Do you think that those dropped class-specific essences will last long in game?
It's not my intentionl to drill this suggested design into the ground based on a few minutes of gameplay. This is merely meant to stir discussion. And things should definitely be tested out before you toss them in the bin.
I fear that those essences will be stashed and dumped on the market. The ID value of those essences and overall meaningfulness of those might plummet quite fast. And it might be considered as a questionable design choice. This may sound harsh, but what do you think?
So couple months in, you’ll have new characters calling out for 20 essences and buying everything from early levels straight away.
My first reaction was: Gimmicky drops. Where do they come from, how did those bats/wolves/skeletons obtained those essences or why are those creatures not showing elements that relate to the dropped essence?
A dire rat could drop dire lord, rogue, ranger, druid essences for example.
Alternatively, keep the sensible drops going of body parts related to the mob you just killed. And have a mechanic where X amount of them can be handed in to trade for 1 essence. And having X amount of essences in order to trade it in for 1 spell/combat ability. You could do it differently by having for example eyes required to turn in and get a dire lord essence in return. Where druids might need bones etc. That way, you could create specific requirements for each class or archtype. It might provide a more unique experience for the player, where not everything is suited for them.
This might give you a good extra sink of early level items and competing with the crafting content, which isn’t a bad thing from my perspective.
It really depends on the drop rate, right? Aion did something quite similar with stigma stones that gave you stigma skills when equipped. Basically a talent tree. Some of these stigma stones were quiet common but others extremely rare world drops in specific level ranges. In my years of playing I never found that any of the rare stigma stones became so common that their value plummeted to dirt cheap. I believe that new players, Alts, and later, progeny, will all contribute to keeping the value of skill essences relevant.
Barin999 said: "Where do they come from, how did those bats/wolves/skeletons obtained those essences or why are those creatures not showing elements that relate to the dropped essence?
A dire rat could drop dire lord, rogue, ranger, druid essences for example."
I am not sure if you are against the idea of 'A dire rat' being able to drop any/all of the essense types or if you like the idea that any essense type can come from any mob type.
If specific Essenses came from specific target types, then this would mean that a specific target would become a priority target for a specific class and you may find some anger or frustration occuring if somebody else is killing the enemy you want. For example if Dire Lord essences come from Rats only then a newbie Dire Lord player might get frustrated if the Monk newbie player is killing all the rats. It would also encourage this Dire Lord to run around looking for Rats to kill, ignoring all the spiders, wolves, bats, etc... and thus slowing down his leveling experience as he tries to find the right mob type to get his essenses.
Barin999 said: "Alternatively, keep the sensible drops going of body parts related to the mob you just killed. And have a mechanic where X amount of them can be handed in to trade for 1 essence. And having X amount of essences in order to trade it in for 1 spell/combat ability. You could do it differently by having for example eyes required to turn in and get a dire lord essence in return. Where druids might need bones etc. That way, you could create specific requirements for each class or archtype. It might provide a more unique experience for the player, where not everything is suited for them."
In your example you suggest that 'eyes' could be for Dire Lord 'Umbral Essence', 'bones' for Druid, etc... This could only work if every type of 'eye' could be used. So Wolves eyes, Bat eyes, Rat Eyes, etc... could all be handed in to obtain the Umbral Essence. If not, you just run into the same problem as above where players are vying for a specific mob type.
You also run into the problem of combinations. Say you need 10 eyes to hand in for your Umbral Essence. What if I have 3 Rat eyes, 2 Wolf eyes, 4 Bat eyes, and 1 snake eye. Can I hand in this combination of 10 to get my Umbral Essence? Or does VR need to make sure that enemy eyes that drop are just all generic. So if you kill a Rat he will just drop 'Eyeballs' and if you kill a wolf you will just loot 'Eyeballs' etc... So you get the same 'Eyeballs' from anything you might kill.
You then run into problems with other uses of said items for quests or trade skills. Alchemy may call for Spider Eyes to create an anti-venom potion. Do you use your eyes to get Essenses or do you use them for Anti-venom potions? Do spiders have the chance to drop both 'Eyeballs' used for Essenses and also 'Spider Eyestalks' used for anti-venom potions, thus inflating the Spiders loot table and making it rarer to get essense body parts off Spiders.
This creates extra complexity just so you don't have Essences droping directly from targets. And if this system continues all the way through the leveling process they would need to make sure that all the 'body' parts drop off all enemies throughout all the levels. So even when you are level 45 and killing Rock Elementals there would need to be Eyeballs, Bones, Arms, etc... just so people could be handing them in to get their essenses.
I'm also guessing that as you level up VR will require upgraded Essenses to get higher level abilities, so at low level you may need Umbral Essense, but as you reach say level 15 you start needing Pristine Umbral Essense, and then at level 25 you need Glowing Umbral Essense, and then at 35 you need Sparkling Umbral Essense, etc... These of course would drop off the Level appropriate targets. This is to make it impossible for a high level player to just go farm a bunch of low level mobs to get Essenses. This would mean that the 'Eyeballs' used would need to change as well as you level up, so at level 15 targets start dropping 'Pristine Eyeballs', 'Glowing Eyeballs', etc... or some other modification to let you know that these Eyeballs are used for higher level Essenses.
It's simpler to have Essenses just drop directly from enemies so they don't need to worry about all these conflicts.
Also it's possible they want to use 'dispositions' to have special types of Essenses that are used for those 'rarer' abilities out in the world. For example, maybe on the top of a mountain you find a Paladin master that can teach a special AoE version of the Turn Undead spell, but he requires you to collect special Essenses that only drop from Undead targets with the Alarmist disposition since these are Undead who are 'afraid' to fight alone and thus their Essense can be used to learn a potent Turn Undead spell.
Delthalas said: "I'm pretty sure Joppa said that these essences are for testing purposes only, not for launch. My assumption is that this is only for PA5 with the way he was talking about the essences."
This is correct, Joppa did say that they were only Testing this idea:
Joppa said: "We are still very much in a testing phase and so it's an opportunity for us to try some different things. At some point in Pre-Alpha 5 we want to introduce ability progression through coin, being able to purchase abilities through vendors. We also want to test out some aspects of... you could call it like a loose bartering kind of thing where you... right now if you get an Umbral Essense or a Primal Essense you can take one of those to a Shaman master or a Dire Lord master in that general starting area and exchange those for abilities. So it's an opportunity to see how some of that more barter type trading and barter type mentality goes as opposed to just loot things, sell things, buy things. We are going to bring that online once PA5 starts and we get to the phase of PA5 that we want to introduce that and all those systems. This is kind of an intrim experiment and it's going to be fun to try and get some data on." (source)
So this suggests that they are not all yet sold on the Essenses being used to purchase your Abilities and they just want to see how it works out with the Testers before they commit to the full complexities of the system.