Andor's Trail

Wyrmspawn brought up something that's been bugging me for a while now... legendary and extraordinary items. You may smile and glance at my signature and see that I have none yet, despite grinding for both the RoLS and the RoL for a very long time but I'd like to highlight the problem as I see it.

Lowering the chances of an item dropping causes the variance between number of kills it takes to obtain the item to increase.

^-- Math fact.

Example: Player A kills 2 wild boars before getting a pair of leather boots to drop while player B has to kill 6 wild boars before he gets the drop. High drop rate = small variance. Neither player minds the difference because the number is so small.
Example 2: Player A kills 429 shadow gargoyle trainers before finding a RoLS while player B kills over 14,000 before getting the same legendary item to drop. Low drop rate = large variance. Player A is ecstatic that he got the item that far below the drop rate while player B is understandably grumpy after seemingly wasting hours of his real life to get the same item that his buddy got in a matter of minutes.

If the problem is not yet visible, you either don't mind the grind (some people honestly just don't mind) or you were the lucky player A keeping up the appearances that finding a legendary item is easy.



So, do I have a solution? Why yes, I do! Definitely not an original idea but this process has been used in many other games quite successfully and I think it would work quite well here. This is a multi-part solution so bear with me.

PART I: Loot
Remove all legendary and extraordinary drops from monsters. Every monster type (Black Ant and Forest Ant both count as Ants) in the game is given a single unique drop with a fairly high drop rate (something like 1:4 or 1:8).

PART II: Specialists/Recipes
Give certain NPC specialists the ability to create new items (these would be the new leg/ext items). Each NPC should have no more than 1 recipe and the materials required by the recipe should both indicate the power of the item to be created and limit that item to those players who can obtain the unique drops. In other words, you wouldn't find an NPC in Fallhaven who could create an uber awesome weapon and the specialist in Blackwater Settlement might require an item that only drops from the spiders on the way to Remgard but would be able to make a much more powerful item. In effect, this gates the obtaining of leg/ext items in a similar manner to what we have now. For example, one of the thieves from the Thieves Guild may be able to make a pretty nice rapier that has an effect similar to that provided by the skill Evasion but overall the stats probably wouldn't be worth it by the time you got all the way to Remgard. The key is to increase immersion by giving recipes to NPCs where the story fits. You're probably not going to want a mage type NPC to make a 2H Battleaxe legendary item... leave that to a dwarf somewhere.

PART III: Unlock
The NPC specialists would not want to just make their fancy items for any kid off the street... they would want you to prove your worth as well as your need for the item. This would allow for new quests as well as requirements such as being on a certain quest or having killed at least 1 of a certain kind of monster or having been through a particular dialog. For example, a specialist in Fallhaven might be able to create a ring with +1 regen after you explain your findings at the village near the Crossroads concerning the poisoning. Of course, you would still have to go out and collect the unique monster drops to make the item.

PART IV: Shared Resources
Some recipes would require similar components as other recipes. You might have killed 500 ants and wondered what you would do with all those ant legs only to find that not only are they needed for your little wooden sword at the very beginning of the game but that helmet that the guy in Remgard can make also requires quite a few ant legs. The idea is that each recipe would require a few components from a lot of monsters. Say, 14 different kinds of item but only about 50 of each one. This spreads out the requirements to a lot of monsters instead of forcing a player to sit in one little room for days killing the same monsters over and over and over and over and over to meet that 1:10000 drop rate.

Something to note: when each skeleton you kill has a 1:3 chance to drop an elbow bone and you only need 140 elbow bones (along with many other items in similar proportions) in order to get that new legendary weapon you've been eyeing the grind becomes a bit easier than when you have a 1:10000 chance for that shadow gargoyle trainer to drop your legendary... especially when you've already killed 12,000 of them still haven't seen it drop.

In short, reward hard work with proportional prizes rather than using a lottery system that makes some people happy at the expense of upsetting others.

I think your really on to something there. Are you proposing that very village has a specialist quest? I.e. crossglen has a low level specialist who makes weapons or armor from say bug,rat, and animal fur and once you complete his quest he tells you that there's a more experienced specialist in fallheaven who can make better items. And every time you complete the specialist quest he tells you of another specialist in a different town that is more experience. Is that what your proposing with the specialist?

I was just suggesting the concept of a specialist as someone to whom you could go to trade in "materials" to get an item from. How it's implemented is something else entirely but yes, one specialist in every (or most) towns would probably work or you could even have multiple specialists in some areas - just specialists in different areas such as a dagger specialist and a ring specialist could co-exist in the same town. The concept is simply to ensure that to get an item from a specialist would require turning in some of each of many items (effectively grinding from several monsters types) as opposed to a lot of a single item (effectively how the current system works... you grind off a single monster type). In conjunction with that, the drop rate for each item would be increased significantly but your efforts would produce more visible results allowing you to grind at your own speed, knowing with certainty that you are actually getting closer to obtaining that legendary item you're after.

The difference is that currently, grinding merely increases the mythical likelihood that you will obtain the legendary item soon but you have no way of knowing if you'll get the item in the next 2 minutes or if it will take you another 18 hours. The proposed change would cause grinding to visibly put you closer to obtaining the legendary item at your own speed as you could tell pretty easily that another 30 minutes on this monster should give you enough of that material to finish off your grocery list of unique items. The side effect is that just by running around in the world killing monsters you will be picking up those unique items so if you come across a new specialist that has a recipe you want, you've probably already collected some of the materials required to make it without realizing it.

*Edit* Heh... you know you're a geek when you notice your forum post count is 404 and you giggle maniacally

Lol that's funny. I understand what your saying and I like that idea. Because as it is now you are not garrenteid that you will get the L/E items. The drop is to random. But by having some1 be able to make these items seems better. The only.problem would be going back and redoing the drop rate for every item.

The grinders who spent months grinding for any particular item would probably throw a fit if it was really implemented though.

So lol. I think in the long run it would b better

I've disliked the rare random drop thing since the beginning, and suggested simply converting the L/E items all to boss drops and quest rewards, but this is an interesting twist also.

Wyrmspawn, I was aiming for a total time spent collecting materials to be about the same as the current grind to 10,000 kills. The difference here is that you're much more likely to get the item closer to that 10,000 kill mark than you would with just a straight up 1:10,000 drop rate from any individual monster. In other words, it would still require an epic amount of work to collect, you'd just have a better idea of how close you are to getting it and how much more work you have to do to get it. It would be a lot like saying that the item would drop for sure on your 10,000th kill rather than having a random drop rate of 1:10,000.

NO! A huge -1 here.... Make the leg. Items 1:25000 not 1:10000, the whole point of them is to give the player some 'ultimate' goal to strive for. They are not needed to progress the game in anyway, and provide no new areas, quests, or npc's. They are once in a lifetime items your adventurer has a very small chance of recovering on his expeditions.

I see no problems with the way it is, all good things come in time with hard work and perseverance.

But you are not gerantied to get these items that's the whole point.