I know Chris wanted us to do this: 1. Ettins- Drop as much or more then earth eles currently. Should be slightly lower. I get an average of 178 per. 2. Earth Eles- I recall from OSI they dropped roughly 200+ per. Currently averaging about 170.
Ratman Archers -- Seem to be a bit on the high side with 300+ gold, 64 arrows and about a 50% change of a magic armor/weapon drop. Skeletons -- drop an extremely low amount of gold around 8 Zombies -- Around 58 gp Mongbats -- These are dropping as much as zombies, is this normal?
All monster loot drops will be reviewed and adjusted in a future patch. The amounts seem to be in line, be default, with a world that expects players to have billions of gold (OSI). This is not the world we want here. Monsters should reward the player an adequate amount for the effort required. 6 hp mongbats should not drop much gold. A database is currently under construction including all the monsters and their details so detailed analysis can be done.
Just a note. With regards to "we want them to drop an adequate amount in line with the difficulty," i will say this. Mobs that cast magic seem to be exceedly hard to kill simply because they heal like mad men. I've been told they only have a small chance at healing when low on hp, but i've done some serious farming with a wyrm and mare and all i can say is, they heal A LOT. It can take far longer than necessary to kill even a lich with a wyrm and mare simply because the damn thing will heal so much sometimes. I've even had mobs that will heal when they are above 50% hp which, if I heard correctly, shouldn't happen. When you spend upwards of 3 minutes trying to kill an elder gazer that heals the hell out of himself when using two strong pets only to get 400-600gp it gets a bit ridiculous.
This is the kind of information we are looking for, overall difficulty of monsters in general so the loot drops can be balanced properly.
The only thing is from what I have heard is that the monsters skills are based off of players having 120 points in skills. You are going to adjust this to the proper difficulty right? If this is adjusted the difficulty will go down. I think the first thing we have to do to properly get the difficulty base for each monster is to adjust there level. Until then we wont be able to properly gauge this. This is based off of information I have received.
That is in the works, the first step being to determine if the monsters were adjusted at all to account for the 120 skill cap or if it is just the new monsters that were designed based on the elevated skills. Currently we are in the process of creating a database of all the monsters from the era to allow for a detailed analysis and planning of changes. Rather than making knee jerk adjustments to this monster or that monster we are going to implement a large monster patch. This should be done in approximately two weeks.
