Adventurer party drops

[rangerjeff]

Okay, read back a couple of pages and didn't see anything recent on this, so...

I'm playing a character I've pretty much given up on winning with, but thought it would be nice to finally get all three potions for an alchemist and see what the bonus is. Unfortunately, the third potion I have to complete requires a red crystal, and there are no more of them in the Scintillating Caves. So, I've been hunting Adventurers partie on the world map. I've munched maybe 50 of them so far, and still no red crystal. Every other component for all the other potions, and the last one of those came a long time ago.

So, in all this time of hunting, I've made a several observations.

First, mainly you get weapons and body armor, with anything else being pretty rare. Given the risk associated with these encounters, I'd like to see it beefed up to 6-10 drops per kill, including as appropriate more of the secondary equippable items including helms, cloaks, belts, gloves, boots, rings, amulets, diggers, lamps, and ammo, as well as some consumables like wands, gems, infusions, and runes.

Second, I'm currently level 28, they're usually 31 or so, and yet all I get is 3rd tier items, absolutely nothing I might use at this point, since I'm in 4th tier (stralite) territory already. Finding a way to scale the quality of the items dropped to the level of the encounter seems like a good idea. Not necessarily guaranteeing high quality drops, but allowing for the possibility as appropriate.

Third, I'm guessing aside from the guaranteed armor/weapon drops, there's a chance for a single extra item. If you get an extra item, a list is generated of possible drops and one thing is rolled off that list. Might be a list of 20 item types (rune, shield, boots, etc) plus at the end of the list another slot for each alchemist quest ingredient you're missing. So, if you've got all quests active (12 ingredients total) and you only have acquired 2 of the ones you need, then there's another 10 items at the end of the list of possible bonus drop items, giving that bonus drop a 1/3 chance of being an ingredient you need. If on the other hand you have 11/12 that you need, there's only one ingredient left to add to the end of the list, and so when you get a bonus item, there's now only a 1/21 chance that it'll be that last ingredient you need. I'd like to suggest, however this mechanic actually works, that as long as the alchemist quest is active, whenever you get a bonus item dropped from an adventurer, there's a 1/3 chance that it's an ingredient item you need, even if there's only one item left that you need. Hope that makes sense. Hunting down this one last ingredient is boring the pants off me. And given the risk I'm taking (if I enter the Ambush with two mages in sight of me, I'm toast), I just can't help feeling that these encounters could be tweaked the make them more rewarding.