Thoughts on TH and the mob drops table

[TeoTwawki]

I think eventually it will have to be overhauled rather than band-aid fixes. While that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, I want to brain dump here for the future.

• We should do away with the group type in the type mask, and give every item a non zero "slot id" instead. if multi items are in the same slot, automatically they are a group. Why? because right now the order items drop in is solely defined by the order of the rows in the table, and the way we sort the rows in the file is not accurate to how they should drop in game. With a slot ID we can sort on dropId+slotId and have that match what happens in game instead of the current dropId+itemId chaos.
• We haven't been applying TH to 100% rate grouped items, and that is correct behavior. However in groups that are not guaranteed drops I believe we should. This makes TH useless for a lot of endgame drops. TH may not apply to Okote since its a 100% rate of it -OR- a strider sword, but I believe it does apply on all those sky god drops that are grouped but decidedly not guaranteed.
• We have bugs related to item drop rates within a group not totally exactly 1000. If 2 or more items in a group each have rates under that add up to either more or less than 1000, you get undefined behavior.
• The conf setting and TH itself are likely to trip aforementioned bugs once applied to grouped drops (again, TH currently does not apply on grouped items)
• we technically don't need a rate at all anymore now that we know how TH is actually supposed to work. We could define grades (player and mob stats are done in this way) and then only store what grade of rarity the item is to assign its "bucket". However, we woudl want to make it easy for users to customize a single item without modifying buckets globally, which the current system makes really easy. This is going to take some thinking on. Maybe just keep one column in table as a drop rate override and ignore the bucket if set? Continue to keep our % and just make it fit a bucket, like we've been?
• Retail reduces drop rates on AoE kills. this was one the earliest nerfs after NA release iirc. Not strictly TH related - just in general.

[ShiyoKozuki]

TH isn't supposed to fade when you zone or change jobs either. It's an infinite duration debuff in retail.

[TeoTwawki]

I propose we start a new thread purely for enmity/claim issues, with relevant sourcing. What is being discussed effects far more than just application/removal of TH.

You can look up numerous strategies for monsters with adds via a ??? that involve having the tank pop first so they get glued to them.

I see you did provide some sources via dropbox after saying this, but in general nobody will go farther than checking the main enmity pages of the prominent wiki's and not seeing it mention these things at all before telling you to prove it or provide soem kind of corroborating source. So thanks for the links, but please in the future don't tell the team to look it up, its not that obvious a thing.

[TeoTwawki]

Add me on discord Teo I will share enmity and TH testing vids

I actually tried to DM you to thank you for posting issues earlier and discord said you were blocking

[ShiyoKozuki]

I have the "require friend to msg me" discord option. Need to accept my friend request.

[Era-Lusiphur]

Recreated thorny's tests here, with some slight additions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmGx9VHpNj0

[WinterSolstice8]

TH now persists as mentioned previously. Sources in the commit and the code for the behavior.
#3791