Dear all
As a very passionate old-school MMORPG player, I am obviously very much looking forward to Pantheon (like all of you guys here I guess) and yesterday I had a thought that I think could add another layer of cool complexity and replayability to the game. What about adding a randomly generated attribute category to the item system in Pantheon a bit as ARPG's do? Now hear me out before you say, "Hell no! I don't want to play Diablo item grind in first person!"
I am not saying that all items in the game should have randomly generated attributes but just some - and only a layer of it. We are all familiar with the item rarety in a game like Pantheon. For instance, we have heard Joppa comment on a stream that finding a flawless blue diamond is quite rare compared to finding a rough blue diamond. So if we take that aspect and add a similar one to items like armor and weapons we could get something like this:
Item: Metal Plated Kicks (data taken from the stream with Cohh playing the warrior in Amberfaet)
+2 Agility +2 Charisma +46 AC - This is the standard Metal Plated Kicks that you would find but why not have the attributes range from maybe 1 - 3 on both the agility and charisma attribute but in total always have a sum of 4? and also have the AC range from maybe 42 up till 48?
But then also have a chance of finding a rare Metal Plated Kicks that maybe had a +1 or +2 to strenth as a bonus - or some other attribute. It does not have to be too significant but just a small add-on that made a rare item within a standard selection be just a bit better.
The reason why I would love to have this system or something similar in Pantheon is that It would add to the customization of your gear to your class. If you are a Paladin you would have to choose if you would go for higher Charisma or Agility on your equipment, and should you happen to find two Metal Plated Kicks on your runs through the same dungeon there is quite a high chance that they might not be identical. I think it is also quite important that finding good loot always has to be a cool experience. You don't want to come from a level 30 area and now playing in a level 40 area and happen to find an item that is actually worse then your old item only because you got "unlucky" on the roll of the random attribute on your new item.
I think a system like this on items would:
1. Make it less annoying to find the same item twice (something I am quite sure we have all tried in games like Pantheon).
2. Make more options for character specialization/customization.
3. (this one might sound contradictory to my first statement about item-grinding) but for those people who put in thousands of hours to a game like this and just love grinding for gear, they would have a reason to grind for a complete set of "Whatever-Gear" and have all of it with bonus attributes.
4. It would add a layer of equipment on the market that those players who put in thousands of hours could also spend their millions of gold pieces on.
Last example: (and then I will shut up, as this post is already too long)
Say you have spend a week in Evil Dungeon of Horrors and you got Tunic-of-Sown-Together-Fingernails from a named mob. It has +10 Strength +8 Wisdom +6 Agility and 50 AC. After a week you happen to find this item again but this time with +6 Strength +8 Wisdom +10 Agility and only 45 AC. Now you have to choose whether the increase in agility is worth the loss of AC if you are a monk for instance. keeping in mind both items are better than your old Tunic-of-Crude-Fish-Skin that had only +3 Strength +6 Agility and 30 AC.
If the amount randomness and Bonus-attribute possible per item, is done right (not too much!) I think it could be great!
Ps. I don't know if the devs have already mentioned something like this on a stream or in a newsletter?
I like the idea with taking the stats and suming them up and then doing RNG but everything els, DMG and AC i would like to be fixed numbers for the equipment.
If it should be implementet, i hope they don't put it on raid loot, and personally, i wouldn't like to see "special" versions of items, the extra stat versions, since that normally makes me think "so the normal version wasn't good enough, well, why is it there then"
But that is just my two cents, I really think the base idea of having a stat pool of points devided out with some limitations would be nice.
Some level of randomness is good - I agree. One question is how much frustration do we want with e.g. gear drops.
Thus - if armour or weapons are sized for particular races do we want to have a one in ten or one in twenty random chance of the gear we get being usable for our race even if we *finally* get the exact item we have been working for over the last month. Good news - finally got that plate mail plus two. Bad news - it is sized for an ogre and loses the bonus if melted down and recrafted.
Thus - suppose plate mail is primarily or exclusively for tank classes. Oooh what wonderful plate gauntlets I just got they glow with their magicness. Um ...too bad that +five intelligence won't do me all that much good.
It's difficult to form a real opinion on this without understanding exactly how the game's itemization will work in terms of stat weights and so on.
However, I will say that while I support the idea of more item variety, I would rather see this accomplished by customization in the crafting process, instead of randomly-statted loot drops.
