
So my thought is that the mobs which are harder to get to, or are not commonly encountered in quests, or don't have great crafting drops (great doesn't have to be rare, just something in demand), those should have higher drop rates.
It is funny that you have the illustration of a chest being looted, as one of my favourite memories playing another Well Known MMO™ was getting a rare and powerful item from a chest (not even end-game level). It has only happened once in years and years, and that is the level of rarity that I would expect, but getting a teeny tiny chance to get powerful loot from the World feels really great IMHO.
What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs?
I will use WoW classifications to express my opinions since that was the MMORPG that I spent the most time playing. Regular mobs should drop normal, rare, and epic items. If I had to give percentages, I would say:
Normal: 80-100% of the time.
Rare: 1 - 10% of the time.
Epic: <1% of the time.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
It feels amazing, but it should be spread out so it actually feels rare. The percentages I gave above are just random guesses. I want to play 2-3 hours a day and I hope that on regular mobs I hit a rare item every week or so. Maybe it won't be the most useful item, but something.
Will copy paste my opinion i did on rare drops because well it applies here too
This is a difficult question, because it's quite situational.
First of all, you have to take into account the type of rare monster and the associated drops.
I've always found it highly illogical to defeat a gigantic beast and have it drop a two-handed sword. Where does it come from? While butchering the beast for its teeth, poison gland etc. might make sense.
In the case of a bandit leader, yes, it's logical that you can recover some of his equipment if you're lucky enough not to destroy it in battle, or some of the materials that make up his equipment... and it doesn't mean he had ultimate stuff, he can just have some good items of normal to rare rarity. And i think it is totally ok to drop it.
After a battle is over, you can also loot the boss or monster's personal chest (if he was smart enough to own such a thing).
So for me, it would be interesting to make a distinction between rare drops on creatures and monsters that would loot materials in 90% of cases, which could be rare.
And humanoids, who could drop complete items (broken, damaged, recipes, etc.).
The integration of harvesting professions within the monsters themselves could also be interesting, having a master skinner in the group to retrieve the best materials etc. ... but I digress.
As long as complete items retain a role in the crafting ecosystem, and loot rates for complete items are much lower than for materials, I think it's a good compromise. It would allow you to target materials or complete items according to bosses and monsters.
Full items should be repaired/maintained, and while they are very rare and inferior to crafted items in any case, they may remain a viable alternative for less wealthy and less organized players, who would prefer to target full item drops. Although the game has a craft-centric and social component, it shouldn't be unplayable for less-involved casual players either.
Generally speaking, I don't agree that looting full items is problematic. It would be problematic if the loot of the complete item required no interaction with the crafting system for it to reach its full potential. But if the complete item needs to be repaired/sharpened/enchanted, the problem solves itself.
As Ashes of Creation is intended to be a game with interconnected systems, it would seem logical to me that loot should also benefit from this interconnection, to the benefit of the game experience, immersion, economy and players.
there are no problems, only solutions.
To sum up:
- Loot circumstantial and logical in relation to the type of monster / Pnj beaten.
- Mostly materials/recipes, rarely complete items if relevant.
- A minimum number of normal to rare materials, then a chance of better loot, potentially influenced by team raid/dungeon performance.
- Crafted items remain superior to looted items
- It would be interesting if crafting/harvesting professions had the possibility of interacting with the corpses of defeated monsters to maximize the obtainment of better materials. Stone Golem: Miner, Living Tree : Lumberjack etc...
- Looted items remain rare, can be looted destroyed/damaged/need an enchantment to be restored and reach their full potential, be set items, trigger a quest etc.
I wouldn't want to see a unique item drop from a normal mob. It would be cool to have a rare chance to find equipment from a mob with the matching cosmetic design that we see the mob playing with, and blueprints for crafting their equipment style. rare drops could include consumables. i don't want to have to pick up items with keyboard input, I'd rather the drops just appear in my inventory. i do not want to constantly get trash items from mobs, things that waste my time reading the pick-up's popup onscreen, wasting inventory space, or quickly depleting the time that i have to adventure before i need to go back to town and sell my trash inventory items.
