Uniques, what do you think?

[Steeloxide 146]

I'm curious what everyone thinks about the value of the unique loot.

Lets look at the potential value of a single unique:

Meat, Glands, Eyeball, Tooth usually worthless.
Skull of creature worth 5-10s
Rare bone of the creature worth 30s
Valrei item, 3 charges worth 1gold (per charge)

Total potential value is 340silver, or 340 euro's give or take. (that's 496 CAD for my fellow Canadians)

Most of the value obviously stems from the valrei items

What do you think of that? Is it too much? too little? just perfect? How would you change it?

Persoanlly I feel the loot value is a bit crazy and to make it better I would create more types of valrei items and add them to the loot table, some of witch would be completely cosmetic or seemingly useless. (Flaming horseshoe that adds the hell horse fiery footstep animation to a normal horse, off the top of my head)

I would then make the uniques drop a higher quantity of the items, say 10 charges.
This would lower the rarity and demand of said items and in turn their value while at the same time allowing more people to experience the sorcery system.

Anyways, What do you think?

PS: This is a discussion about uniques, not a sparring pit for your personal problems, if you have an issue with someone personally, PM them about it. Lets try to keep this constructive!

[Bloodscythe 2,225]

The difficult thing here is finding the most acceptable answers as uniques discussion often leads to what is known as "dragon drama".  The second difficulty is price/market value is determined by the players demand and adjusts accordingly.  The price is not artificially set, but determined by it's perceived value by players and self adjusts accordingly in a free market capitalism paradigm.

[Steeloxide 146]

While I understand its up to us as a playerbase to decide the exact value of things in this game, its up to the developers to determine how rare something is in the first place, witch then effectivley determines the supply of said items, and in turn, their price.

As an example:

If the developers increased the rate at witch rare bones were found while digging, the value of rare bones would eventually decrease.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Steeloxide

[Odynn 2,248]

I'm curious what everyone thinks about the value of the unique loot.

Meat, Glands, Eyeball, Tooth usually worthless.

Skull of creature worth 5-10s

Rare bone of the creature worth 30s

Valrei item, 3 charges worth 1gold (per charge)

Total potential value is 340silver, or 340 euro's give or take. (that's 496 CAD for my fellow Canadians)

Most of the value obviously stems from the valrei items

What do you think of that? Is it too much? too little? just perfect? How would you change it?

[Chakron 1,025]

Valrei items don't drop that frequently.

 

I'm not sure if I agree with the "too rare" aspect - there are 14 uniques alive right now, just waiting for someone to find and kill them.

 

Edit: Hell another one just spawned in the last 10 minutes. 15 uniques. Go get 'em!

Edited May 25, 2015 by Chakron

[Pandalet 1,848]

All of the below is my opinion only. 

 

Scale / drake armour should be something that takes some effort to get, but not the ridiculous effort of the current system.  Perhaps you need to kill 20 dragons to get enough for a set, or give those who slay a bit more, or something.  Either way, the current system is basically pointless for all except a very small number of people.

 

I like that everyone in local gets blood, even with the monster lag at larger slayings.  It gets people involved, even those who don't have the necessary skill and gear to directly participate, plus provides some windfall for the more desirable bloods.

 

Split the valrei items into single charges (I think this has already been done on Epic?), and make them much more common.  They're mostly cosmetic on non-PvP anyway, and if everyone has them, then they probably won't unbalance PvP, right?

 

Make the uniques harder to keep penned indefinately.  Allowing them to be penned for a short time seems good, to allow a hunt to be organised, but of the 14 uniques referred to above, 2 that I know of (black dragon on Xanadu and red dragon on Release) have been penned on deeds for some time.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Pandalet

[Hashirama 870]

As odynn said, more spawns and frequent drops. The valerie charges are ridiculously overpriced!

[Steeloxide 146]

Lets look at story from the days of old:

Once upon a time there was only one unique of each type per server. They did not respawn.

The Wurmians of old were sad that not everyone could feel the joy and thrill of cutting down one of these legendary beasts, Their hides and loot were firmly out of most peoples grasp.

Then the great dev-gods of wurm hearing the cries of sorrow came down and said "Let there be uniques far and wide!"

And there was. And we rejoiced.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Steeloxide

[Klaa 4,872]

Dragon Drama?!

Wait a minute...

Very well. Continue.

[Steeloxide 146]

After further discussing this with friends the only reason I can see NOT to change this is it would effect the PVP servers pretty heavily.

I guess then the real issue here is the code bleed between pvp and pve servers.

