Sadly, I think this will be an instance where the technology available is limiting the coolness factor. Having mobs show their rare loot on their person while alive requires them to have the loot picked on spawn rather than on kill. That in turn drives telling the client what image to load which can give away loot information about the entire zone that players have not earned just for zoning in.
Perhaps there are a few tech solutions that would allow some of the coolness factor to remain.
1) Can the server be set to send the model configuration only when players are within line of sight? That way your client would only be told what to load milliseconds before you can see it for yourself. (image loading performance limited)
2) Loot determination on engagement? The mob does not have weapons drawn until it is engaged in combat and that’s when the command to load a skin gets sent. This would still allow for some form of dynamic loot code as the group/raid makeup could be checked at engagement. Though if another group some how steals the looting rights the loot would need to be rerolled on death.
3) The humanoid models always spawn wearing/wielding their possible rare loot but dropping is not guaranteed. We at least get to see items that are not on the common loot table for its race/faction. I have always though non medium sized humanoids should only drop objects that must be crafted or turned in for a reward, but that’s just me.
@Vjek
Ha, it is some of our conversations in the past that lead me to believe that option 1 was likely to have performance issues of one type or another. Almost tagged you to confirm it. I wanted to list it as a reference of something that technically might be possible but because of game tech reality it would not deliver a great game experience.
Option 2 only worked for held items. I was going on the assumption that most worn items would look the same as they did on the model so it would be impossible to see if the rare version was equipped. I am hoping for virtually zero particle effects from gear.
Option 3 is sort of your idea with all the broken items just not showing up in the loot window. That is how a few other games and a past DM handled loot, you only saw the stuff worth picking up. Once you were carrying around 8k gold weapons you really didn’t care about that used set of studded leather covered in blood and BO that you could maybe get 2 gold for if you drug it back to a town. With salvage being a skill of some type I could see the “broken” items being accessible so that a crafter with the right skill could get out their portable tools and harvest small amounts of raw materials from each piece. Other than for crafters to salvage they would just be worthless bulky items.