Developer Snippets – 14th December, 2013

Welcome to the first edition of Developer Snippets! In this set of articles I will be perusing the forums for any interesting Dev posts made that week and referencing them here. This week there’s a fair bit to go through, so let’s get started.

 

Gold HD Loot

The reason I’m posting an entire thread here is because the Developer in question, Verizal, posts multiple times. In it he elaborates on the situation with Gold level item drops in instances;

So yes, with the release of Update 12, you should only see epic (gold) pieces drop for those two particular slots. The intent is to release more pieces over time so that, after a few updates, you will be provided with the means to complete two full sets (well, a 2-piece and 3-piece set) of epic jewelry.

Keep in mind that epic-quality gear is meant to be the most powerful gear attainable, which is why we decided against releasing it all at once.

He also brings up a suggestion for creating spec-based loot:

Hey all, back for a quick update.

So as one of my potential solutions, I’m going to be looking into implementing a spec-based loot system. That is, if you receive loot as a tank, it will be tank-oriented. The same goes for dps and healers (although at this point there is not a huge difference between those two). It seems like something that we would capable of doing, it just may take a bit of time on my end.

I do, however, realize that this is only a partial solution to the issues that many of you are having with RNG, so I do not plan on stopping there, and need to work some things out over here to figure out what the next best step would be. I appreciate all of the feedback so far, and I want you to know that I will be taking it into consideration as I iron out some of the remaining details.

 

So to clarify on a few things, if this went in, much like with class-specific loot, it would also look at your current primary trait-line to determine your role. Since I’m pretty familiar with the Guardian, I’ll use that as an example:

Defender of the Free: Tank
Keen Blade: DPS
Fighter of Shadow: Tank

Based on this role, it would then provide a piece of gear with role-specific states (or set bonuses). The way that I believe it functions right now, is that you could theoretically switch trait lines before claiming/looting, and you would be provided with gear relevant to that spec (a feature I’m not necessarily opposed to). HOWEVER, I still need to play around with things a bit. Also, the intent would be to have this in more sooner than later, but I can’t give definites on a release yet.

 

HD Loot List[WIP]

In this thread Verizal goes into (immense) detail on some of the thinking behind the loot drop setup, as well as the noticeable gear stat increase with the Helm’s Deep content and future adjustments to stat caps and mob potency. There’s way too much said here for me to go over, so I will instead pick out a few choice quotes;

The biggest thing to take into account with all of this, is that there is still a good deal of balancing to be done. You can expect adjustments to mob difficulty, damage and healing output, and stat caps to account for all of the changes, both itemization-related and not. As it stands, yes, many classes have little use for defensive stats, and many people aresitting on or near a number of stat caps. This will change, however, and my intent is to have you be at a point where you will need to make conscious decisions on what you wear in order to progress through some of the harder challenges in the game.

 

Ah yes. PvE armour sets. No, they are not planned for 12.1, but yes, they will be coming in the future. Honestly, a large part of the reasoning here is that I wanted to make sure many of the other aspects of itemization were straightened away before providing access to a new set. For the time being there are the jewelry sets in Big Battles, which have their own set of requirements. I do not want to simply throw sets at you guys , however, and I worry that that’s what may have happened if I tied them in with instances/raids at launch. There should be some sense of prestige with obtaining them, and that’s what I am hoping to create in the future.

Again he responds multiple times, so be sure to check out the entire thread.

 

Mithril Coin Price Increase For Helm’s Deep

Here Sapience explains the reasoning for increasing the price for using Mithril Coins to travel to completed quests in Helm’s Deep from 1 to 5. Essentially, it was done to encourage more travel and exploration in West Rohan(which as a HUGE fan of the landscape there, I very much support). He also notes that the timing on bringing the price back down is under discussion(I would suspect either the next landmass update or the next xpac) and that the idea for this change was originally brought up by players.

 

NA/EU Transfers Not Possible

This is basically confirmation for something we had suspected for a long time. Due to technical issues with data on the former EU side of the game, transfers between their servers and the former NA side are not happening. Period.

 

Extra Life 2013 Update

In this post Sapience gives a brief update on his Extralife campaign, including his various milestone obligations. Notable mentions are listed below:

• The Inklings of Meneldor donated the most as a Kinship for the second year in a row
• Top donation was $1,000 by an anonymous person
• Photos of Sapience’s dyed beard will hopefully be out by the end of the year
• The rap video is pushed back until sometime in the new year

As always guys, you should not take any of this as gospel carved in stone and written in blood. Stuff happens, and changes have to be made.