Perhaps the next thing our great and humble devs could focus on is seperation of the pvp and pve code.

I dont know much about coding especially with something as complex as wurm, so accomplishing that is probably alot harder and expensive to do than it sounds.

*jokes* Cant be harder than bridges though right? *jokes*

Sounds like development of the pvp and pve servers would be able to progress much, much, smoother though if the codes were seperated, from a layman's perspective anywhoo.

[Ayes 3,715]

Lets look at story from the days of old:

Once upon a time there was only one unique of each type per server. They did not respawn.

The Wurmians of old were sad that not everyone could feel the joy and thrill of cutting down one of these legendary beasts, Their hides and loot were firmly out of most peoples grasp.

Then the great dev-gods of wurm hearing the cries of sorrow came down and said "Let there be uniques far and wide!"

And there was. And we rejoiced.

[KanePT 699]

Blah, sweet blah.

Its the Dev's fault, sorry it is.

It was done this way on purpose, they nerfed the drake hide drops from enough for several sets to not enough for a boot (although that varies because of being distributed among all).

But they did this to keep the players that SELL stuff for 300+ € a dragon, to keep earning that money. Because, they Wogic based. They'd rather keep the opportunistic players like that happy, than make the game more appealing to a larger audience (thus making more money).

[Steeloxide 146]

Somehow you imagine that those who make out of proportional profits from doing so would advocate to reduce them in some manner such as adding more supply?

I didn't say we all rejoiced

I'm sure the few people back then who were making money off of the super rare loot were not too happy at the time.

But things still changed, and as with uniques back then, I think most people would agree making sorcery actually accessible would be for the better.

Currently your options to access sorcery are:

Kill dozens of uniques over the span of months, maybe even years, with no guarantee to get a spell.

or

Spend hundreds of dollars.

I dont mind spending a bit of money to unlock something in a game, but when the price gets like this...its just silly.

Edited May 25, 2015 by Steeloxide

[Tikki 65]

anything to make the game and loot more balanced is alright with me

[Wurmhole 3,650]

Here is an idea:

Completely revamp the system.

1. Someone finds the unique,then they get to file an official report (maybe like a trouble ticket) that starts a formal process, where they can choose a time for the hunt. Must be within 48hrs of finding it.

2. Finder gets a 5x chance of getting picked on loot rolls. No other advantage.

3. Once registered, unique hunt gets listed in a special hunt chat tab that anyone can be subscribed to, lile CA and Freedom. This gives server, coords and time.

4. on arrival to hunt location, there will be a hunt token/portal, that you use to enter the hunt instance, freeing the server and local area from massive player lag.

5. ALL characters that enter the hunt instance can attack it, (once hunt starts) and nobody is turned away from being too crowded. If you hit, you get on the loot roll.

6. Uniques move! They get tricky! No staying in one spot waiting to die.

7. When fight concludes, game auto rolls and distibutes loot, displaying results in the hunt chat tab.

8. Within 1 hour, hunt instance is closed, booting everyone back to the regular server, if they haven't left on their own already.

9. These special instances will have no random junk, critters, npcs, buildings, etc, that slow performance.

Now loot is always open to the public. Nobody gets abuse for penning or stealing from another group. Lag is virtually eliminated and anyone can participate, regardless of skill - but chances to hit are low if skill sucks, naturally.

Valrei items would be split this way. No more trying to coordinate multiple winners.

Finally, until the hunt starts, the unique runs amuck. No penning or killing is possible on the server where it was discovered.

Typed on my mobile, sorry!

[Ulviirala 431]

Only people who hit the unique in combat should get blood and a piece of scale or hide.

[Emoo 4,357]

I think how it is now is fine, it offers atleast some reward to everyone and afew high value items to keep people really interested in acctually going to slayings. 

 

This is a much better solution to dragons of yesteryear that could drop up to 3000 euros worth of loot which usually would be horded by the organiser and close friends with maybe afew sets of drake raffled out to people that attend. When you consider this the current mechanics seem pretty damn great. 

[bdew 2,462]

The main problem with Valrei drops is that 1-3 people get 95% of the "value" of a kill in which many others have participated. They are also potential for drama due to being stolen, ninjaed, witheld by organizers from public rolls, whatever.

 

I think this whole system needs a rework. Divide Valrei drops into smaller "parts" that need to be combined to make a usable item, and distribute them automatically to fighters. eg:

• On kill a creature drops 1.50kg of "valrei dust" - they are evenly distributed to all fighters together with hide/scale/blood.
  
