Affix roll pity / bad-luck protection #7
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Context
Tier-table line counts fix the 3-line scarcity problem structurally, but playtesting (develop, Jul 2026) showed the opposite problem: drops are too generous for both Instability Caches and affixed items overall. That creates an easy early-game snowball and weakens the reward of powerful drops.
Simply slashing base rates (e.g. 3% affix / 3% cache) avoids snowball but forces long grinds for often-useless affixes.
Design: soft pity + tier segregation (not pure RNG)
Rolling accumulation (soft pity)
Instability aura (momentum UX)
Non-goals
Implementation notes (TBD)
Acceptance
Upon further playtesting, I have found out that the drops are far too generous for both
a) Instability Cache items
b) Affixed items in general
Thus, creating an easy early-game snowball that saps the reward feeling from acquiring powerful items. The first consideration was to simply lower the drop rates to something minuscule, like three percent for both rolling an affixed item and getting an instability cache (tier-dependent, with low-tiered caches and affixes dropping more frequently). But this creates an undesirable state of being forced to grind for possibly useless affixes.
One solution to this would be to introduce a rolling accumulation system, wherein the players' chance for each sub-category of item caches and affixes silently ticks up on the server side. Take, for example, low-tiered affies.
The player or group starts out with a base chance of rolling an affixed item at three percent; each subsequent failed drop increases the chance by one percent until a successful drop, creating a soft-pity mechanic that slightly nudges the bell curve towards success. The same applies to instability caches. Due to their large values, they should have their own background tracker.
This system shall not apply to all tiers of loot and caches at the same time. We shall segregate them by tier and tune chances per encounter level. So that higher-tiered mobs drop low-level affixes more frequently, while introducing their individual chances at high-tier enchants.
We should keep a small chance to roll absurdly powerful items at the overlap zones, so T1 mobs could have a 0.01% chance of yielding a T4 cache or item, but the accumulation value should be much lower.
Furthermore, we should enhance the UX by introducing an instability aura on the player. As their cumulative chance to drop any item rises (instanced per zone or dungeon), their received damage and dealt damage increase, creating momentum that resets upon a successful drop or death. This creates a problem with high-tier affixes, as low-tier ones are now much more likely to drop, so we need to separate them once again and possibly ignore them while building up momentum.
I would advocate for not building up this momentum mechanic while farming regular mobs, or perhaps keeping the accumulation low. Mutated mobs should be the primary focus for this mechanic.
First implementation in #10
After playtesting, I noticed a critical bug with how we're resetting the pity aura. Even after rolling successfully past the gate, loot on the corpse is not guaratteed.
Meaning the player can pass the check but receive no reward.