Editing Forum:New Monster Template Needed

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 | Text = Hi,
I suggest a new template for Creature Profiles.

* Common Attacks
* Melee Weakness 
* Missle Weakness (may be the same as melee)
* Magic Weakness (elements will differ from melee/missle elements on certain monsters)
* Drain Weakness (Does draining or martyring help or show significant decrease to monsters health?)
* Void DoT (a good monster to Void DoT?)
* Has Weapon and is vulnerable to Item Enchantment Debuffs? Y or N?

something like that, what do you guys think?


wish there were someway to throw salvage in there but I think that'd clutter it too much. 

-Synabuns

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 | Text = Hi, those are good suggestions, I'll work on getting them included in a new template. And I agree that it would be nice to have some sort of salvage information availability/drop rate info available on the wiki. It's not a task amenable to doing by hand though, we'll really need to have some sort of auto data compilation via a plugin. I'll see what we can do (or perhaps go the route of selecting a subset of information based on utility rather than including everything when 90% of it isn't that important).

--{{User:Tlosk/Sig}} 21:34, 9 February 2011 (EST) 
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I'm not sure how much of this is actually needed as an update to the [[Creature Template]].

* ''Common Attacks'' - We have a common attacks field. What do you feel is missing from this/how could it be better used?

* ''Melee Weakness, Missle Weakness (may be the same as melee), Magic Weakness (elements will differ from melee/missile elements on certain monsters)'' - Again, we have a weaknesses field. I would guess that for the vast majority of creatures, the weaknesses are the same for all three forms of attack. For those that vary, in the weakness field you could enter, for example, ''"Fire (Melee, Missile), Slashing (Magic)."'' I don't see the need for three separate fields when they will be identical in most cases, and the ability to further specify is already there.

* ''Drain Weakness (Does draining or martyring help or show significant decrease to monsters health?)'' - I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this. Do you mean the Drain Resistance/Immunity of a creature? If so, again I am not sure that this warrants an entirely new field on the template, since most creatures have no drain resistance/immunity. Since it is relatively rare, it can be placed in the notes area, like it is on [[Acidic Diamond Golem]].

* ''Void DoT (a good monster to Void DoT?)'' - I've not yet played a void character, so I don't know what this is all about. Could you elaborate?

* ''Has Weapon and is vulnerable to Item Enchantment Debuffs? Y or N?'' - While a large number of creatures wield weapons/shields that we can debuff, its only actually useful to do so on a handful of high level and/or boss creatures. So again, I do not think this needs a new variable in the template, but rather an item in the notes list.


To sum up my thoughts:<br />
While we could add every conceivable creature statistic to the Creature Template, this would create a huge area (visually) of wasted space. The only variables in [[Template:Creature]] should be those that are common enough to include on every creature page. Further granularity can be achieved by using the notes section. This does not mean that the creature template is perfect and nothing should be added to it, but rather we should think about the impact it will have on all creature pages.

--[[User:An Adventurer|An Adventurer]] 02:46, 10 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = That's very true, the cases are few enough that all that information can be kept to the notes section for those creatures where it is important.

I finished a mockup up of a subpage that can show loot characteristics including salvage. This isn't something that every creature would need (low spawn creatures and bosses would best be skipped), but it might be useful for creatures in flood dungeons or that drop useful salvage. I'd include an icon link (perhaps of an Ust) in the regular creature template, it would check to see if the subpage for that creature exists and display normally if it does or grayed out if it doesn't. See an example at [[Tusker Guard/Loot]].

The template format would be something like [[Template:Creature Salvage|this]].

Also the template would create invisible links similar to the locations (dungeon/landscape/POI) such that we could place a set of links on each salvage page that would give lists of creatures that drop it (very common, common, uncommon).

This is just a rough layout so please give feedback if you think something should be changed around or added.

--{{User:Tlosk/Sig}} 03:44, 14 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = I really like the salvage layout, maybe we should go to the decal developer community and see if someone would be willing to write a plugin that we could run that would output creature drops into an xml or something.  

--[[User:Immortalbob|Immortalbob]] 04:01, 14 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = I'm working on one myself right now. I did some statistical analysis on a couple of creatures and it takes about 500 items to get a high confidence set of values for %s. So it's not that much. --{{User:Tlosk/Sig}} 06:06, 14 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = let me know, i'll run it on whatever i hunt.  what would be even cooler would be if it could output the wikicode all filled in for whatever creature it reaches 500ish items on.  quick c&p --[[User:Immortalbob|Immortalbob]] 00:14, 15 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = That looks really good. I have a few suggestions:

* In the Loot Parameters area, it would be nice to include what tier of loot the creature drops. Based on that value, e.g. Loot Tier = 5, we could auto-categorize the page with [[:Category:Loot Tier 5]] - this same category system could be applied to chests as well.

* Since the page is titled <Creature>/Loot, why not include the trophy listing here, even if it is just a duplicate of the trophy info on the main page?

* Instead of [[:Category:Creature Salvage]], the main category for this should probably be [[:Category:Creature Loot]], since its focus isn't entirely salvage.

And I have a question - does loot/salvage vary between creatures of the same loot tier? Will a tusker that drops tier 3 loot and a golem that drops tier 3 loot have the same or differing salvage? Because if salvage is the same, we could have a master template for each tier, instead of having to set all the variables for each creature.

--[[User:An Adventurer|An Adventurer]] 02:23, 15 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = Good suggestions. A new iteration is at [[Gold Shallows Shredder/Loot]]. It will also add a category "Prodigious Loot" if the creature drops a lot of items (more efficient looting since more items per kill). From what I've seen so far it seems there isn't any sort of standard loot profiles according to tier (with more data patterns may emerge).

I added a section for the armor types that the creature drops (similar to the salvage I'll be able to add a link to the armor pages that bring up a list of creatures that drop that armor type).

Also we don't really have to kill ourselves trying to get these done for lots of creatures, I think it will be useful as long as each salvage type has at least a couple of easy to find creatures that come up in the lists. And since we're using a template it will be easy for casual editors to make changes if they notice something that drops.

I won't be making the template for a week or two so if anything thinks of anything else let me know.

--{{User:Tlosk/Sig}} [[User:Tlosk|Tlosk]] 10:47, 18 February 2011 (EST)
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 | Text = Has there been any movement on this?  --[[User:Immortalbob|Immortalbob]] 23:22, 25 July 2011 (EST)
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