• To create a tome (with 1 charge) you need 0.50kg of dust combined with whatever to make ink then craft into a magic tome
  

Also scale/hide needs to drop more. The current amounts are way too low. Also possibly should only be divided between fighters and not everyone in local.

 

Blood is pretty much OK. Maybe add more types of gathering skill potions. The crafting ones seem to be valued a lot lower by the community, so maybe remove some of them. Also fix the goddamn acid potion, it doesn't work.

[As_I_Decay 1,592]

Only people who hit the unique in combat should get blood and a piece of scale or hide.

The problem with that lies in the fact that they allow for a limited amount of targeters. If we play by that game, all the people that bring their 8 alts with them will use said alts to crowd the unique to guarantee their own drops.

Even less chance of everyone getting their hits in.

 

Edited May 26, 2015 by As_I_Decay

[Ulviirala 431]

The problem with that lies in the fact that they allow for a limited amount of targeters. If we play by that game, all the people that bring their 8 alts with them will use said alts to crowd the unique to guarantee their own drops.

Even less chance of everyone getting their hits in.

If people stop bringing in cartloads of useless alts that have no FS (and other related useful skills), the game would run better for everybody. And if they crowd the unique with useless chars anyway, they might not be able to kill it at all. So it's go fight or go home, empty handed. Everybody would get more useful amounts of scale or hide. Instead of gaming the mechanic with the current go to solution, bring as many prem alts as possible.

I'm not saying that I have an idea that makes the system better, and even though it's heaps better than it used to be as Emoo said, the current system is not really great either in my opinion. They're not even challenging fights when you bunch up enough people, they're free loot - free potions at the very least.

[Propheteer 7,139]

i think the loot is fine as is, but at the same time i also believe all the uniques need to be buffed to be truly considered event worthy.

 

 

the majority are far too easy to kill.

Edited May 26, 2015 by Propheteer

[Pandalet 1,848]

Finally, until the hunt starts, the unique runs amuck. No penning or killing is possible on the server where it was discovered.

 

 

I was ok with most of your post, but not this.  While it might be ok on Chaos (I can imagine some inter-kingdom fun with folks dragging dragons into each others deeds), there's already an issue on Freedom where new players who are not equipped to deal with this have uniques falling out of the sky and trashing their deeds.  To me, that runs counter to the point of Freedom, where you're meant to be able to build in safety.  There needs to be some ability to escape penning, to prevent people holding on to 'private' uniques indefinately, but uniques shouldn't completely trash deeds.  If I'd poured my heart and soul into building up my home, especially as a new player with low skills and resources, I'd be heart-broken (possibly to the point of leaving the game) if it was suddenly trashed by something completely beyond my control.

[bdew 2,462]

I was ok with most of your post, but not this.  While it might be ok on Chaos (I can imagine some inter-kingdom fun with folks dragging dragons into each others deeds), there's already an issue on Freedom where new players who are not equipped to deal with this have uniques falling out of the sky and trashing their deeds.  To me, that runs counter to the point of Freedom, where you're meant to be able to build in safety.  There needs to be some ability to escape penning, to prevent people holding on to 'private' uniques indefinately, but uniques shouldn't completely trash deeds.  If I'd poured my heart and soul into building up my home, especially as a new player with low skills and resources, I'd be heart-broken (possibly to the point of leaving the game) if it was suddenly trashed by something completely beyond my control.

 

This is extremely easy to fix, by simply disallowing a unique to steep on deed tiles unless actively attacked by a player. 

[Pandalet 1,848]

I agree, that would probably fix it.  There are other options, too, like making uniques non-aggro until attacked (like avatars).  Either way, just having uniques rampaging around the countryside destroying stuff until a slaying party can assemble is not a good thing.

 

There is a question of balance for PvP regarding the Valrei thingies, but wouldn't making them common enough that they can be acquired with a little effort solve the balance issue?  If everyone has them, then it's balanced?  And I don't consider 'spend €100' to be a 'little effort' in this context

[Klaa 4,872]

i think the loot is fine as is, but at the same time i also believe all the uniques need to be buffed to be truly considered event worthy.

 

 

the majority are far too easy to kill.

Aye, for example a dragon flying up out of range and launching a AoE attack on the ground. Would help to make archery more viable with unique-hunting too. Atm archery in this context is just a waste of time.

 

Unique-hunting is all about gang-banging them with melee dps.

Eww, I agreed with a Propheteer post... now I feel dirty.