Rare mobs and interesting loot tables

[Voidwards]

Before I start - Requiem Team: fantastic job with all the adjustments. Thank you a lot for your efforts!
While spawns and loot tables seem to be one of the priorities now, I'd like to suggest a few things about them:

1. Rare mobs
It'd be fantastic to have some rare, recoloured, renamed variants of regular mobs being spawned around the map. I imagine them being way more powerful (perhaps requiring more people or unorthodox tactics to kill, i.e. dropping poisoned food on the floor) with a really low respawn time (a few days?) and few potential spawn points. They could also drop some otherwise unobtainable cosmetic items, hues or house decorations.

A few ideas:

• parasite-infected wild boar which starts to spawn his parasite (a small snake) at 10% health. If killed quickly enough, has a chance to drop that parasite as an usable item (instant poison cure),

• named bloated corpse (maybe a name of an ex-player?) that must be killed without exploding the monster (magic/one hit/archery), otherwise the loot is wasted,

• human-faced spider (with zombie sounds) that poisons player, and when a poisoned player leaves a splash of blood on the ground, the blood can be collected and later used to alchemy/smithing,

• a spirit of a witchhunter which casts a curse that makes the player cast a healing spell on himself in random intervals (20-30 minutes) on himself - along with the incantation above his head. Good luck explaining that to your friends in town.

2. Reduce the tool drop rates
Humanoid (and probably not only) mobs seem to drop tools quite often, which renders toolmakers less useful. Let's make the market as much dependent on Players' actions as much as possible.

3. Incentive for PvE hunting
I'd like to suggest more ways for the fighting characters to support the crafters. Of course, there are recipes and skinning products, but aside from that there's no way to be useful, combat characters just gather money. More player interedependency = everyone feels involved and necessary = more fun.

To increase such interdependency it may be a good solution to have some mobs/containers drop unique, uncraftable components for high-end gear. Rare feathers for a special bow, ancient handle for a great smithing hammer, twice-reborn larvae for starvation-inducing poison, a piece of meteorite (maybe the one casted by mobs?) for a sharpstone that adds a mana-draining effect to a weapon or maybe a pieces of high-end armor that requires a skilled smith to reforge it (as not to devoid armorsmith of his work)?

[Orange]

have no idea why i need to collect skinning resources and who will buy it heavy and cheap.
except for the leather of course and senew for bows

would be nice to add functionality to a vendors, so that they can buy up the resources specified by the owner. this will increase demand and trade relationships. For example, if I know that a certain merchant buys rhino fangs, then I will definitely collect them and drag them to the fort

[Voidwards]

have no idea why i need to collect skinning resources and who will buy it heavy and cheap.
except for the leather of course and senew for bows

Well, I guess they are used mostly for alchemy and/or research. Besides, some "illegal" activities.
They are still, however, in regular loot tables, similar to said leathers or sinews. What I wanted to suggest is to create a low % chance to drop rare/unique crafting components as to give incentive to farm certain spots, dungeons or mob types. Such a small-chance reward makes such repetitive activities somewhat exciting.

would be nice to add functionality to a vendors, so that they can buy up the resources specified by the owner. this will increase demand and trade relationships. For example, if I know that a certain merchant buys rhino fangs, then I will definitely collect them and drag them to the fort

But it would decrease the interactions between us. For now, a Discord #trade subchannel is a good place. On the other hand, this suggestion would fit a separate topic.

[Domitian]

2. Reduce the tool drop rates
Humanoid (and probably not only) mobs seem to drop tools quite often, which renders toolmakers less useful. Let's make the market as much dependent on Players' actions as much as possible.

I've noticed this as well from the little hunt I've done. Being a crafter, this benefits me, but it definitely takes sales from Engineers. Food is in a similar spot - the first few days of the server my friends needed me to cook food for them. Now they are getting all the food they need from whatever they are killing. I think most of my food sales at this point are to other crafters.

That said, I'm not sure what you'd replace these low-value items with on low-end mobs. You definitely want something in their loot tables that is interesting to find and potentially for newbie chars to sell. Will be interested to see how this evolves as the economy shifts more toward higher-end crafted items.

[Meowakin]

I will say, skinning already has incentives to hunt particular mobs all over the place, though it's not 'rare' drops like you're suggesting.