Spiral Knights - Dynamic Loot

Dynamic Loot

5 replies [Last post]

Wed, 09/05/2012 - 00:45

Thinslayer

Monster and treasure box loot should be tailored to maximize apparent profits at the end of a mission, more for psychological reasons than for any major benefit. Players feel happier when their loot-collecting is efficient, even if it doesn't make much of a difference.

The loot should be modified thus:

By default, the content is random.
Treasure boxes placed at the end of a tier or string of levels (e.g. treasure depths) should not contain any consumables.
Treasure boxes placed right before treasure depths (e.g. Danger Missions) also should not contain consumables.
If all the members of the present party have the heat levels on their gear maxed out, neither monsters nor Treasure boxes should drop heat.

I would also recommend a few more changes. Share the materials; when one person collects, everyone gets it. It's not a good enough reason to go solo, and players feel better about it. Most of the forum economists would recommend a material sink or reduced drop at this point, seeing as the material supply will go up fourfold. Make fire deal elemental damage so that there are alternate ways for players to reduce its damage (besides fire resistance), and increase the damage dealt by fire a little bit to compensate. Give freeze some damage against knights, and some kind of audio/visual response to breaking freeze; this should encourage teamwork in ice levels and give them a little extra scariness. Remove the healing effect from sleep, as that makes the status abusable (for healing from enemy attacks) and unusable (from knight attacks).

Opinions?

Wed, 09/05/2012 - 02:59

Aureate

Processing Thoughts of You Always

+1 for modifying treasure boxes
No to sharing all materials
...I like setting fire to Wolvers
Yes to freeze damage against knights
Yes to removing healing effect from sleep

Wed, 09/05/2012 - 13:49

Qwao

Treasure boxes should be modified. Although I'd rather (like Little-Juances said in another thread) devs made new treasure boxes that do not contain vials/vitapods for say end of danger missions etc.

I don't see the point with your proposed heat changes. There's no harm having it all the time, though sometimes that pure heat treasure box can be a little dishearting when you have fully heated gear, the treasure vault levels at the end of danger missions ALLOW you to change your gear to something unheated, so you can gain heat for that item.

Sharing materials... IDK. I don't sell them nor do I craft a lot.
Fire dealing elemental damage... no. That'd make it OP against zombies and constructs, and murder graveyards even quicker. But here's your mistake: The damage is reduced, and ONLY reduced with status resists, not armor defense. For example, shock does elemental damage, but shock resistance reduces the damage, not elemental defense. (Unless I'm wrong- need other opinion)
Freeze damage? How would it work, though? Damage over time? Since it doesn't damage monsters it can work
Visual effect from breaking freeze is nice
Sleep becomes an even deadlier of freeze in this case: Enemy can't move NOR can it attack. As to knights, there is current nothing to inflict sleep on knights. Nope.

Wed, 09/05/2012 - 14:28

Little-Juances

^
Monsters get damaged when freeze wears off by itself. Kngihts dont. Would empathize teamplay.

Wed, 09/05/2012 - 18:01

Addisond

If you're changing stuff like this, it needs to break even with the current system (so while the last level of a danger mission wouldn't have any boxes that dropped pills, but all the boxes would be slightly less valuable). The same would go for heat. Hence, it wouldn't have any effect on anything. So yeah, if OOO wants to put this in I think it'd be nice, but I feel that their time could be much better spent doing other stuff.

The non-mat sharing actually IS a motivation for soloing certain levels - those that offer rare and expensive items like ghost bells. The rest however... not so much.

The fire thing? I don't get it. They should probably make shock ticks "shock" damage, too.

On to the ice thing... eh, maybe. I kinda like making the status work two ways, but freeze is already pretty dangerous. Maybe if it was blockable by shield..

Sleep healing would be broken if monsters used it, but they don't. And it's totally usable.

Thu, 09/06/2012 - 03:42

Aureate

Processing Thoughts of You Always

A little thought on how sleep could work:

Attacking monster/knight will wake it up
Taking damage from other sources will wake up a monster/knight (in order to help prevent rage on floor traps, and because I don't think anyone could sleep through being set on fire)
Approaching sleeping monster/knight with charge attack will wake it up (in the same way that approaching gunpuppies from behind with a charge attack will alert them and cause them to turn towards you, no matter what direction they face - I'm not entirely sure of the precise distance and would need to do more research, but I think it's about 1 tile or so; this also includes charging near friendlies)
Coming into contact with sleeping monster/knight will wake it up (moving within about 0.2 tiles of the affected monster/knight; this also includes coming into contact with friendlies)
Leaving monster/knight alone will cause it to remain asleep until 'natural' waking (when status times out)
Asleep monster/knight cannot attack, charge or shield, and any of these actions are halted when asleep
Sleeping knights have the 'dozes off' animation
Sleeping knights do count for LD caps (limiting usefulness of sleep-status mist bomb spam in LD)
Sleep does not cause any healing whatsoever in monster/knight
Sleep has a brief cooldown period in which it cannot be reinflicted after wearing off; this varies depending on your sleep resistance/weakness (about 1s for no resistance/weakness? This needs tweaking in order to prevent abuse of any potential sleep-status mist bombs in LD)

Essentially, it would be similar to a non-damaging version of Freeze. I put in certain stipulations in order to prevent any possible abuse in LD, although I'm not entirely sure that this is enough. If anyone spots any loopholes, please let me know.

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