From the Turbine Site - Jan. 11, 2005

-by Jessica Mulligan

It started after the third drink at a Friday "girl's night out."

Wouldn't it be neat, someone said, to have very rare items drop in loot?  Like, you know, really cool stuff, potions that boosted your health 200 for a short period or a pearl that increased strength by 250 for a few minutes.  Now, wouldn't that be way cool?

Pulling my Cosmopolitan-tinted gaze from the cute guy at the end of the bar, on whom I had been unsuccessfully practicing mind-control techniques, I fixed my eyes roughly in the direction of the speaker and said (somewhat snidely, it must be said), "Why stop there?  Why not a healing kit with a +500 skill modifier or a dye pot that never fails?  How about foolproof salvage for perfect imbues?  And no skill or level restrictions; anyone can use any rare item, whether they be a level 1 player or level 126-plus."

"Exactly!"

This is how Frankenstein was born.

The next day, while downing prodigious amounts of orange juice and aspirin and trying to explain again to my steady why he had to come get me at a bar at 2am, I remembered that conversation.  The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.  The advantages were obvious: a way to reinvigorate the in-game economy, a new class of items we could add to every month, something to help push the lore along occasionally.  And it would be just plain fun to come up with the items.

Of course, there would be potential downsides, too.  We've been reading the threads in which you've been commenting about the plan for rares and we agree that there are some issues with the plan as it exists now.  For example, balance will be a tricky issue; we wouldn't want to make a one-shot-kill weapon, for example, or PvP would become an absolute joke and never able to be balanced again. 

And if rare items were only found in loot, then UCMers would have a natural advantage in finding them.  Heck, it would encourage pharming just to get the items to sell on eBay.  There isn't much more we can do about UCMs than we are already doing, e.g. find and ban them.  However, we can do something about making sure the hunt for rares doesn't become a pharmer's paradise.  We've put our heads together and come up with a two-pronged approach, which we now propose to you for discussion:

Rare items from loot will be rare.

The easiest thing to do would be to pull rare items out of loot drops altogether.  However, we feel there ought to be at least a small chance of finding a rare in a loot drop, even if it is a really small chance.

At Turbine Nation, we gave some figures for how often rare items would drop in loot.  Throw those numbers out the window; loot rares are going to be a whole lot harder to find than that, as much as an order of magnitude more difficult to find.  This ought to keep the pharmers from monopolizing rare items from loot drops; the 'ROI' (Return on Investment) of pharming for rares will be very, very low.  In this case, the time investment spent to acquire even one rare by pharming will be extreme, so there won't be much sense in trying to create a business out of it.

For the Future: Everyone gets a chance.

While the rares implementation for Throne of Destiny is just about complete, we're considering an improvement to the system that we could add shortly after launch as part of a monthly update.

We want everyone to have a chance to find a rare, on a more or less equal footing.  In fact, we'd like you to have a small chance of finding a rare item every day that you log in – and I do mean small; they are called 'rare' for a reason.  What we propose is that each day, when you log in for the first time in a 24 hour period, there will be an invisible die roll.  If your number comes up for receiving a rare, you'll see a special message, such as "You feel especially lucky today!  You might want to go to the nearest Temple of Rares and consult a priestess."

If you receive that message, you'll need to go to a special temple or other building we'll set up in each of the starter cities, where a priestess (or Guide or Acolyte or whatever) will guide you to a special chest.  When you open the chest, you'll receive your rare item.  As to which rare you receive from the chest: that will be random chance.  You could get a tier 1 item, you could get a tier 5 item, you might get something in between; you just never know.

The only limitation here is that every character only has one chance to get lucky every 24 hour period.  For example, if you log in 15 times in one day, you don't have 15 chances to be awarded a rare; you only have one chance, the first time you log in.  It also works in the reverse; if you don't log in for three days, you still only get one chance the next time you log in, not three.

Again, this is in addition to finding rares on loot. Active hunters will still have a better chance of finding a rare than those who do not hunt, but that chance will be much smaller than initially presented.

As we said, this new system would not be in the initial release of Throne of Destiny, but would follow shortly afterwards as part of a monthly event.

So, after reading your comments and contemplating on them, that's our current thinking on rare items.  Now we want to know your opinions.  Fire away; I have on my rare Level 5 Everlasting Pantaloons of Fire Resistance.

Rare Items Examples
Below you can see some examples of the unique appearance of Rare weapons. Click on an image to enlarge it!

(click to enlarge)