[dev1047] Thoughts/Feedback on "Legion"

[wish12oz]

Because of what Tile said above. Ok, so imagine you could buy E. Body with Ichor. Most people I know have tens/hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Ichor these days. Ein would be even MORE dead than it is these days if you could just buy every single one of Odin's drops because nobody would ever have a reason to go in. If you designed Legion the same way, the event would instantaneously have a shelf life. Imagine if you could buy every single Limbus drop via Ancient Beastcoins and never have to zone into the area again. Imagine if you could buy every single +2 item in Abyssea with cruor. Bam, dead events walking.

MMO devs have to have some way of ensuring people actually do the content and fight the toughest monsters (e.g., WoW raids). Moreover, the events they design need longevity. It would be nice if all MMO items were obtained through points, but this just isn't realistic. Imagine, if you will, a scenario in Legion where people discover a way to farm a few smaller mobs ad nauseum and amass Legion points hand over fist. The event would be DOA. Anybody who enters would just farm that same mob over and over and nobody would touch the tougher bosses (e.g., Paramount Botulus Rex).

While in theory there is nothing wrong with being able to work towards everything you want, and not having to rely on building your own groups/LS or finding a LS with honest leadership, in practice what you are really asking for is a console RPG, not an MMO.

The solution to your problem is simple, add LOTS of good items, and create a way to make gil from it or something else useful. Lets use einherjar as an example again, lets say you're a WAR, you're gonna need e body, v helm, maybe v body, maybe shadow breastplate too. That's 4 items for 1 job, and doesn't get into being a completionist! Then you're going to need more e and p abjurations to tatter to augment your adaberk and shadow breastplate. After you get all this stuff, you can continue to do the event to get e/p/whatever abjurations to tatter and sell to make gil on.

This is a simple solution and makes the event worth doing basically forever, and by basically forever I mean until the gear from it is outdated by new gear. Everyone is always going to level new jobs and want new stuff for them. And using the earlier figure of 3 months to get e body abjuration, those 4 items alone are going to take you at least a year to acquire if you don't get them as drops. I think that's more then enough.

[Runespider]

Square love random too much to ever adopt anything sensible, Random number generator will reign supreme till the end of days in a SE MMO.

[FrankReynolds]

It's really simple. let's say the devs want the item to have a %5 drop rate from legion. So the average player has to do 20 runs to get X item. They can implement even higher point requirements. So that the item that takes 20 runs avg. to get can also be bought with the number of legion points acquired for say 100 runs. That way the incredibly unlucky guy who can't seem to get the drop no matter how hard he tries knows that eventually he will be able to get it through hard work.

Making it a random drop doesn't mean that people are not going to stop doing the event when they get their drop. I don't know anyone who got ebody from einherjar, and then kept doing it because they wanted a second one.

They did it because they needed DKP for other events. IE. If you show up for all these legion events, you get points that go towards having the LS help build relics etc for you. Or because they needed ichor for items that don't drop from the NMs (this could still work), or they needed ichor for mythics.

If they make some of the really good / hard to get drops sell-able, then people will never stop doing it.

[Mahoro]

Well if the choices are "Legion HNM has 0.01% drop rate on X item" and "X item can be purchased for 100,000 Legion points," I'd choose the latter too. So I just hope the devs increase the drop rates over stuff like VW bodies, which is just egregious.

[Zaknafein]

The rare drops should be obtained by defeating the most gnarly of the NM's.

Point systems are great, and people should be able to get something decent for their efforts. Effort to reward ratio, and all that. However, there still needs to be some top of the line rewards available only to those who actually succeed at the highest level of difficulty. Just farming incessantly lower tiers, or only making it through so many targets in the 30 mins repeatedly should not allow you to grind your way to everything.

[Arcon]

So if they just make harder mobs give more points you'll have no objections?

Wouldn't be the same. To you, maybe, achieving something great and investing a lot of time are the same. To me it couldn't ever be. I think no amount of trash-mob grinding should be able to give you HNM drop items. A point-based solution would be for tougher NMs to give different kinds of points, so you can't take the "easy way" out.

[wish12oz]

Wouldn't be the same. To you, maybe, achieving something great and investing a lot of time are the same. To me it couldn't ever be. I think no amount of trash-mob grinding should be able to give you HNM drop items. A point-based solution would be for tougher NMs to give different kinds of points, so you can't take the "easy way" out.

So add a qualification to the items, where they can only be bought if you have killed the monster that would normally drop them, and that problem would be solved.

I think you guys are looking at this all wrong. The idea is simply to give people the ability to obtain the items they want from the event, no matter how screwed they get on drop rates/lots/LS leadership, as long as they go do the event a lot. There's nothing wrong with that and it would be a good thing if implemented smartly.

[Ravenmore]

The rare drops should be obtained by defeating the most gnarly of the NM's.

Point systems are great, and people should be able to get something decent for their efforts. Effort to reward ratio, and all that. However, there still needs to be some top of the line rewards available only to those who actually succeed at the highest level of difficulty. Just farming incessantly lower tiers, or only making it through so many targets in the 30 mins repeatedly should not allow you to grind your way to everything.

Wake up the grind is what the game already does, what it has always done.

[Zaknafein]

Wake up the grind is what the game already does, what it has always done.

Einherjar which is what for all intents, and purposes Legion is based on was not grindy. It was one of the few events where skill mattered. Where the skill of the linkshell you did the event with directly related to your success rate. Also it allowed smaller groups to accomplish the same goals other shells needed more members to equal. As far as events went at 75 cap it was by far the most enjoyable imo.

PS: If you're so keen on grinds go grind out your limit break, and get to 99.

[FrankReynolds]

Einherjar which is what for all intents, and purposes Legion is based on was not grindy. It was one of the few events where skill mattered. Where the skill of the linkshell you did the event with directly related to your success rate. Also it allowed smaller groups to accomplish the same goals other shells needed more members to equal. As far as events went at 75 cap it was by far the most enjoyable imo.

PS: If you're so keen on grinds go grind out your limit break, and get to 99.

It's already been said, but "just make it so that a person cannot buy the item with points unless they have defeated the monster that it drops from.".

Learning how to defeat and defeating the monster == Skilll / overcoming challenge.
Defeating the monster 1,000 times and never getting the drop == Luck based grind.
Buying the item with points from a monster that you have defeated repeatedly == fair reward system.

In my experience, einherjar allowed the shells with the most mule accounts to do the final mob more often. after 1,000 runs, the only real challenge is getting enough people to actually show up every week so that you can kill the boss. Showing up for einherjar for months / years, waiting on a drop while you accumulate thousands of useless ichor is an incredibly "grindy" thing to do. Especially when you consider that they made the zone out in the middle of nowhere, so that gathering people together took twice as long as the actual event.

There is no reason why 1 person should be able to do content 1 time, and walk away with an item that another person has tried for 200 times. The above posters explanation about skinner box is absolute fact. Low percentage drop rates are just flat out inhumane.