What is a "world drop" and other questions...

[Darian]

I have many times seen "world drop" when it comes to items from monsters (and perahps chests and such but not sure) and was just wondering what it really is?
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I'm going to be more expository than you probably need me to be, for the sake of actually being guide-like rather than just answering your question. :)

"World Drop" has one actual meaning, but two connotations.

1) Technically, it means any item which is not constrained to dropping from any mob or specific subset of mobs (to include "all mobs in a given area/zone/instance"). Obviously, Maladath, Runed Blade of the Black Flight is not a World Drop; it only drops from Broodlord Lashlayer in BWL. Similarly, Hourglass Sand is not a world drop; it only drops in BWL, although from random mobs. Likewise with, say, items which only drop off the furbolgs in southern Felwood.

2) To an extent, some people restrict the term to Epic (or possibly Rare) gear items which do not drop from a specific boss (or group of bosses). In this sense, a World Drop encompasses Epics such as the Axe of the Woods on down to green items such as Adjective Noun of the Animal, which are always randomly generated. These are items which are contained within a table designed for random item seeding.

I'll now engage in a lot of wild speculation based on logic and observation. Each mob sort of has four loot tables, from what I can figure. This would make more sense than actually populating each specific mob type with a specfic loot table containing every item that mob can possibly drop.

The first would be cash. Humanoids will generally always drop cash, as will certain other mob types. The game likely checks to see if a mob drops cash, then the RNG applies itself against that mob's potential cash drop rate, which is both level- and mob type-dependent. (Some mob types will drop more cash than other mob types of the same level.) I'm fairly sure this is a separate check entirely from loot, as cash isn't so much an item as it is a simple additive.

The second would be materials and "common items". Certain classes of mob will drop cloth, herbs, ore, potions, food, and so on. Because all humans in a level range around 40 are liable to drop Silk Cloth, it makes sense to assume that the code checks against a key which places the mob into a class for this sort of thing and checks for its presence, rather than looking up a loot table which has "1 silk cloth," "2 silk cloth," "8 silk cloth," etc. Because of the wide nature of these item drops, it seems reasonable to me that they're also outside the standard concept of the loot table.

The third is quite clearly mob-specific drops -- things which can only drop from a single mob (boss or named), or only from a single mob type (i.e., you may only get Widget_001 from killing "Riverpaw Brutes"; "Riverpaw Shaman" won't drop it). There's a percentage rate on this (up to 100%). For this, you're also looking at collection quest items, I'm sure. This is the only type of drop where it makes logical sense to tie a loot table to a mob or mob type.

Finally, you get to World Drops. I'd guess that there's a flag which turns off a mob's eligibility to drop a World Drop (there are mobs which appear to only drop certain items, period). Outside of that, it's apparent that every mob has a percentage chance to hit the World Drop table based on mob level -- even some end-game boss mobs will occasionally drop World rares as part of their haul. I have no idea of the actual percentage chances, but just for illustration... I'd presume that it first checks for the existence of an epic item (some infinitesmal percentage chance). If that check fails, it goes on to check for a rare item (say maybe .02% chance). That check may actually be two checks; it may check for a unique rare, then check for a randomized rare (Adjective Noun of the Animal), or "randomized rare" may be an actual item in the rare table which then instigates the randomization. If the rare check fails, it would go on to check for an uncommon, then a common, then a junk item. If all these checks fail, it exits.

These tables also apply to chests (although undoubtedly with a slightly different mechanism). Not every mob or chest will check all four tables; some mobs absolutely do not drop cash, for example, some mobs only drop items specifically itemized to them, and some mobs even only drop World Drops. Any or all of these checks may fail for a given mob, resulting in the dreaded empty loot window.

Again, all that babble I just tossed out is just speculation, but it's certainly the way I'd have designed things, and it makes sense that it would be this way. If every single mob had its own loot table, the game database would be absolutely ridiculous.