Treasure caskets, reworked — rarer chests, augmented gear

Treasure caskets on retail are a shrug. A chest pops, it is usually the blue one, you take three temp items you will never use, and you go back to pulling. We tore the whole thing down and rebuilt it around one idea: a chest should be a moment, and the moment should pay.

The chance

Any experience-yielding mob you kill, in any of the sixty zones that have caskets, can be hiding one. On DriftwoodXI that happens 2.5% of the time — about one kill in forty, a quarter of retail's rate. Chests are deliberately rare here.

What changed is which chest you get. Retail almost always gives you the blue box of temporary items; the brown locked one, the one with real gear in it, is a 15% sliver. Here it is 75% — three chests in four are locked.

Multiply that out and roughly one kill in fifty-three conceals a locked chest. Retail's number for the same thing is closer to one in sixty-seven. So even though you will see fewer chests overall, you will see more of the only kind that matters — and every one of them is a real find rather than a coin flip you lost.

The blue chest still shows up for the remaining quarter, still full of temp items, and it is still free.

The lock

A locked casket wants a two-digit combination, and the game tells you nothing except higher or lower — plus whatever hints you can pry out of the lock by examining it.

Retail gives you four to six attempts, which is not enough, and losing a chest you earned to bad luck is not a puzzle, it is a tax. You get eight attempts, always. Halving the range each guess cracks any two-digit combination in seven tries at the absolute worst, so anyone who actually plays the minigame gets the chest open every single time. Guess lazily and you can still blow it — that part is on you.

The chest stands around for three minutes before it fades, so open it before you pull the next thing.

What is inside

The locked chest fills all four of its slots — retail rolls a weighted one to four and usually disappoints. Each slot pulls from that zone's casket table, with a 5% chance per slot of a regional item from elsewhere in the world instead.

Then the part that makes this ours:

Every weapon and every piece of armour that comes out of a casket rolls its own augments. Not a fixed list, not a preset — generated the moment you take it, unique to that item, that chest, that kill. The same body piece out of two chests is two different items.

• Anything can roll HP, MP, the seven base stats, or elemental resistance.
• Armour reaches into a much wider pool: DEF, Evasion and Magic Evasion, Regen and Refresh, physical, magic and breath damage taken down, Fast Cast, Cure potency, Subtle Blow, Enmity up or down, spell interruption down, and — rarely — Treasure Hunter+1 or Gilfinder.
• Melee weapons roll damage, Accuracy, Attack, critical hit rate and damage, Double and Triple Attack, Store TP, Zanshin, Weapon Skill Accuracy, and a bonus to the weapon's own skill.
• Ranged weapons get their own version of that list, built around Rng. Atk. and Rng. Acc.
• Clubs and staves are the weapons casters actually carry, so on top of the melee pool they also roll Magic Accuracy and Magic Attack Bonus, Magic Damage, recast reduction on healing, elemental and enfeebling magic, and magic critical hit rate.
• Shields can roll Shield skill and Shield Mastery.

The mob you killed decides how good the roll can be. Low-level monsters give two augments at the weak end of each range. Around level 33 that becomes three, and from the mid sixties up you get the full four augments the client can display, with the ranges opening all the way up by level 75. Kill harder things, open better chests — no other lever, no currency, no grind counter.

One honest limitation: enchanted gear, the kind with a usage timer, can never be augmented. The timer and the augments live in the same place on the item, so that gear comes out of the chest plain. Everything else is fair game.

The small stuff

Slots that hand you crafting materials give four at a time instead of one, so a slot spent on ore or logs is still a slot worth spending. Arrowheads, bolt heads and fletchings come as a full stack of 99 rather than retail's 33.

Why

The whole point of a rare chest is the walk over to it. If you are going to stop what you are doing, gather the party, and play a guessing game with a box, the box had better hand you something you cannot buy on the auction house. Now it does — and because the augments are rolled and not scripted, nobody can tell you what the best possible casket piece looks like. Go find out.