If I expand my view to more than just "should regular mobs drop this, and bosses drop that", I start thinking about how players will interact with the world. There is a high probability that large guilds will monopolize certain bosses that drop legendary loot. How many players will be in large guilds vs how many will be in smaller, tighter knit guilds, or even solo players. Should we limit these drops to only the large guilds? That sounds to me, like 1/2 the server complaining non-stop.
Now, unless there's another solution already in place for this that I'm unaware of, a solid solution could be to let regular mobs have a small chance of dropping legendary stuff. This will satisfy all the BDO, and ARPG players for sure lol, but it also brings forth a balance, by offsetting the overwhelming strength a zerg guild can have, when they monopolize open world bosses.
To sum it up I am totally for average mobs have a small chance to drop legendary loot.
Yes I think there should be a very small chance, their is no better excitement than seeing that color loot light up in anticipation, also It is important to reward the people who prefer a alterative way of leveling as opposed to just pure questing. No one like to be pigeon holed into 1 way to level and be rewarded. Quests, Grinding mobs, crafting, and even PvP (legally) should all be rewarded experience.
TwitchTV Streamer: The Hidden Dagger Inn Saturday's 5:00 PM Cst And
Wednesday's at 7:00 PM Cst
What types of items and upgrades do you expect to drop from regular mobs?
Gold, crafting materials, and occasionally "green"/basic quality gear. I'd prefer to get consistent upgrades from crafting that I get materials from the mobs. Very, very rarely should anything of higher quality drop.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
Yeah, I love it. It's really exciting if it's exceptionally rare because then you get a huge upgrade or a huge payday by selling it to other characters. I like how Classic WoW handles dropping blue / epic items from world drops.
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?
- Minimum or no trash items at all (only if they have a utility somehow and can be sold without inflating the economy too much)
- Basic crafting materials (0.1 to 1%).
- Rare/legendaries materials 0.01% drop rate
- Basic material for aesthetics purpose (add a maximum of NPC that cost gold, for players destroy a maximum of money to change colors, hairstyle or whatever).
- Gold (money)
- Health/mana potions to be able to stay long enough at a place with strong mobs
- Important that mobs have a maximum of specific drops to give more importance to every single area
- Keep a low drop rate in general and reduce the quantity of materials for crafting to avoid inflation
Comments
To answer this I think we first need to establish design philosophy behind the purpose that regular mobs serve.
In my mind regular mobs or trash mobs or whatever we want to call them exist for a few reasons.
They provide consistent experience gain.
They serve as an obstacle or segue to more challenging foes or encounters.
They stand as a power check. If you can't kill the trash mobs in a given area, you have no business going after the elites.
They can play into power fantasy and limit testing. In games with no mob aggro limit, it can feel awesome to bite off potentially more than you can chew, pull 30-50 mobs and see if you can survive.
Given this mindset, I think that regular mobs should primarily drop currency (glint,etc.).
Although seemingly necessary, these monsters are mundane in nature and should have a loot table reflecting that.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
To avoid getting semantic I'm going to interpret "powerul" as all-encompassing rare items.
In general, I think regular mobs have no business dropping powerful items. Powerful items should drop from powerful, challenging enemies. The more rare/challenging the mob, the rarer the reward.
If we're talking about raw materials or slightly processed materials, I think that can be okay in moderation but
should never drop at rate that could prove to be more efficient than gathering those materials outright. If regular mobs are to drop materials, those drops should be geographically and temporally relative (iron ore dropping from mobs near the mountain, moon opal dropping from mobs at night, etc.)
If we're talking about rare recipes or cosmetics, I think regular mobs having an extremely low chance of dropping these items is okay as long as these drops are regional and not part of a global loot table.
In conclusion,
Regular mobs serve a purpose outside of dropping us rare items. Let rare/elite/boss monsters serve their purpose in being the most attractive targets from the loot table perspective. The more targeted the loot tables are, the more meaningful and purpose driven the grind feels. It would be anti-climactic if we end up in a spot where farming endless packs of respawning trash mobs becomes the most efficient means of powerful item acquisition.
-Blaspherian
However a very good 90-95% item can drop very rarely, where 80-90% is Norm.
