WoW Loot Generation

[Los]

Still it feels as if some mobs are tagged for spawning some type of loot. I know of a mob in wetlands that will drop blues eventually (within the hour) happened to me many times (made a nice buck of it, twink stuff). Have simillar things with a mob in zf, dropped an epic at least 3 times for me now. Another mob in shadowvalley dropped a recipe for me on 3 occassions now (bop though , and i was partied all 3 times, last time it was for me, cheer :P))

Think its a bit like the npc vendors and their not always available recipes, there is a time for it to drop/spawn and as long as you are in the time frame of it dropping and there wasnt somebody else to get it, its yours.

Bottom line from what i wanted to say, in my experience and humble opinion there are mobs with higher /blue/purple drop rate.

[jrox]

I remember reading a long time ago a trick that someone had found pertaining to some humanoid mobs in Burning Steppes. This person had found that if one of these NPCs had spawned with a weapon that the items they held in their hands were different. And using this you could selectively kill only mobs with this characteristic and get an weapon item drop 100% of the time. This would imply that at some point the a mobs loot was determined at the time of its spawn.

I never actually tested it out, but I seem to recall other readers confirming it.

[empeha]

When i was grinding pre bc with my rogue, i noticed the following:
The amount of money i pickpoketed was a fix % (dont know actually the exact value, i think 60-80%) from the amount that i loot from the same mob. So i think at least the gold amount from a mob is generated at spawn time.

[stompershock]

jrox: that was confirmed, there was a bugged mob, only because i don't think bliz intended for it to happen, that if he held a certain weapon in his offhand you actually looted it when he died, so you could just run around and see if he had the weapon, lol. If it was only that easy for everything...

[Los]

would be funny imo

[Ziran]

In early EQ1 (kunark/luclin) the mobs held their items. You could often tell what the boss would drop just by looking at what it is holding. In some cases the bosses were significantly harder if they had certain weapons (i.e. quad attacking because they now wielded two weapons instead of regular double attack).

Ziran

[yarr]

diablo2 exact loots were determined upon death of the mob... since the MF % (% greater chance to find magic items) of the person or pet who kills the mob determines the quality of the drop.

in WoW i really don't know, i have never noticed any patterns, hehe!

[kalih]

Operating under the presumption that it's random... does it really matter?

I prefer to think that the mob has all possible drops until the moment I loot him causing the wave function to collapse to a single drop.

Sometimes I sit there looking at the sparkles waiting for the universe to align just properly so my drop will show up.

[smallo]

i never did read all the posts here, but 2 situations that happened to me.

we killed all the stuff in ZG, pre tbc, and as we all looted hakkar, we got booted from server, when we connected hjakkar was back and we'd lost our loot. after he died again (same instance ID, we got different loot).

in karazhan the other week, we killed shade of aran, but when he died, his door remained locked. after looting and then someone dieing to summon us out, we zoned back in, and ran back up, to our suprise he'd respawned (again same instance ID) and we killed him again, dropped different loot.

[Ghallo]

The other night there was a server reboot, I was killing mobs in Red Ridge - and I got a specific green item. After the reboot - didn't get that green.

Think about it in terms of server maint. If you generate the loot on mob spawn, you have to keep track of what the loot is for the life of the mob. This means a new table in the database. If you generate the loot on when the player loots the mob ... you don't need to track anything. Both results, over time, would show the same level of randomness - but generating drops on loot is more efficient.

This would explain why the loots are different.

Also, we had a reset once when my raid was in MC. We got a different drop. Messed up our DKP system at the time too, because the raid tracker f'd up and charged both the old and new recipient.