Mischief- consistent loot tables, or huge range?

It will be functional. However, I'd say don't expect it to be perfect, because history says it won't be. Still, it will be a lot of fun and a great chance for guilds to play russian roulette with content.

If they take all "rare mobs" and point them all to the same loot table +/- 10 levels, please explain how VT keying will be functional.

When formulating your answer, please remember the 20-30 "rare mobs" in that same level range who each drop 20+ completely worthless quest items that will be flooding those pools.

Or if they c/p the FV no drop rules, which make epic drops stay no drop, but then point those mobs at the same universal loot table.

Or if they just mash together all raid encounter loot, and Tormax drops the bonus loot from Ring War.

Or if they statically reassign loot, and pieces that were purposefully disseminated wide to avoid bottlenecks are now back on a single spawn.

I'm hoping it is something along the lines of :

Kill Naggy and you get the original loot table with a randomized chance at other loots from NPCs with MoTM and the same level and expac. so kill Naggy and get 1 piece of Lady Vox, phinny,CT etc.

I do see alot of problems with this server but overall It should be fun.


I am more curious for the keying process. If they were smart they would just remove all keying quests on this server to avoid the problem. IE zone into seb,VP,VT,HS without doing the quest, which would make alot of players happy.

The randomize loot from trash I hope is based on a per zone basis to avoid people in say "the hole" getting a FBSS or SMR.

I also did not see anything in regards to spell focus effects, are those going to be making a return or are those MIA until luclin again ?

Considering no one has played on a server like this ever before I am curious about your assumptions (as I have some of my own). I don't believe it will be a "unplayable mess". Chaotic? Yes. But it will be more than playable. You just may not like the playstyle. Fair enough.

If all rare NPCs drop all rare's loot for their given level are you saying that botmasters will lock down every single rare in the entire game forever? Thats hard for me to believe. I think the botmasters will lock down some but the fact that they cant control or know which rare will drop that demanded item gives opportunity to that group or player who happens to come across a rare and downs it. It raises the probability of them getting that item that would normally be locked down in a static location.

Second the mere increase of random loot from the increased rare spawns will produce more loot which will reduce the demand for said item. Why pay for what botters are selling if I have a chance to get it from someone else or myself. We never had this opportunity in the past in this era.

In terms of what other players or guilds do is up to them and I am not factoring it into what I believe the experience will be like. Each existing TLP is still going with players on it so the view of how long a server will last is subjective at best given what your goals are for playing.

I do agree we don't know if the ruleset will be fun or not but that unknown is what is going to make this experience unique and fun for me.. for however long it lasts.

My best guess would be that they will pool the loot from common level mobs and put all those mobs on that loot table. So random chance to get something from that table. No guarantee or higher chance of the mob's original loot. We won't know until it launches though. I'll be watching the forums that day for sure.

You're confusing "This will need to be played differently and some people won't like it" with my statement, which is "This will significantly break certain mechanics if it's implemented stupidly, making certain types of progress nigh-on impossible regardless of playstyle"

Presumably, they'll copy the FV rules for what keeps a No Drop flag - to wit, epic pieces and most key pieces.

If they just point all mobs flagged rare from the same expansion in a +/-10 level range at a universal loot table without discrimination, and set drop percentages to be the same - absolutely no SK will ever get their epic. Rharzar is flagged rare and will share a loot table with almost every Kunark named, but has an EXCEEDINGLY low spawn rate - so you'll have a pool of literally hundreds of items for each kill, but only a .01% chance of the item you need dropping, and it's no-drop so just giving up and buying it won't be an option.

And that's not even the worst scenario. Fast forward to Luclin, with VT keying. Same loot rules as above. Now, each key piece is competing with the 20-30 quest items per mob per classthat drops in that same level range, and even when you get a shard to drop it needs to be the one you actually need. Still no drop, still can't buy it. And you've got to do that 10 times.

And while we're in Luclin - nobody is going to do Emp because 18 splitting Grieg and servitor then trading the loot is more loot and easier.

Or back to Classic - same rules as above. Now nobody raids anything but 10+ hours straight of Sister or Spiroc. That's the entire raiding experience in Classic now. Or you do go ahead and push that first Inny kill, and get 8 Sky quest items as the drops.

Or flip the rules - they just reshuffle all items to new mobs, but the new mobs always drop that specific item. The jade prod now drops from a mob inside Howling Stones, because we know what QC is like around here. But because there are no details available to the public, nobody can submit this as a bug because nobody knows.

This isn't about playstyle preferences. I personally think this is a really fun server idea if it's implemented right. But without some information on the mechanics intended, we have to blindly trust them that the server won't be an unplayable mess after folks have already invested 3-6 months playing here.

And to restate it for maximum clarity: I don't want them to say "X item will now drop from Y mob instead of Z mob." I want them to say what the level range of redistribution is, if quest items are being redistributed, if epic items are being redistributed, and if the redistribution is a universal pool, a one-time static redistribution, or something else.

None of that info would ruin any surprises, but it would allow us to know whether or not anyone who has actually played the game was involved in the decisions behind this server.