I prefer that normal mobs just drop greens, and other usable items that can help a character get a basic level of gearing in all slots. This doesn't mean that a wolf should drop green plate armor. Rather that wolf can drop items/tokens that can be traded for gear in town, without you having to get a quest first
I wouldn't mind if certain areas or types of mobs had mob specific drops with fixed (good) stats. This usually causes an overfarming situation, where a pre-BiS item spawn is monopolized for selling. If this kind of "small farm contention" is a goal of the game, then that's fine. Otherwise, those item could be made BoP
I very much dislike the WoW system of "world drops", where powerful items have an ultra-small chance to drop from any mob. Or even the L2 system where a whole weapon (worth millions) has a very very small chance to drop. IE, I want to work towards my powerful items, not just get them from being ultra-lucky (or rich)
Well think best way to approach this is have tier 1 loot tables and tier 2 loot tables and so on. But how should they be set up specifically.
Wel before we get into all that let me share my personal experience. The lack of variety in the regular mob makes the game kind stagnant and tedious. In some mmos the loot table allows for items like small magical items like rings. Well when these type of loot table is implemented ther is a hope of getting a rare or semi rare item; when the player it up and about int the open world that is. Typically you already know all the loot items from lets say bear. Typically fur, bear claws, bear meat, and so on. Seen posts how loot should make sense. Like should bears be not dropping.
bows or magical items.
Thing is a transitional item can be implemented. Like magical essence basically a currency. Lets say you are in highly magical forest that drops nature essence or life essence that you can use to buy loot from local druid. Think this type of system is alright.
Wild life in general could of ingested small gems. But think loot table for wild life is kind of limited unless you want them to drop other items, which kind of breaks the immersion but there should be some rare item or rare items that they should drop.
Aslo think there should be like a bountiful drop. or a critical drop where sometimes you get extra loot. For example if most of the time you get 3-5 bear meat. Sometimes you get 10 bear meat. Just a pleasant surpise. Plus if the have a wolrd that is heavily imbued with magic. Then bear claws could have chance to be imbued with magical essence, From eating magical cretures. Or magical berries.
As far as humanoid mobs well there is a lot more room for variety. Think humanoid mobs should be allowed to have rare items like rare material, rare potions, rare weapons, gems, recipes, not like up to the level of legendary items. For humanoid mobs really the loot table should be pretty big so that you never know what you are going to get.
Really like the way dungeouns and dragons does it. You roll a d20 for loot then if 20 gets rolled got to another loot table for chance to better loot and if you roll 20 againd then it is a special item. Now this just a general structure. But this type of structure can be taken and be used for loot tables hundreds of items or for however number of items you have.
As far as magical monsters like that kind of fit into the regualr mob category. Like Hydras, Psuedo dragons, feyrs, corrupted monsters then they should have magical loot that fits the monster. For example droping monster magica essence that can be transmuted into another component that is useful to creat a magical item like a potion.
Plus there are regular undead, and regular monsters form lets say other planes.
Lets just take demonic bunnies from the abyss or the void should have loot that is related to what they are.
Already stated this in another post but, video game companies have different level loot cards like bronze loot cards silver gold platinum and son on. Kind of playing the lottery. Talking about lottery tickets that have games on them that have like one in five hundred chance of winning. So if you were to combine this type of system regular mobs think it would be pretty good.
So what would look like in game. Really simple infact lets say on average every 20 mobs you kill get a chance to get better loot or whatever number Intrepid Studios deems appropriate. Putting some RNG into loot tables makes things interesting in my opinion.
I can't stress how important this is. Crafters need to be important for more than just repairing gear! They need to create it to!
The only thing I will add is that IF the overall community demands full item drops from the world, at least make a black market system like Albion Online has, so all the items are still player crafted.
I personally love exploring and killing random mobs. Others will only do it if the rewards are there.
You also have the option to reward mob-killing with the many quests available from nodes and the world at large. The issue with this is that it's very localized and requires you to run back and forth to town (or the quest giver), it doesn't really encourage exploration and generalized adventuring throughout the world, rather the nearby area.
So my thought is that the mobs which are harder to get to, or are not commonly encountered in quests, or don't have great crafting drops (great doesn't have to be rare, just something in demand), those should have higher drop rates.
I will use WoW classifications to express my opinions since that was the MMORPG that I spent the most time playing. Regular mobs should drop normal, rare, and epic items. If I had to give percentages, I would say:
Normal: 80-100% of the time.
Rare: 1 - 10% of the time.
