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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Mobs and bosses should not drop completed gear
SirBlake
Member, Alpha Two
With the new changes in gear making a lot of legendary level 10 gear not as good as uncommon level 20 gear this has far reaching affects. With people being able to get to level 20 within a week or two weeks while leveling they will get mob gear drops of level 20 with rarity generally from common to rare. That feels nice to get gear but this severely affects crafters and crafting systems. It makes level 10 gear not worth crafting since even the highest rarity is not as good as uncommon mob drop. equipment crafters will be useless until JM stations are up which took around 2 months on Vyra so 2 months of your profession being worthless. Looking into the future where according to steven it will take 45 days to level to 50 which means they will kill level 50 mobs along the way. These mobs if they drop even uncommon gear will be the best gear you can get and making crafting useless until GM crafting stations which who knows how long that will take even if it is 6 months that is 6 months with crafters with no job.
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My solution would be:
Leave level 0 gear the way it is, because there will be no economy for players to acquire crafted gear before the node levels.
After level 0, remove any gear dropped from mobs from common to rare rarities. You can leave heroic+ as it's a very rare chance to drop, and players won't be able to rely on that to gear up. They will need to rely on crafting. Heroic+ drops just keep the possibility of a rare drop, and that feel-good moment.
And from my side, with the benefit of 6 months of data, I'd like to rescind my original stance. So now I say:
It's not okay for bosses to drop completed gear pieces for any purpose other than to be deconstructed, in Ashes of Creation (I had time to confirm some stuff about player incentives in Lineage, TL and Ashes).
i assume with item degration and deconstruction being available at some point those drops could be used as first item in that slot and then to be deconstructed to get materials to craft a better rarity of it.
pve drops need to have effects on economy.
theres just so much we are still missing that its hard to make the right call for balance. (will nodes take too long to build stuff, will there be enough stations in reasonable distance to make crafting viable etc.)
so take this all as a current game feedback
This is a big deal to a lot of people, yes.
I don't know if Intrepid can come up with a solution for this that pleases everyone within their own constraints, but I can offer that even though I don't think the solution Throne and Liberty uses would work for Ashes, it hasn't seemed to cause as much negativity as I would've expected.
I think average people are learning to understand game economies again if they are eased into it. So part of the reason for my change of heart is actually this:
"I don't think Ashes has to worry about 'paying the goodwill cost' of 'not having wearable/satisfying gear drop from mobs'."
That is, I think it's okay to absorb the 'salt' of people who complain about the initial drop they get not being a big improvement/upgrade/gear-chase item.
My recent experience implies that cost is smaller than I thought. The recent stat/gearing changes also imply a path where the drop is wearable but Common/White grade and 'only worth deconstructing'. I believe this leads to a good econ-flow (but my opinion of the current stats and gear balance pass is low, as you'd expect from a first iteration).
I'd imagine that having rarity-up effect during the deconstruction would be a bad thing, so this selective process would only be applicable to universal parts of the item (which would in turn probably require crafting to have a few more universal parts in it, I guess).
I'd be more ok with somewhat frequent grey drops, if they pretty much just went back into crafting immediately, because anything higher than rare+x item of lower tier would be better.
No, economically that's entirely fine actually.
That's... again, basically the obvious way that should work.
If I deconstruct Studded Griffon Leather Armor (for readers' clarity, this is made up as of this post), I would expect to get 4-8 Brass Armor Studs (could be used for repairing multiple things) and maybe 1 Griffon Leather but being able to choose to 'destroy' some of the Armor Studs to get more intact Leather due to my skills would be entirely acceptable in most designs (even moreso if Leather strips and Leather Squares are separate).
The Rarity Up effect would then be able to act as a 'deconstruction result increase effect', changing the choices even for the less skilled, as an example.
You're just describing FF11+L2 as usual though, I'm sure this doesn't surprise you.
It's absolutely not common, but FF11 allows you to deconstruct certain items using either a Lightning Crystal (to split apart components and 'melt down' metal, often destroying delicate parts) or a Wind Crystal (to cut apart delicate parts and recover cloth or leather, while losing or destroying metal parts, the lack of realism here is probably why it isn't very common).
The reason I say that bosses shouldn't drop good wearables is that it changes the player perspective of what the game is. Players must be guided/taught how to interact with economy, gently, sure, but giving them bypasses just leads to losing them later when they realize either 'I've been noob-trapped' or 'this game isn't actually about this and it isn't the type of fun I wanted'.
Targeted Deconstruction, even with Rarity Up (which I still hate, but wouldn't mind it being repurposed in this way) is only one complexity step and is a good economy lesson. So far, World Chat interactions on this matter in TL that I've seen have been positive/acceptant.
But ofc, Throne and Liberty is explicitly full of Lineage 2 and FF11 players at this point, so that's huge demographic bias. I still think a lot of the responses have been from MMO-newbies or people who haven't been able to play that game style before, though, simply because I'd expect FF11/L2/AA players to understand Lithograph/Deconstruction stuff without needing to ask.