Epic 1.0 quest items ARE tradable on FV. VP medallions are tradable. VT shards are not (I think). I'm sure they have something planned for this stuff

Cheers for the correction. But the faith in their ability to both have a plan and have it not be dumb is where we part ways. The last two TLP launches both had really disfunctionally dumb plans before the community told them how to fix it.

The key question for me on the loot mechanic is whether the random loot is an and or an or situation.

• would Nagafen loot draw from the Nagafen loot table and the combined loot tables of all the rare mobs at that level/era (Vox for example)
• would Nagafen loot draw from the Nagefen loot or the combined loot table, meaning you might get no Nagafen items at all.

The former sounds great. Reliably get the same items from the same places you always could but with a chance at a little bonus from the combined loot, you might get lucky you might just get some extra junk. That sounds cool. With FV rules it's a little loot pinataish but it's a game lets have some fun.

The latter option however sounds like an absolute horrible drama disaster waiting to happen. Naggy/Vox isn't the best example to highlight why but I'm sure everyone can imagine for themselves the rage that would be generated if a guild does Naggy, gets Vox loot.. goes and does Vox.. gets Vox loot again. Think of that forward through the expansions, who's actually enjoying that?

I guess there is the third option, where loot has just been randomised once and then set. So a given rare mobs loot is now just permenantly on some other rare mob in the same level/era and the folks who run Allakhazam start buying those pots you scream into to relieve stress.

It might be possible but I would be shocked if they don't treat quest mobs different as having to pray for a random drop from a random mob for a quest such as your epic wouldn't be fun at all. The idea of random drops seems to be to shift the focus from camping in the same spot to being able to experience more of the game.

Why not? Sure they can 18 split those raids but that doesn't change the fact that emp is another shot at loot and they would be crazy to pass it up.

And once it goes live we will be able to submit any bugs that are needed but part of the excitement around this new ruleset is we don't know exactly what to expect and personally I find that exciting.

We don't need to know all the mechanics right away to be able to enjoy this server and it doesn't help to keep thinking worst case scenario for this. While they might have to make some adjustments over time after it is launched I would be shocked if they have not already considered most of your concerns.

At this point we should just sit back and wait to see what we will get.

In your terms it's almost certainly the "And" option. If it's not, the developers are daft and added rare bonus spawns for no real reason.

Bonus rare spawn rate strongly points at it being somewhere around 50% chance of a normal drop and 50% chance of the shared table IMO, since "bonus rate" is nearly always 2x. So a doubled rate would mean for every spawn on a normal live server, you'd see 2 rares on average - 1 with it's typical loot and 1 with roulette wheel loot.

Enough to make camps like Efreeti still retain their value (since they'll have a far higher chance of dropping GEBs and Rings than the other similar level camps) rather than losing out to simpler camps with the wide table only. Because otherwise with a single spawn - with the same odds of anywhere else, the higher difficulty and less named of the camp would make it completely uninteresting.

Whereas the "AND" version retains interest in specific camps while ALSO boosting the interest in bad camps, and not screwing up things like epic named farming too much. (Since sure, you might not get a ring from Gimblox or crown from Bergurgle the first time, but the second spawn - which should be soon after due to 2x spawn - almost certainly should)

Yet funny how if no one were to ever know these details that they would still be able to play the game.

Just because we don't know how they are going to do this doesn't mean it's going to be done utterly wrong. I don't have a fear that SKs won't get their EPIC. The problems that will absolutely arise will be dealt with, most likely in a way to appeal to some but not others.

My point simply was anyone who plays on the TLP will find out one way or another "how it works"and maybe that's the experience they are going for. It would be a welcome one in my opinion.

I can too. Except they won't catch them all day 1. Which means that the players that do catch them will have 1-3 weeks to farm them minimum before they are corrected. In a worst case scenario, that's 1-3 weeks of farming instant triggered raid mobs that drop best in slot loot across the board for each expansion.

Protagonist gets it. This is a math problem ultimately, and if you are bad at math, you are going to get results wildly different than what you calculated.

You are making a big assumption here, that there is a "right" way to do this. Based on what they've told us so far, I'll argue that there isn't.

I don't think its going to be pure RNG like they alluded too in the Mischief post. Daybreak rarely codes anything new so i bet they just moved some items around called it a day and if this is the case the majority of people are going to be pissed.

If you are right, they just lost all credibility with TLP players forever. I don't think they will be that stupid. They have been really dense at times in the past, but just moving a few items around would take the cake, by a lot.

So there is some benefit to this ruleset then. I guess them VP key parts will be selling for big chunk to the low in self esteem.

This is provably wrong. They've repeatedly done really stupid things with TLP launches, and the crowd's all here saying how certain they are this one won't be stupid.

Mangler/Selo: They thought 'hardcore' meant ultra slow xp, and that people would want that.
Miragul: A server so dumb it didn't even manage the single year before it died on the vine
Aradune/Riz: They thought people wanted two new PoP lock servers.

They haven't gotten a TLP launch right from the drawing board in YEARS.

I think maybe you should just wait until the server is launched and players start to post some details. Clearly going into a server with questions unanswered is really troubling for you.