As often - I agree with Nephele ==>
However, I will say that while I support the idea of more item variety, I would rather see this accomplished by customization in the crafting process, instead of randomly-statted loot drops.
Mainly because I don't mind camping for gear whose specific stats I have heard about, but would not enjoy the evils of the RNG cursing me with repeated increased STR when (as a bard) I of course wanted more CHR. Leads to frustration having to fight for the camp in an open world for 3-5 times as long in hopes of getting what I need, or spending hours trying to find someone with the exact item I seek to trade for the dud I got. Just one bard's opinion, but no thanks.
I would be happy to camp the gear, and the necessary materials - then pay my favorite crafter to tweak the silk armor so that its paisley pattern pops even more as I charm / mez mobs for fun and profit.
Absolutely not.
This makes it FAR more annoying to find the right item once. It already takes a very long time to get item drops, let alone if players had to keep farming endlessly for "good" rolls.
This also removes most of the excitement of seeing an item drop as now you have to pray the stats are also right.
This destroys any sense of item identity.
It floods the market with "trash" as players generally won't accept anything but the best.
Even in ARPGs and looter shooters it doesn't really feel great and it's very deflating to see something drop only to have less than ideal stats.
not a fan of rng items. i'd rather a similar upgrade system that bdo.
it gets frustrating especially to optimizers and min maxers.
to give an example:
ginto of mad king cloak base gives 5 agility and 5 stamina
if i smash two of them together, it gives me a 2 points to put into whatever stat.
so i'm now at 7 agility 5 stamina
if i smash another into it, i get another 2 points etc etc.
it gets riskier to keep smashing, but i can upgrade indefinitely at the cost of losing the item completely.
When I think about this concept I think about the route that WoW has taken with their itemization, the horrible balancing that has ensued and the loot pinata like aspects have plagued the game making it more ARPG like and less MMO like. If VR were to do something like this in Pantheon I would need to see their balancing philosophy and loot philosophy in action before making a definite opinion about it but, overall I am not a huge fan of RNG associated loot in terms of stats or additive effects.
I will say that I love the concept of crafters being able to modify stats or attune items to players and maybe the strength of these modifications is based on their overall skill and the quality of the items being used in the process. I would also probably be ok with some RNG going into the stat modifications based on overall skill and quality of items being used, as long as I can try to modify it again provided I have the necessary items required.
Iksar said:Absolutely not.
This makes it FAR more annoying to find the right item once. It already takes a very long time to get item drops, let alone if players had to keep farming endlessly for "good" rolls.
This also removes most of the excitement of seeing an item drop as now you have to pray the stats are also right.
This destroys any sense of item identity.
It floods the market with "trash" as players generally won't accept anything but the best.
Even in ARPGs and looter shooters it doesn't really feel great and it's very deflating to see something drop only to have less than ideal stats.
I support this message.
Without more context regarding the crafting, economy, currency, looting, taps, sinks, and more, it's hard to offer a reasonable answer.
If the effects can be removed from the items, with something like salvaging, deconstruction, dis-enchantment, distillation, sacrifice, or a similar mechanic, so you can end up with the effect that you can re-apply on another item? Sure. Doesn't sound too horrible, with appropriate limits, restrictions, caps and balance mechanics.
If some of the effects on items would facilitate creating a set of gear that enhanced particular skills, abilities, or spells that the character had? I would support that too.
In isolation though, without any other context or consideration, it seems out of place given their current public design goals, revealed to date.
Generally, I'm 100% against immediately-equippable drops, though, so my bias is certainly showing with respect to economic design.
Items can be broken down into three categories: generic, Lore, and Artifacts. Not every sword that drops needs to have a backstory and a masterwork steel long sword need not be worse than Grognars Cleaver of Elf Ear Collecting simply because its generic and not named.
For purposes of this discussion all generic items should have some corresponding crafting recipe to duplicate them. Lore items are basically just generic items with known appearances, specific names and flavor text but no additional power. Artifacts are powerful items earned with high amounts of effort and likely should not be trade-able.
Under a system like this every time a mob triggers an item drop it checks that area/faction loot table. If that mob does not have a specific lore item it drops to the generic table. Based on the mob type and disposition it has a weighted range of options to drop. The different recipes it can drop can range from low quality to high and from common to rare. A specific material may be common for a specific area but rarely you might have a different base material but otherwise similar. Likewise certain enchantments will be more common and to less common. Finding an item of a rare base material and a rare enchantment in a given area could be exceptionally rare. The next zone over though might have that combo be fairly common.
