World Drops

How gear generates from kills, and what grade, quality and condition each drop is rolled with.

Most of the gear in the world is not placed by hand. It is generated at the moment something dies, built from a template picked for the slot and the level of the encounter and then rolled along three separate axes. Grade fixes the power band. Quality is a one-off craftsmanship roll made when the item comes into being. Condition is the wear it accumulates afterwards.

Nothing is guaranteed. Each category of loot rolls on its own, so a single kill might yield nothing at all, or a weapon and a potion and a bag together.

The trivial kill rule#

A kill pays nothing when you have clearly outgrown it. If the highest level player engaged with a creature out-levels it by ten or more, that kill yields no world drops, no runes and no coin. Whatever the creature was carrying still falls, but it is marked unsellable. Explorer training-ground creatures work differently: they keep paying out while you are still an Explorer, and stop once you have joined a real guild and reached level five in it.

What can drop#

Each of these categories rolls independently on every qualifying kill.

Gear is the common find: a weapon comes up on about one and a half kills in a hundred and armour on about three and a half, which together is roughly one piece of gear in every twenty kills. Each of the other categories sits at a base chance of one percent. Luck, a socketed Fortune rune, a potion of fortune and any world-wide bonus event all multiply that base rather than adding to it, so a large stack of bonuses lifts a one percent category to a few percent, never to fifty. There is a hard ceiling of five percent on any category no matter how much fortune you have gathered.

Your first twenty levels#

Up to and including level 20, gear comes far more often: about one kill in five leaves a weapon or a piece of armour, with armour a little over twice as likely as a weapon. That rate is fixed. Luck, runes, potions and bonus events neither raise nor lower it, and the trivial kill rule above still applies. From level 21 gear drops at the usual rate described above. The other categories are the same at every level.

In a party each kill is counted for one member standing in the room, chosen at random, and it is that member's level which decides how likely gear is.

Gear made for you#

Every piece of gear a kill drops is made for someone who was there. A weapon is of a kind your class can wield. A piece of armour is in a material your class can wear, and is more likely to be for a slot you have nothing in, or one where what you are wearing is ten or more levels behind you.

In a party the kill still drops at most one of each, and the piece is made for one member standing in the room, chosen at random. A party of four sees gear for each of them about equally often.

Potions, scrolls and tools found this way arrive unidentified. A masked potion can still be drunk and a masked tool still used, though neither tells you what it did; a masked scroll cannot be read at all until someone names it. Vendors pay a quarter of the usual price for anything nobody can name. A mage's identify, a rogue's appraise or a potion of identify reveals the true name permanently, and it stays revealed when the item changes hands. When none of those is to hand, Sidonie Grane the assayer, east off Tidegold Row in Aurin, will do the same for anyone at any hour. Her fee is 500 copper for each of your levels and never less than 5 platinum, which is meant to make a mage or a rogue the better bargain. Bought, crafted and quest-given goods are never masked.

Runes are not rolled here at all. They have their own drop table, described on the runes page.

Separately from the gear rolls, a kill that pays out at all also leaves a trophy or a coin. A humanoid carries a copper, or two at level 100, if it was carrying anything, and a boss carries nothing at all; everything else leaves a trophy themed to its race or body type, which a collector wants and a shop will give a copper or two for. Your own pets, companions and minions leave neither. Hunting is not a living: see the economy page.

The level of a drop#

Gear comes in at the level of the creature that died, or very close to it, and never above it. It is never above the level of the player it was made for either, so you can put it on the moment you find it.

The bands clamp at level 1, so low-level creatures simply collapse into the top band.

World drops are capped at level 90 whatever the creature's level, so levels 91 to 100 belong to content gear alone: quest rewards, vendor stock and boss loot. Nothing a wandering creature sheds can compete there.

Grade and tier#

Grade is the name of an item's level band, and nothing more. Legendary is the band you need level 100 to use, Ancient is 90, and so on down to Basic at level 1. The full ladder is on the gear page.

Underneath the grade name, generated gear is built at one of twenty tiers, and the tier sets the base numbers before quality is applied. Each tier has a level it unlocks at.

Quality#

Quality is rolled once, when the item is created, and never changes. It is a flat percentage modifier on the item's numbers, and it is not shown in the item's name; you have to look at it with ooc or have a merchant identify it.

Condition#

Every drop begins Flawless and wears down from there, taking its numbers with it. The ten condition tiers, what each costs you and how repair works are covered on the durability page.

Putting the three together#

The three axes multiply. An item's working number is its base value for its slot and tier, lifted or dropped by quality, then reduced by whatever condition it has fallen to, with the result rounded down:

final = floor(base x (1 + quality) x (1 - condition penalty))

A Pristine piece worn down to Battered is carrying +20 percent and then -25 percent, and comes out a little below where a Moderate piece in good repair would sit.

Sockets#

Sockets are rolled at creation from the item's quality. Better craftsmanship means more of them, and Poor work never produces any. The roll checks the three-socket chance first, then two, then one, and stops at the first success.

The result is then capped by what the slot can physically hold, which is listed on the runes page. A bracelet holds no runes at all, so a Pristine bracelet still comes out with nothing.

Enchantments#

A generated piece can carry one named enchantment, rolled at one of three strengths. Epic comes up 5 percent of the time, rare 20 percent and uncommon the remaining 75 percent. The name is never shown in the item's short description; ooc <item> lists it, and so does a merchant's identify.

This matters more than it might look, because generated gear carries no bonus health, spell power or stamina of its own. Every point of those on a dropped piece comes from its enchantment, and everything else comes from completing a gear set.

Enchantments are also capped per item: at most 3 percent resistance to any one damage type, at most +4 spell bonus of any one type, and at most +4 to any single stat.

Class-specific drops#

Fifteen percent of weapon rolls and fifteen percent of armour rolls produce a piece made for the class of whoever landed the kill. Class armour is locked to that class alone; a class weapon is gated by its weapon type like any other weapon, so a class weapon can be wielded by anyone whose class uses that type. Class armour comes as body armour or a helm; class weapons come in whatever form that class actually uses. Class weapons stop generating at level 80, ten levels short of the general ceiling, because they are the strongest thing a class can find at random and the last stretch is left to content gear.

Generic weapon drops are not weighted by class. Every weapon type is equally likely for everyone, so you will find weapons you cannot use, and can trade or sell them.

What can generate#

Armour drops come from the seven armour set slots plus the shield: head, shoulders, body armour, arms, hands, legs, feet and off-hand. Accessory drops are rings, necklaces and bracelets. That is deliberate; every random armour drop is a piece you could be working a set toward.

Weapons generate as daggers, swords, axes, maces, heavy weapons, polearms, staves, bows and instruments. A dropped weapon's class, the number that drives its damage, is its level plus up to ten, modified by quality, and never above 80. Classes 81 to 100 are reserved for content weapons.

Related#

• Gear
• Runes
• Gear sets
• Durability