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Nadroj

About time unique drops were balanced?

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Was just chatting with a friend who's on freedom who pointed out that "the white hatchling has been found" and we both laughed and quipped, "oh the most useless unique in the game" and it occurred to me that....well why the **** are the uniques drops still so broken and unbalanced.


For those who don't know what i'm talking about let me lay it out for you, these are the uniques that exist in Wurmonline (drops based on freedom cluster sorry Epic i don't know enough about yours)

 

The non-dragon uniques each can drop a decent potion that has a use, Mining, Leatherworking, Stonecutting and Woodcutting, a rare/supreme/fantastic bone and a 50% chance to drop a sorcery item with 3 charges.

 

The 5 Hatchlings - Each gives a pathetic....shall we say average of about 0.6kg total of drake hide to the crew slaying it, shared with everyone in local. If you could get everyone to pool it together you would need about 5 hatchling slayings to make ONE goddamn drake set. Note these are weaker and less valuable than scale sets. A rare/supreme/fantastic bone and a 5(?)% chance to drop a sorcery item, which i've never seen happen. Two of them drop potions that are essentially useless, only affecting people who have a sorcery weakness to their effect. As well as having duplicate (read lazy) potions to the adults.

 

Red - Weaponsmithing potion (broken and only works on weaponsmithing subskills btw) - Same as dragon

Blue - Fletching potion - Same as dragon

Green - Acid potion - Worthless

Black - Armorsmithing Potion - Same as dragon

White - Frost Salve - Worthless

 

The 5 Dragons - I've seen give between 3kg and 10kg of scale (about 6 needed for a set), meaning you could make a whole scale set, which is worth far more than a drake set, from one kill.  A rare/supreme/fantastic bone and 5(?)% chance to drop a sorcery item, which i've never seen happen.

 

Red - Weaponsmithing Potion - same as hatchling

Blue - Fletching Potion - same as hatchling

Green - Tailoring Potion

Black - Armorsmithing Potion - same as hatchling

White - Blacksmithing Potion

 

So to sum up, the potions from the dragons are lazily done, with 2 being considered useless by the community almost unanimously and others duplicating the adult/hatchling drop. Dragons never drop sorcery items at all while non-dragons drop them quite regularly. White and Green hatchlings are basically "well at least someone gets a bone i guess?". While hundreds show up for a goblin leaders immensely valuable drops.

 

What i would like to see is some of the, already existing, other potions considered to replace the duplicates and frost/acid potions for more variety and at least consider a slightly better chance for sorcery items ( this one i can live with not changing tbh). Finally for the love of christ increase the drops for hatchlings hide and sort out the RNG with adult dragons which occasionally gives you enough for basically 2 sets and other times not enough for 1. All in all these are simple changes, everything i'm suggesting exists in code.

 

 

 

Edited by Nadroj
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+1 but this should not be in the suggestion section, but rather in the town square where wurm staff may actually take the time to read it

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Just now, JakeRivers said:

+1 but this should not be in the suggestion section, but rather in the town square where wurm staff may actually take the time to read it

 

I live in hope my friend.

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Actually its 1%

And yes drake hide needs to be doubled or tripled, i have said this from the start but nobody cares

And we've got a smoke of sol drop from that 1% . I guess if you look at how many drakes/dragons were killed there shouldnt have been more than 2 either.

 

Do i think dragons need to be increased to 50% charge drop aswell? hell yes i do. And for all i care let all uniques get a 100% drop chance 

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1%? Jesus thats stupid, what was so wrong with how it was originally set up and they dropped just like the rest of the uniques...share the love CodeClub!

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With the current mechanics I don't see how any group, alliance, or pmk not named Mol Rehan could even get a drake set together.  That is so obviously broken I'm surprised it wasn't changed immediately after the first drop, which Emoo and I reported as a bug.

How many .01kg pieces of drake and scale are floating around uselessly in the item universe?

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1 minute ago, Robus said:

With the current mechanics I don't see how any group, alliance, or pmk not named Mol Rehan could even get a drake set together.  That is so obviously broken I'm surprised it wasn't changed immediately after the first drop, which Emoo and I reported as a bug.

