Game Mechanics: It appears NPC's in hate should pickup Book of Souls

[Rygar]

Keep in mind not all monsters picked up items, could only be clerics for example and perhaps only a certain level range. Maybe they also only searched for ground items every 2 ticks in a specific radius.

So possible the roamer may never pick up the item, but maybe if there was the unlucky combo and they searched in the sweet spot then yeah they could.

All needs testing to determine mechanic

[Elroz]

The item pickup scans were fairly quick, there was a quest involving Hansl Bigroon in qeynos called "The Bridge" that you had to watch an item spawn and grab it before he could pick it up. It only showed up for about a second, sometimes less.

[nilbog]

I did preliminary testing of npcs picking up ground items a while ago. If people can fill in edge cases to finish requirements that'd be great.

Here were my findings:

For these tests, I used Jracol Brestiage in qeynos2, and Nillipuss in rivervale.

-npcs that pick up items will pick up dropped items regardless of their type. They can be norent (summoned:black bread), they can be magicial (blackened iron armplates)
-the timer seems to be somewhere between 4.5 and 6 seconds. I used a stopwatch to test.
-the radius of pickup seems the same for the npcs who pick up items. somewhere around 48-50 distance (using #dist).
-when an npc picks up items, it picks up ALL available items within range, providing a text response for each when picked up.
-npcs also pick up items if they are in combat.

[Chortles Snortles]

i love this

[Elroz]

I forgot to go back and find this npc to add to my list of item pickups, he's in OOT.

[Tue May 31 16:29:33 2022] Endan Halson picks up something from the ground.

[Jimjam]

Are all the classic posters being entirely honest in their reports of “book not up”?

Could it not be someone swiped the item and blamed it on a mob?

Could team up with a necromancer using voicegraft to make the swindle extra convincing?

It seems a good smoke screen for rogue shenanigans, especially if it was a real thing for a short while.

[Elroz]

Speaking to the rogue book specifically. If PoHate was like PoFear, only 1 type of NPC did item pickups. It sounds like it was the cleric of innoruuk. So that would mean a cleric of innoruuk had to be within a certain distance of the book to pick it up, and if it was a roamer, it would have to have done the scan/pickup within the time it pathed by. I'm not sure how many exact spawns would qualify as to being culprits. Could have been a rare occurrence. I don't believe they added it as a way to make the rogue epic harder, I think they added the item pickups to hate/fear because of mod rods and the book pickup was a side effect. Phoboplasms still pick up items to this day, I didn't test PoHate because the zone has been re-done a few times and just assumed all the old mechanics were removed.

[Rygar]

Originally Posted by Elroz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Speaking to the rogue book specifically. If PoHate was like PoFear, only 1 type of NPC did item pickups. It sounds like it was the cleric of innoruuk. So that would mean a cleric of innoruuk had to be within a certain distance of the book to pick it up, and if it was a roamer, it would have to have done the scan/pickup within the time it pathed by. I'm not sure how many exact spawns would qualify as to being culprits. Could have been a rare occurrence. I don't believe they added it as a way to make the rogue epic harder, I think they added the item pickups to hate/fear because of mod rods and the book pickup was a side effect. Phoboplasms still pick up items to this day, I didn't test PoHate because the zone has been re-done a few times and just assumed all the old mechanics were removed.

I'm sure in old world there are cases of no-drop ground spawns showing up, isn't there a wizard wheel quest where you pickup items? Are they no-drop? Quite simply if the zone is not really updated and there are no-drop ground spawns there, just drag over a mob that you know picks up items and see if they pick it up.

Would be wise to drop a control item near the no-drop item and validate they pick that up but not the no-drop item.

If someone can list off some items I can test myself, can't recall no-drop ground items off the top of my head. I think there is a scroll in Dalnir for enchanter epic?

[Elroz]

NPC's still pick up no-drop items, Hansl Bigroon is the good example for that. The list he drops and picks back up is no-drop. I just meant each plane only had 1 npc type that seemed to pick items up, fear was phoboplasms and hate was cleric of innoruuk. I was more curious how often the clerics of innoruuk actually went near the book of souls, where they might have picked it up. If there was only 1 roamer that pathed near enough to pick it up, and that roamer had a chance of being multiple npc types, then it might have been a really rare occurrence.

[Rygar]

Originally Posted by Elroz [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

NPC's still pick up no-drop items, Hansl Bigroon is the good example for that. The list he drops and picks back up is no-drop. I just meant each plane only had 1 npc type that seemed to pick items up, fear was phoboplasms and hate was cleric of innoruuk. I was more curious how often the clerics of innoruuk actually went near the book of souls, where they might have picked it up. If there was only 1 roamer that pathed near enough to pick it up, and that roamer had a chance of being multiple npc types, then it might have been a really rare occurrence.

I would still test with a random ground spawn in the off chance npcs could only pick up designated / certain quest items but not others