It Don't Mean A Thing If You Ain't Got That Bling

Talking Loot with Adam Gershowitz and Mike Donatelli

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Any MMOG player who's played longer than five minutes will tell you they've heard the term "phat lewts" before. Loot is one of the driving forces in any game, not just MMOG's. From gear, to crafting, to just plain old wealth, getting rewarded for your efforts is something all gamers expect from their game of choice. We sat down with Mike Donatelli (Content Design Lead) and Adam Gershowitz (Career Strike Team Lead) and asked them a few questions about the gear and loot that we're seeing or might see in the future of Warhammer Online: age of Reckoning.

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It's gotta be a crime to look this good!

Ten Ton Hammer: You’ve stated before that City siege obtained gear will be the best in game. Are you worried that it may unbalance the game for those people who don’t participate in the City Siege RvR, but may stick to just scenarios?

Adam Gershowitz: I’ll handle the balance question since I’ve spent most of the past six months beating Mike over the head with a bat yelling “Gotta keep it even!” *laughs*

One of the things to note about WAR, our armor sets? While they’re nice and unique upgrades, especially at the higher levels, they’re not huge power shifts. They’re not like WoW opens up a new dungeon and that new armor set completely increases the power of the player. They’re very similar, smaller steps of power. What we like to do actually with these armor sets is add interesting and different, but about the same power level bonuses, in the sets and one the pieces themselves. So you might get one set that has certain of abilities of a spec line leveled up and another set might have different ones. Or you might get one set from one area with an interesting click attack and another set from another area a different click effect. So, generally speaking set bonuses and set items themselves do incrementally get better and better, but not in such a way that if you’ve managed to clear out all the way to the capital city King’s Set, you’ve got the highest renown rank and best armor in the game, you’re definitely going to be a badass and you’re going to be hard to kill, but you won’t be impossible because the equipment is SO much better than anything anyone else can find.

These armor sets, you can get them a myriad of different ways. You can get them in RvR, you can get them in PvE. We wanted to make sure that if you’re into PvE and that’s all you wanted to do, you can get sets all the way up. Also, for balance reasons the PvE sets had to be the RvR equivalent of that content. You will be able to equip yourself with sets with great set bonuses in either PvP or PvE, through out your levels, and they kind of merge into the City Sieges, where you’re gonna have PvE encounters and PQ’s but you’re also going to have a lot of PvP going on, so you’re still going to be able to get those pieces either way.

Ten Ton Hammer: Prior to getting to the Cities, is there a benefit to having an RvR set over a PvE set? Or if you’ve got a PvE set from the PQ’s in say, Tier 2, are you still going to be able hold your own with the big boys in the RvR content up to the higher levels?

Mike Donatelli: The sets are very equivalent. There are subtle differences between the PvE and the RvR. This comes from the fact that there are just certain things that RvR players go out and seek and PvE players go out and seek. For example, you’re never, ever going to find a RvR set that has hate management tools on them like reduce hate vs. monsters, or a de-taunt clickable or a taunt clickable or anything like that. You’ll only really find those on the PvE and the Dungeon sets. Whereas the PvP sets kinda focus a little bit more on things that while useful for PvE players, aren’t as useful as they could be. Things like critical hit protection and stuff like that. Like I said, the sway between them is not such that if you go out and you do PQ’s and you get all the PvE set and someone else has done all the RvR and gotten the equivalent set, genuinely speaking, you are geared out 70-80% equivalent to the other person, the only difference being what is more RvR specific or PvE specific.

Ten Ton Hammer: If a person leaves a corpse un-looted, will there be a period of time before random strangers can pick it up or will it just disappear?

Adam: We’re kind of a fan of not leaving open corpses out on the ground. So basically, if you lock it, it’s yours. You can loot it and your group can loot it, but no one else. Primarily because one of the things we want to be very careful about is those high level players coming through and rip up waves of low level content and then their buddy trails behind about three minutes later picking the corpses to get really good loot.

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Some of the best loot comes from influence rewards.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can one get a complete set of armor from winning loot in all the PQ’s in each tier?

Mike: We have what we call armor sets, put in PvE and RvR, and you get them in PvE primarily from PQ’s. You have a better chance of getting more pieces or say, like the chest piece, in one of the harder PQ’s, slated for 3 groups of people for example, but you still have a chance to get it in all of the PQ’s. All the PQ’s give you the chance to get armor set pieces that together give you reaaly great set bonuses.

Adam: Generally speaking, as you may have noticed, different PQ’s have different drop rates for the various pieces. So we do encourage people not to sit and farm the same PQ over and over to get the set, you may be able to get a few pieces that way but really if you kind of migrate around and play through all the content in an area or a chapter you’re going to have a much better chance of getting a complete set. It’s kind of our way to encourage people to not sort of squat on an area and not move on and let other people enjoy it.

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Make sure to tune in tomorrow for the second half of this interview!