How many .01kg pieces of drake and scale are floating around uselessly in the item universe?

 

Favourite was the time we had a massive kingdom event and hatched three dragon eggs just to get zero drake sets made xD

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You can't get pvp changes to actually happen... and you think the chances of this are?  Don't get me wrong, I'm with you on this, just don't see it happening until a year on test, 45 bug fixes, 14 test sessions, and then a server crashing release.

Edited by Nomadikhan
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Just now, Nomadikhan said:

We can't get pvp changes to actually happen... and you think the chances of this are?

 

Oh god don't get me wrong, i never expect simple obvious changes that should have been done forever ago to actually happen. I just like to be able to reference threads that show i've tried and give me a timeframe for how long it's taken. I'm British, we take complaining about things very seriously.

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-1

 

I'm all for more loot, but the problem is if there's more loot, or more scale, or drake hide whatever... it will further entice the same 10 people that find, pen and kill the uniques to host private fights all the time.

 

Every non-dragon, non drake unique on Freedom has private loot.... but feel free to show up for your usless acid potion and .02 kg of drake and maybe you'll have a drake set someday if you attend 200 of these seemingly pointless events.

 

If it's a dragon or drake, of course it will be a public slaying, because the only thing to gain is a skull or a bone, which these folks already have a full collection of.

 

(Not to sound degrading or to label the "Secret Service" as I call them as greedy, but it bears relevance to this proposal).

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This isn't about the nature of players and how the organise slayings, it's about basic balance. However you view the way it's distributed and how players organise that, you cannot deny that this system is unbalanced and flawed. Did you even read what i said? you get more scale than drake atm from kills and hatchlings that drop useless potions. That's not the fault of player organised slayings that is an imbalance in the loot that the devs should fix.

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Freedom can go back to getting absurd amounts of tomes when Epic can have real 100 titles ;)

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Just now, SmeJack said:

Freedom can go back to getting absurd amounts of tomes when Epic can have real 100 titles ;)

 

I'm happy with that, though it's hardly in the nature of balance, nor are they the same issue :P

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To be fair it kinda is, Epic are denied 100 titles because of 'ruining the secrets' yet Freedom got more tomes in one week when first implemented than Epic did in years but it was perfectly ok to ruin the secrets, and even with the crappy drop rate they still get more tomes and discover secrets about title combos. So if we want to balance and make things fair why stop there.

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1 minute ago, SmeJack said:

To be fair it kinda is, Epic are denied 100 titles because of 'ruining the secrets' yet Freedom got more tomes in one week when first implemented than Epic did in years but it was perfectly ok to ruin the secrets, and even with the crappy drop rate they still get more tomes and discover secrets about title combos. So if we want to balance and make things fair why stop there.

 

Correlation is not causation. There's a poor link there, though you're right there's a link, but that has nothing to do with the unbalanced drop rates, which as i've mentioned extend well beyond the tome drops. As with most people annoyed about broken features in wurm you have a right to be, but it shouldnt be taken out on other memebrs of the playerbase wanting a different feature fixed than the one you're annoyed about.

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Not taken out just applying the same reasoning to the two, what's good for the goose and all. It just happens to only be part of your bigger beef so I'm commenting on that part.

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8 hours ago, whykillme said:

Actually its 1%

And yes drake hide needs to be doubled or tripled, i have said this from the start but nobody cares

And we've got a smoke of sol drop from that 1% . I guess if you look at how many drakes/dragons were killed there shouldnt have been more than 2 either.

 

Do i think dragons need to be increased to 50% charge drop aswell? hell yes i do. And for all i care let all uniques get a 100% drop chance 

KEK

 

5 hours ago, Wargasm said:

-1

 

I'm all for more loot, but the problem is if there's more loot, or more scale, or drake hide whatever... it will further entice the same 10 people that find, pen and kill the uniques to host private fights all the time.

 

Every non-dragon, non drake unique on Freedom has private loot.... but feel free to show up for your usless acid potion and .02 kg of drake and maybe you'll have a drake set someday if you attend 200 of these seemingly pointless events.

