Andor's Trail

I know, this may sound like a really bad idea, but hear me out.

There are many types of monsters in the world of Andor's Trail.

There are grinding monsters that give you gold (in the first 20 or so levels) and monsters that give exp (later on). But there are also a lot of monsters that give neither good gold or exp. Some of these monsters are quest monsters that are there to make quests difficult without giving you much reward for killing them.

Some of these monsters are in dungeons that make the dungeons more fun.

But some of these seem to serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever, except to fill in the maps so travelling is more difficult.

Examples of these include: Stinging Wasps, Hardshell Beetles, Anklebiters, wild foxes, wolves, and other commonly seen creatures that have no purpose other than to fill the maps.

Well, what if we were to give them all a specific item drop, maybe an extraordinary or a legendary drop?

The uncommonness of legendary and extraordinary items has thus far limited us to grinding again and again in the same dungeons for a weapon or a ring or a robe or a hat or a glove. But what if there were thousands of these items, with each map filler monster with its own legendary item?

If there were enough of these items, it might even discourage grinding that leads to Sarumar-level players who are left killing everything in sight when they come out of the dungeons as they can instead grind literally everywhere.

However, I admit that designing items for every single excess monster (There are a lot of them) will probably be, well, excessive. Also, that might just lead to players grinding for their favourite items anyway, or worse, grinding for all of them... However, the idea is to make it possible for a wide range of useful items to exist without centralizing the game on any one of them, as is what happened when the ROLS came out. Hopefully, it would be like a smattering of GoLFs all over Andor's Trail.

Therefore, these are the pros and cons I can see with this idea:

Pros:
1: If implemented correctly, there should, theoretically speaking be less grinders as there will be opportunites to grind while on the move.
2: If implemented correctly, the game would be able to limit players to specific levels, making it easier to design the game for gamers, as it would be easier to predict what level they will be at.
3: If implemented correctly, every player would end up with an extraordinary or two by the end of their games as of v.0.7. These won't have to be good extraordinaries; they could be like the GoLF, useful, but not superpowered.

Cons:
1: This would probably make players who have grinded for a year or two to get a RoL really, really, mad.
2: This would also probably make life hard for people who want to collect full sets of items (oh dear, nightmare.)
3: Now that there are hints for where legendary items are, it would be difficult to implement hints for every single one; so maybe we would have to forgo hints for the weak items.

Well, what do you think?

In the meantime, I have also designed a few items for these purposes:

Waspsting: (slightly better quickstrike dagger, drops from wasp)
Extraordinary
Category: Weapon, dagger.
AP: 3
AD: 1
AC: -10
BC: -10

HardShield: (shield of shells, drops from hardshell beetle)
Extraordinary
Item Category: Shield, light
Total AP: +1 (A really light shield helps with moving around)
BC: - 15 (real small, right?)
DR: 1 (hardshell beetles were once the most damage resistant monsters around)

Hide Armour: (Drops from Anklebiter, made from their skin)
Extraordinary
Item category: Armor, leather
AC: -3
AD: +1
BC: 10

That's all so far.

-1

I think this would have the exact opposite effect of what you would want, and would actually create more grinders than less grinders.

There would be more L + E items for them to hunt down to collect... and if you build it, they will come.

But if there were a million different legendaries, I think most people would give up getting a full set, while the average non-grinding gamer will still be able to get a legendary or two. Its like assigning a legendary item to each monster; since all of them have a chance to drop something good, there's no point in staying in the same place and waiting all the time.

1) There would need to be a ton of weapons coded to do this (There are a ton NPCs at this point)

2) The grinding would be the same, players would stay in certain areas trying to get specific gear that they want for their builds. The only difference is that there would probably 1 really good item for ever 100 junk items, and if there were more good items then we would probably run the risk of overpowering our players making the game boring. Right now there are 2 really good items (Rols + Rol) and 1 junk item (Elyr)

+1 for more rare, extraordinaly and legendary items.

IMO mondters like; " Stinging Wasps, Hardshell Beetles, Anklebiters, wild foxes, wolves, and other commonly seen creatures that have no purpose other than to fill the maps." have a game balansing purpose. Typically they prevent player for entering too far in areas that are beyond their ability to survivall.

I think adding more Rare drops for NPCs would be a good option, even Extraordinary would be okay, but adding too many Legendary items would simply turn the game into a never-ending grindfest.

For the dedicated players they wouldn't stop until they got them all.

For the newer players or casual players this wouldn't be much of a game enhancement.

I do like the idea a lot.
Only don't name them legendary but, just as Pyro said, rare or even extraordinary instead of legendary. Those items should also be only slightly better than the regular stuff you can buy in shops. This would also mean only minor coding, as the monsters are already there, but would improve the game experience a lot. Just implement some more items, designate a certain drop rate for these items to certain monsters and you're done.

Easy peasy, but lots of grinding fun for the people that enjoy grinding.

From someone that refuses to kill the same wimpy monster over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...breath...and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ...you get the idea... again, no matter how good the reward:

An alternative would be to have a few merchants in Feygard and Nor city that sell a few really exceptional items, but at eye-watering prices. The player can go and grind anywhere they want to get the huge amount of gold needed to buy them, which is a lot more interesting than killing the same thing over and over again. Also, anyone that wants a full set can still get one.

+1 on that.
The game needs a decent shield, so something like that woupd be a great idea.
Most of you older players have insane amounts of gold, so it should be fine, the rest could run around poking things and earning Exp for moar splat.

The only down side would be people whining about the prices. But, you get what you pay for.

If they start complaining they can alwas put sp on merchant