Epic: <1% of the time.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
It feels amazing, but it should be spread out so it actually feels rare. The percentages I gave above are just random guesses. I want to play 2-3 hours a day and I hope that on regular mobs I hit a rare item every week or so. Maybe it won't be the most useful item, but something.
This is a difficult question, because it's quite situational.
First of all, you have to take into account the type of rare monster and the associated drops.
I've always found it highly illogical to defeat a gigantic beast and have it drop a two-handed sword. Where does it come from? While butchering the beast for its teeth, poison gland etc. might make sense.
In the case of a bandit leader, yes, it's logical that you can recover some of his equipment if you're lucky enough not to destroy it in battle, or some of the materials that make up his equipment... and it doesn't mean he had ultimate stuff, he can just have some good items of normal to rare rarity. And i think it is totally ok to drop it.
After a battle is over, you can also loot the boss or monster's personal chest (if he was smart enough to own such a thing).
So for me, it would be interesting to make a distinction between rare drops on creatures and monsters that would loot materials in 90% of cases, which could be rare.
And humanoids, who could drop complete items (broken, damaged, recipes, etc.).
The integration of harvesting professions within the monsters themselves could also be interesting, having a master skinner in the group to retrieve the best materials etc. ... but I digress.
As long as complete items retain a role in the crafting ecosystem, and loot rates for complete items are much lower than for materials, I think it's a good compromise. It would allow you to target materials or complete items according to bosses and monsters.
Full items should be repaired/maintained, and while they are very rare and inferior to crafted items in any case, they may remain a viable alternative for less wealthy and less organized players, who would prefer to target full item drops. Although the game has a craft-centric and social component, it shouldn't be unplayable for less-involved casual players either.
Generally speaking, I don't agree that looting full items is problematic. It would be problematic if the loot of the complete item required no interaction with the crafting system for it to reach its full potential. But if the complete item needs to be repaired/sharpened/enchanted, the problem solves itself.
As Ashes of Creation is intended to be a game with interconnected systems, it would seem logical to me that loot should also benefit from this interconnection, to the benefit of the game experience, immersion, economy and players.
there are no problems, only solutions.
To sum up:
- Loot circumstantial and logical in relation to the type of monster / Pnj beaten.
- Mostly materials/recipes, rarely complete items if relevant.
- A minimum number of normal to rare materials, then a chance of better loot, potentially influenced by team raid/dungeon performance.
- Crafted items remain superior to looted items
- It would be interesting if crafting/harvesting professions had the possibility of interacting with the corpses of defeated monsters to maximize the obtainment of better materials. Stone Golem: Miner, Living Tree : Lumberjack etc...
- Looted items remain rare, can be looted destroyed/damaged/need an enchantment to be restored and reach their full potential, be set items, trigger a quest etc.
That is my 2 cents on that point.
Now, unless there's another solution already in place for this that I'm unaware of, a solid solution could be to let regular mobs have a small chance of dropping legendary stuff. This will satisfy all the BDO, and ARPG players for sure lol, but it also brings forth a balance, by offsetting the overwhelming strength a zerg guild can have, when they monopolize open world bosses.
To sum it up I am totally for average mobs have a small chance to drop legendary loot.
Wednesday's at 7:00 PM Cst
https://www.youtube.com/@TheHiddenDaggerInn/featured
Gold, crafting materials, and occasionally "green"/basic quality gear. I'd prefer to get consistent upgrades from crafting that I get materials from the mobs. Very, very rarely should anything of higher quality drop.
Do you feel good when regular mobs have a rare chance to drop powerful items?
Yeah, I love it. It's really exciting if it's exceptionally rare because then you get a huge upgrade or a huge payday by selling it to other characters. I like how Classic WoW handles dropping blue / epic items from world drops.
- Minimum or no trash items at all (only if they have a utility somehow and can be sold without inflating the economy too much)
- Basic crafting materials (0.1 to 1%).
- Rare/legendaries materials 0.01% drop rate
- Basic material for aesthetics purpose (add a maximum of NPC that cost gold, for players destroy a maximum of money to change colors, hairstyle or whatever).
- Gold (money)
- Health/mana potions to be able to stay long enough at a place with strong mobs
- Important that mobs have a maximum of specific drops to give more importance to every single area
- Keep a low drop rate in general and reduce the quantity of materials for crafting to avoid inflation