 

If it's a dragon or drake, of course it will be a public slaying, because the only thing to gain is a skull or a bone, which these folks already have a full collection of.

 

(Not to sound degrading or to label the "Secret Service" as I call them as greedy, but it bears relevance to this proposal).

exactly what this guy said dont change anything

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It is possible to make a scale set from the current drop rates.  It takes some effort, ideally some help from friends and alliance folks, and realistically, buying other people's scraps at slayings for fair price.  It's not easy, but it is doable.

 

Drake hide drops definately do need some love, though, as they seem to be a lot lower than equivalent scale drops.  And it'd be lovely to have a bit more variety in blood potions, so +1 to those.

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I still think tomes should be taken off as a Unique drops. Having an item worth 3g does nothing but tend to make for private kills.

Sell 1 shot tomes on Traders for 50s, that way everyone who wants can buy.

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30 minutes ago, Pandalet said:

It is possible to make a scale set from the current drop rates.  It takes some effort, ideally some help from friends and alliance folks, and realistically, buying other people's scraps at slayings for fair price.  It's not easy, but it is doable.

it IS possible but as nadroj pointed out in his first post only if the rng has a good day. the last slayings ive attended the total amount of scale drops wasbarely enough for half a set, and the drake drop, well calling it miniscule is just about right.

 

11 minutes ago, Becket said:

Sell 1 shot tomes on Traders for 50s, that way everyone who wants can buy.

-1 to that idea, the current way at least allows for people who have groups with decent loot rules to be able to gain the stuff from playing, not by using rl money.

this would kind of destroy the possibility of ever getting valrei charges for those who refuse/dont have the funds to drop cash into the game and dont want to spend hours upon hours of doing tedious bulk jobs)

adding those on top would however reduce the value of charges and as such might (just might tho) reduce the amount of private loot slayings since theres less to earn from them.

 

+1 for potion variety, theres still so many skills that could use them. (jew smithing, digging, pottery, carp (these already exist so shouldnt be too hard to add them?), ropemaking, lock smithing to just name a few)

+1 to increase amount of drake hide dropped, right now except blue and black they really are rather useless. can just send the whole slaying party to dig down a huge chunk of land, prolly bout the same speed to get a bone as the occasional drake :)

+1 to reduce randomness of scale drops, not saying to remove it completely as wurm kinda lives off the rng, but a range from 3-10kg is way too big if those numbers are roughly accurate.

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+1

 

I never did understand the little bit of hide that drops from a drake, unless you buy all you can from the market, there is no reasonable way to get enough drake for a set of armor, even if you were to drag a knarr load of alts to each slaying you could find it would still take ages to get enough hide.

 

And those useless potions, replace with carpentry and ship building!

 

 

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1 minute ago, JakeRivers said:

+1

 

I never did understand the little bit of hide that drops from a drake, unless you buy all you can from the market, there is no reasonable way to get enough drake for a set of armor, even if you were to drag a knarr load of alts to each slaying you could find it would still take ages to get enough hide.

 

And those useless potions, replace with carpentry and ship building!

 

 

 

I'd bloody love to see a unique drop carpentry potions mang

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fixing potions probably should've been done as soon as it was discovered as next to absolutely useless, in terms of acid/frost
drake hide should be an easy fix, like, copy-paste code from red dragon sort of easy.

private slayings have always been fair game imo, if you want to slay it with the community, hunt it in a community that will host a public slaying - host a group yourself even, and get out there and find it before that smaller private group does. Not too hard.
Or you know, remove the server wide "x dragon is starting to spread" and remove it from the twitter and people will stop actively hunting them if you put it on a variable spawn timer, and they will naturally be found by more than likely the people that actually live on these servers.

It's too bad devs stopped posting on suggestion threads long ago. We could probably get reasons why ideas like fixing the cr nerfing small axe are being ignored. 

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The suggestions forums have always been peculiarly ignored like they don't exist, i don't understand it. I made a thread last week that technically should have been here but instead i put it to town square (about pvp servers not having animal management). That got an almost immediate response from Retro. Sadly here good ideas go to die it seems.

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