If this ends up being how generic itemization works then there is no reason that the loot couldn't be weightily randomized but its not true randomization. When coupled with salvaging and high level crafting it might be the only real way to get a specific combination but it wont be the only way.
There might well be *some* system that would add interest rather than detract from the worth of the items. I quite like the idea of most stats being fixed, but having a variable *additional* stat such that items get more cross-class usage.
Maybe in addition, if you could build up the item, somehow (combining multiple versions?) to be its 'best' version, but even then, you are perhaps effectively meaning that all drops feel sub-optimal and you pretty much *have* to farm multiples to get what you want.
Hmm. Interesting idea, but not sure.
Hi all, thanks for chipping in with all the opinions, having so many replies can only mean that this is a subject within the game that people have interest and passion for, whether or not you fall into the category for RNG or against it.
Just to make it clear and as Eldariur also pointed out, two posts above this one. The idea of having some randomization on items was not to go fully "Diablo-like loot" the idea was just (as Disposalist also mentioned just above this post) that some items had a certain level of randomization. Maybe just 5%, or maybe 10 - 20% - it is of course very difficult to put exact numbers on things as none of us have the full scope of the game and game development experience.
But I can tell why I got the idea and why I think it is something that should be considered apart from the points I made in the very first post.
I was recently playing EQ1 on the Project 1999 servers and the same item was sold from different players - the exact same item. The fact that I could google what mob to go kill for this loot and the fact that I would be guaranteed (if the loot dropped) that it would be the exact same, it just felt too one-dimensional to me. On top of that, I could repeat this process on all items I wanted in the game. Now I know that this is only possible due to the fact that EQ1 is very old and played through and through so many times, but I would still have loved it, had there been some differences between the items that you could get.
Remember this does not have to be so for all items. Have items like:
The Crown of Great Gobling King Snotface:
+5 strength +5 Agility AC 50 (and have this item fixed to these exact numbers)
but also have in items like:
Goblin Helmet:
+3 strength +3 Agility AC 30 (and let it go from 2 - 4 instead of the fixed 3 attribute points + maybe let the AC vary between 27 - 33)''
I don't think such a system - if balanced right - would subtract anything from the overall experience of the game, only add to it, as mentioned on bullet points 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the very first post. I get why people would be concerned about finding outright bad-versions of good loot that you have quested for, for a long time. But then just let those items randomness be very small, or none at all on certain items.
I don't know whether this will count as endorsement or condemnation of the idea but WoW did something similar. For "green" quality loot ("uncommon") the stats and names were randomized. Beyond what is described above, for a single weapon, Longsword for example, you could get a Longsword of the Monkey with a high agility bonus or Longsword of the Owl with an int bonus. Some would have secondary or even tertiary stats and the default Damage and Speed ratings could vary. By creating only a dozen different weapon types and a couple dozen different stat categories the designers had created nearly 300 different possible drops for weapons alone. Add in the minor variations in the randomization of the stats and you get thousands of possible drops. Do it all again for armor pieces and you have a rather diverse set of potential drops that took only a reasonable amount of time to develop.
Because the names were also modified to reflect the item's primary bonus it wasn't that hard to search around for the best available if you were shopping for one. Due to the quality level of the loot people generally did not bother shopping for them but you could...
In the end it was a way to add variety to a typically boring gear quality without much effort.
ShaggNasty said:Iksar said:Absolutely not.
This makes it FAR more annoying to find the right item once. It already takes a very long time to get item drops, let alone if players had to keep farming endlessly for "good" rolls.
This also removes most of the excitement of seeing an item drop as now you have to pray the stats are also right.
This destroys any sense of item identity.
It floods the market with "trash" as players generally won't accept anything but the best.
Even in ARPGs and looter shooters it doesn't really feel great and it's very deflating to see something drop only to have less than ideal stats.
I support this message.
Try Dark Age of Camelot on the Phoenix server, it's completely free. The RNG loot system there will show you very early on that this post is absoluitely corect.
One of the best things about EQ was the hunt for unique loot, and I'd really hate for Pantheon to not deliver a similar experience by adopting a loot lottery system.