Determine loot chance

[zeriley]

My thought is that the tougher the enemy, the more likely they should drop good gear, which may not be how Diablo III does it, but think it makes sense. A good standard for determining enemy toughness tends to be max HP + armor. Initial thought would be that a zombie with 20 max hp and 2 armor points would have a 22/1000 chance to drop a legendary item; the Wither with 600 hp would have a 600/1000 chance to drop a legendary item.

In addition, there should be math to determine the number of drops possible. Could also be based on max HP. Something like every 10 HP, there is a 5% chance they'll drop an item, determined individually, so an enemy with a max HP of 20 could drop two pieces of loot, but is very unlikely to because each drop has a 5% chance.

Naturally, we'll have to play around with it to determine what the numbers will be, but this is more as a general approach of using max HP to determine both number of drops and drop rarity.

Thoughts?

[frodare]

My vote would be to only ever have one legendary drop at a time.

Also, I think we need a way to classify the loot first. Like this is a level 230 item. Then drop better loot the stronger the enemies get. Maybe that is too complex?

I guess one question is, will this be like Destiny and Diablo, where there same item has different "levels" or souls where pretty much everything always drops at the same level.

[zeriley]

I would like to not limit it to one legendary at a time, but rather have the chances be low enough that you're only likely to get one legendary at a time. But I think a Wither should have a high chance of dropping a legendary, plus a couple uncommons, and a rare, for instance.

Definitely Destiny and Diablo style. Each drop has stat rolls which are determined by the slayer's level (level being determined by gear quality; cumulative attack and defense power). Which introduces some issues... If the slayer is not a player, etc.

Also Diablo drops different loot on each client and only the client can see those drops. Maybe we should do the same. So that any enemy that dies can drop loot based on each player's level. So you kill a Wither with three other players and each player gets a sword from him. One player gets a 200 attack power sword, one gets a 30 attack power sword, and another gets a 4000 attack power sword.

[zeriley]

Additionally, legendaries only drop after level 70 in Diablo, so we should maybe do something similar. Player level (again attack + defense power) needs to be over 300 for legendaries to drop.

[frodare]

the drop should be effected by the enemy too right? That way you can't keep getting better and better gear from low level mobs.

[zeriley]

Nope. You can get a legendary weapon from a baby zombie in Diablo III. Motivates you to kill everything.

[zeriley]

Although that does raise an issue with max HP. With Rifts, we'll be scaling all enemy HP up to crazy amounts eventually, so we can't use a set ceiling for the chance.

Maybe the difficulty scaling should be a separate mod?

[zeriley]

We could use the base max hp to determine the chance, so that low-level mobs are unlikely to give you legendaries. Then we can scale without fear of throwing off loot chance.

[frodare]

I guess what I was thinking is the "roll level" of the item would affected by the enemy that dropped it, and not entirely based (or not at all based) on the player that killed it.

[zeriley]

Summing up our side discussion we had on gchat:

• we're going to attempt to have drops only show up on the client, by tagging the drop with the player uuid and updating the renderer to not display if the player uuid doesn't match
• base max HP + base armor is used to determine roll chance and rarity
• adjusted max HP is used to determine stat rolls
• player level is an aggregate of weapon and armor power
• player level is used to determine drop level

Add weapon attack damage (strongest weapon in inventory) + equipped armor defense to get a player level. Use that player level to determine the level of the weapon dropped (weapon level determines base attack power and stat roll range). Use the adjusted max HP to determine the stat, so that lower HP enemies weight towards the bottom of the stat roll range, and higher HP enemies weight towards the top of the stat roll range.