Happy Friday, friends!
This week has been a busy one! While we put off the main skill trees (discussed last dev digest), we are ironing out a lot of old bugs and getting everything in it's place.
I've been working on redoing all of the loot tables in the game. There are a TON. How loot used to work was super complicated and not how we wanted at all. Then luck was added and just broke everything even more. So let's discuss the before and afters!
Before a chest would have let's say 3 items. One item had a 75% chance to drop, one had a 5% chance to drop, and one had a 20% chance to drop. Sounds simple right? Well how it used to be set up, when a player rolled for loot, it would randomly order the items in the table, then roll for each one. So if that rare 5% item always landed at the end of the list, you'd basically never get to it with all the items that were in chests no matter how well you rolled. When you added luck to that, it just added to your roll and did not affect the order of the list. So you were guaranteed to get whatever was decided to be first for that chest. If we wanted something to have a 0.001% chance to drop and it was selected to be at the top of the list and your luck added plus 5, it meant the item now had a 5.001% chance to drop. Which ruined the rarity of the item.
Now our chests look at the loot according to their percentage chance to drop. The player rolls a number and that number determines what you get from the loot table. If you have the Lucky stat (which doesn't stack, you either are lucky or you aren't), you'll roll two dice instead of one and take the better number for loot. The number you roll will first check the rarest items to see if you got it, then go up from there if you didn't.
Now that loot rolls better, I've been going through every loot table to make sure the items have the correct drop chance that we want them to have. Along with that, I've simplified the chests to be one locked and one unlocked chest in each zone. While going through the loot tables, I noticed that they were all sorts of... odd. Things were just tacked on at a later time and it just didn't make sense. So I changed them. Locked chests no longer have a bajillion recipes to chase after to get the weapons for the zone. Now they just have a small chance to drop those weapons (and they can drop at different rarities so you could even get a masterwork item!) and various other things. Each locked chest does still have recipes, but these are for rare things for that zone. I did add new weapon recipes to the Windless Woods locked chests.
Next were pots and crates and dirt piles. All were simplified as well. If you want to see how that went, check out the rare stream I did on twitch. Next I have the Grimwick chest, Frostfall chest, and the various other piles (gold, beach, sand, etc.) around the world to do. Then I'll tackle the mob drops to ensure those are set up correctly with this new system.
Now on to Michael. He finished up everything he was working on relevant to the update and has now moved on to bug fixing. As we thoroughly test the bugs with our dedicated testers, he's fixing the issues as they come up to get a fast turn around. We're finally in the home stretch and you guys will be playing the update before you know it.
See you all next Friday!
-Janna & Michael