Trash Drops are Unnecessary, My Suggestion.

[Renevent]

I absolutely love the drop system in TQ...not only did it make sense...but it was exciting to see a monster holding some electrified battle axe and know once you slaughtered him, that item was yours.

[Scryer]

I like to kill things, and so should we all, if we limit what can be dropped, it causes the player to look for specific foes to vanquish, is this truly a desired game-play mechanic?

Maybe it is, however what would be the cost of allowing all enemies drop most or any possible loot?

Being able to kill anything without being forced to farm anything specific. It reminds me of boss runs, kill Mephisto X times until you get a great item, kill the human rebel X times just because he only drops this one item.

So it does sound a little monotonous to simply slay the same thing over and over to try and farm one item that the enemy drops. Having many enemies with many different types of abilities to fight against helps alleviate some of that monotony, and that's part of what Diablo did. Aside from boss runs.

[Vox Nihili]

Regardless of monsters drop what they carry or not, I think it's a safe assumption that they could phase out true trash drops (e.g. TQ's greys) entirely, regular (white) drops after a few levels, and magic (yellow) drops further down the line.

Even if there is some sort of deconstruction mechanic, you might as well leave out the garbage drops and just drop the deconstructed components instead. That whole system seems to leads to lots of things that have an extremely low ratio of fun-created to development time required.

[ASYLUM101]

Originally Posted by Malpheas

Ironically... I kind of agree with with monsters having the ability of dropping certain items based on what they are despite them not using them. Like materials.

There was this one creature in Marduk's Temple in TQ that carried polearms and dropped them, even though it did not use them. Like a jelly or a slime of some sort. It was very cool that it did. Kind of like a clean up from all the other dead adventurers.

Ok, materials, yeah, I agree on that. That's a completely different story though.

And about the jellies, yeah I can see that too. Again, not completely the same thing lol. A jelly having a sword or something inside of it is not uncommon, I've seen old animations and stuff from baldurs gate with that concept, you could even see the critters moving inside some of the jellies. But like you said, nats that can drop a sword?... that's just silly.

And Scryer, I'm not even sure what you're arguing for anymore. Your points are scattered and don't say much at all. You're saying you like to kill things, but by limiting what a creature drops it limits to how many foes you can kill? Did you even play titan quest? If you did, you'd know that's not true, because farming for a stonebinder's item for example becomes a gorgon genocide, meaning you'd have to kill hundreds of gorgons, automatai and undead to get that pair of stonebinders cuffs.

But that whole boss farming argument... doesn't do your argument any good. You're just generalizing the whole farming aspect, not just this one part of it.

[Malpheas]

Originally Posted by Vox Nihili

Regardless of monsters drop what they carry or not, I think it's a safe assumption that they could phase out true trash drops (e.g. TQ's greys) entirely, regular (white) drops after a few levels, and magic (yellow) drops further down the line.

Even if there is some sort of deconstruction mechanic, you might as well leave out the garbage drops and just drop the deconstructed components instead. That whole system seems to leads to lots of things that have an extremely low ratio of fun-created to development time required.

+1 ; cookie ; brownie... perhaps except for phasing out "white" and "yellow" drops.

Although, if this crafting system gets out of hand in a way I hope will happen, I'm looking forwards to grinding for mats. HELL YES. I mean... it will make a playthrough exciting, especially for some of the rare material drops.

Cheers,

Malph

[medierra]

Definitely an interesting topic.

We've taken measures to greatly reduce the amount of trash loot in GD. However, I believe some degree of it is necessary to maintain the "lottery" feeling of killing enemies. To make the times when you get something great, there have to be a certain number of times that you get nothing or something not very desirable. If all of these less desirable items were useful enough that you wanted to always pick them up, it would just get overwhelming.

That said, we have also made some changes to drop a wider range of desirable items aside from just rare and unique items. To fulfill the needs of the crafting system, enemies can drop many different types of crafting materials. We also want to pace the loot a little better so that magical items are not completely eclipsed by frequent rare or unique drops. Having more significant steps between common base item stats will also help here.

We're keeping some of the WYSIWYG loot system but making it a little bit more flexible so that enemies can drop items other than what they're carrying. Generally I think we still want this to make some amount of sense. So a wisp probably will never drop a sword but a zombie might drop a sword even though it isn't using one... "why wouldn't it use a sword if had one?" - glad you asked! Because zombies are dumb... and we think it makes the game a little more fun. It improves the lottery-aspect of getting items and removes some of the pressure of trying to balance item drops when only certain enemies can drop certain items. An even better example might be an archer that would always drop a bow (even if it was broken and disappeared) but could also drop other weapons. This alleviates the problem of melee players being shit out of luck while fighting through a stretch of area dominated by archer class enemies.

[Malpheas]

Originally Posted by medierra

<snip>.. We're keeping some of the WYSIWYG loot system but making it a little bit more flexible so that enemies can drop items other than what they're carrying. Generally I think we still want this to make some amount of sense. So a wisp probably will never drop a sword but a zombie might drop a sword even though it isn't using one... "why wouldn't it use a sword if had one?" - glad you asked! Because zombies are dumb... and we think it makes the game a little more fun. It improves the lottery-aspect of getting items and removes some of the pressure of trying to balance item drops when only certain enemies can drop certain items.

This is entirely what I was hoping for.

Cheers,

Malph

[Mines51]

Zombies not carrying swords? I'm disappointed. We need more sword wielding zombies in the world. Skeletons can do it, why not zombies?

[Malpheas]

Oh, it can! It's just too stupid to. It might, but it also might carry a stick, fwap with a branch.

[Mines51]

Skeleton's don't have a brain let alone muscles. Zombies at least have one, although it is rotting.