Let's discuss Field Boss farming

[Lavinia]

I want to discuss the possibility of farming field bosses for loot. In your typical MMO you would farm a boss over and over for a specific drop you want. Weather it's an upgrade, bragging rights or whatever reason people spend weeks farming bosses to get these items. So for example, to farm an item I would want from a field boss, let's say I'm looking for a staff, we spend a month killing it and I get a accessory. So then it either deal with it and just go with it and move on or start up another run. This would suck up valuable mod time and by the time you finish the second kill thread I would probably out level the drop from that particular boss making it less valuable.

I suggest that it be allowed to pay a cost like ap for what can be called a farm kill. After you kill a certain field boss once you can kill it again without going through a second thread by paying let's say 8 ap. So you would lose all rewards minus the one accessory, weapon or whatever that drops. I believe ap to be of sufficient value to get such powerful gear. Then would a farm kill still require a group, so 5 people all claim a farm kill or would it be acceptable to just be a single person. If so would they be allowed to not pay the ap cost so they get nothing and just allow the group to get their farm kill.

But that doesn't really fix that you could pretty easily gimp your character by farming a drop. After a certain point or even completely if you aren't interested in pre90 gearing it would just be best to keep the ap. So I also suggest a way to limit what drops after a normal and or a farm kill. There is a number of ways you can go about this, but I'll just mention one. Upon a kill a semi random list is given to the participants and they pick what they want from the list. Simple.

What does everyone else think about this system to allow us to farm field bosses.

[Nursery Rhyme]

Staying more in line with our current in-place mechanics, an alternative might be treating group boss threads as another form of 'crafting' thread. We could use the crafting system to allow the party to receive 'drops' based on party composition so for instance if you brought a tailor, a blacksmith, and a scribe with you on your adventure: tailoring, blacksmith, and scribe items can 'drop' on thread claim and completion.

A couple additional incentive benefits could be the ability for this method to produce items without cost and maybe for the drops to come from the highest present crafting score among the party. (if the blacksmith adventurer is present and has level 90 blacksmith, the tailor player can receive level 90 tailor gear despite being a level 1 tailor.)

This might be kind of weird if we didn't already all have crafting classes grafted onto us already, but we do, and I imagine a lot of people are not too interested in leveling them. Such a system also would not disenfranchise the person who -did- pursue crafting and even rewards the party for having at the very least one such person present.

Also, invention threads using this method would be impossible because it would make no sense for the world to drop things that do not exist as a concept within it.

Finally, to prevent abuse, you'd probably need an additional rule capping item level based on opponent level, so no level 90 tailor parties getting 90 equipment from level 1 marmots.

That's what I would suggest and what would probably amount to the least amount of pain for our mod community.

Regardless, I agree that having something in place would be nice, because it's a little strange to RP never receiving monster drops.

[Haneroze]

It makes no sense to spend AP. That's our experience points right there, and if you "spend AP" for defeating more bosses, it essentially means that you died soooooo many times against that boss that you've lost multiple levels.

In Dofus, a MMORPG where the crafting plays a great role, bosses past a certain level will never drop any equipment. Instead, they drop boss materials, which can be used to craft strong equipments. You could roleplay as if that was the case here too.

[Lavinia]

Nov 21, 2014 13:25:46 GMT Haneroze said:

It makes no sense to spend AP. That's our experience points right there, and if you "spend AP" for defeating more bosses, it essentially means that you died soooooo many times against that boss that you've lost multiple levels.

So then it costs a lot of gold for a kill, alienating all the new players. Ap is really the only thing of value that we have. The loss of ap is just something you need to consider when you do this sort of thing and is pretty easy to offset you post in other threads to get more ap to balance it out.

[quote{In Dofus, a MMORPG where the crafting plays a great role, bosses past a certain level will never drop any equipment. Instead, they drop boss materials, which can be used to craft strong equipments. You could roleplay as if that was the case here too.[/quote]
I would like to keep the drops as they are, more crafting incentive or not. Unless the crafter got a AP bonus for it as well, which would make farming for the materials incentive to sped up leveling. In the show or maybe was the wiki for the show, it's stated that some of the equipment people have is crafted and dropped from bosses. Or an alternate argument we need a alternate method of getting gear. The gear we get now comes from crafters, what if we don't have a certain crafter to make a particular item? Then we to kill field bosses.

Another alternate suggestion would be bosses drop tokens, one per player. You may then exchange the token at the forum shop for a crafting material or piece of gear. This is assuming the shop can use alternate forms of currency besides gold. This would also require more work from the mods initially since they would have to create a list of equipment for each field boss instead of creating it on the spot and they would have to make recipes as well. But, I see one problem. How would you decide what effect the weapon has? Would it be up to the crafter or the mod who approves the claim?

[Haneroze]

But in MMORPGs, leveling up is sometimes one of the reasons you fight bosses. Really, bosses are just monsters that give a lot of everything, but requires a good party, a good chunk of time, and offers a fair amount of difficulty.

Tokens have often been discussed in Dofus and Wakfu. The main idea was that, since there was actually a lot of chances to just drop nothing out of a boss, tokens would allow you to at least make those no-drop runs not a complete waste of time. Would you not drop what you wanted after dozens of tries, you would at least have earned tokens that you could spend to get that needed item. However, with over 50 dungeons, organizing shops for all of them, and hogging so many kind of tokens would be quite troublesome.


We could very well use the idea of token. Just like in Dofus, having one token per boss is a big No. However, we could very well use the idea of tokens. Here are three possible ways I see it:

-General tokens. Confirm you have killed a boss, and you get an amount of tokens equal to the boss' level. The more tokens you use, the higher level the item you can claim. The item would probably be randomly generated.

-Tier tokens. Level 1-30 bosses give Tier I tokens, level 31-60 bosses give Tier II tokens, and level 61-90 bosses give Tier III tokens. And then you can only claim an equipment within the correct range. There could have different tiers, of course.

-Reforge tokens. Bosses would all have an additional section stating which kind of tokens he can drop. And then, when a player claims boss drops, he gets an amount of tokens equal to the boss level, then spread randomly between all types of token. With each token equivalent to a Reforge effect, a player could buy weapons of level equal to the total amount of tokens spent, and with reforges equal to the proportion of the tokens spent. For example, an extremely aggressive and brutal boss could drop Attack tokens and Dark tokens, and a player defeating him could use these tokens to get half Attack Increase, half Dark Elemental Attacks reforge to his claimed weapon.


Additionally, Boss threads could require a minimum set amount of posts, as we all know they always take a long while to defeat. But I don't think we should allow off-RP farming of these.