Well, I got this change added to run on Storm Haven currently for the past week and it seems to be working at least as well as the original way. I won't put this change on the SVN without approval from KLS or Derision or someone like that, though. I want them to see what they think first before changing something this essential that has the potential to cause issues with players.
I think that this might be a better way to handle doing loot tables. Instead of the previous way, where it used the RNG every time to select which item to check if it will drop, it would now only RNG to pick the item in the list to start checking at and then continue down the list and cycle through it until one of them is successfully picked. This just takes 1 step of the RNG out of the picture and since the RNG is known to not truely be as random as it should be, I think that would be a good thing to help make drop rates closer to being exactly what they should be.
While discussing this on my own forums, I came up with an idea that might be useful. The idea would be to write a new quest command that will let you get a list of all of the items currently on an NPC at any particular time. So, you could use it to get a list of items on an NPC at the time it is killed and then use quest::write() to write the list to a file. By doing this, you could log certain NPCs that are killed regularly and then over time you could get enough data to have a pretty clear picture on if drop rates are actually what they should be. Another use of being able to get the list of loot on an NPC would be to keep track of what drops were on an NPC when it was killed, for certain high end bosses. I know I have had cases where zone crashes were occurring due to certain issues and people wouldn't get to loot items. At least with this, I would have been able to confirm which items actually dropped or should have dropped before the crash occurred.
Now, I just gotta think of a way to get that list and make it into something that can be used in perl. Maybe exporting them to an array would work, or even just set them all into string or something.
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