Question about Epic monster drops.

[Leanna]

Okay so, I noticed materials will drop after destroying certain body parts, like the horns and spikes or the armor bits.

My question is, what am I supposed to do to get the highest amount of materials? Am I supposed to destroy all the body parts that drop loot and then harvest the strand? Only harvest the strand? Destroy body parts and kill normally? Or just kill normally?

[Cahalith]

My impression has been you should kill bosses normally while they're tempered (i.e. kill them with fire or ice, respectively) to maximise rewards and reward quality. I'm not 100% certain, but I think loot from destroying armour, horns etc. isn't drawn from their main loot table, so you can probably get the most out of it if you temper and destroy body parts and then temper and destroy the boss itself.

[Leanna]

Originally posted by Cahalith:

My impression has been you should kill bosses normally while they're tempered (i.e. kill them with fire or ice, respectively) to maximise rewards and reward quality. I'm not 100% certain, but I think loot from destroying armour, horns etc. isn't drawn from their main loot table, so you can probably get the most out of it if you temper and destroy body parts and then temper and destroy the boss itself.

What counts as tempering? Dealing the killing blow with fire or cold damage? Do mobs encased in ice count as tempered? I have only experienced the demo so far and I plan on buying the game but I found this a tiny bit confusing.

From what I saw the easiest way to temper enemies is just kill them with fire including the breath, but I haven't tried that with body parts.

[Suzaku]

I never quite deeply understood the tempering thing, but I can say with certainty that if you want more materials from a boss, kill it. Harvesting gives significantly less materials, and should only be done if you need it to upgrade your spells, or for a quest.

[Cahalith]

Originally posted by Leanna:

What counts as tempering? Dealing the killing blow with fire or cold damage? Do mobs encased in ice count as tempered?

I posted my personal experiences with farming bosses for materials in this thread, though needless to say I might be wrong about everything I posted there since it's all conjecture based on my playtime with the game.

The short version is: I don't know about normal enemies, but my experience has been that as long as you deal the killing blow with the respective element, I think it counts as tempered. In my experience, tempering things like the armour pieces on boss arks and then bashing them off also seems to increase the quality of some materials you get from them, though other people in the thread I linked say this may not be the case, or it may just increase the chance to drop a high-level material, but untempered armour pieces can still drop them. Also keep in mind that tempering enemies with fire destroys low-level woven and tanned resources, while killing them with ice destroys low-level forged and carved resources.

[Leanna]

Originally posted by Cahalith:

Originally posted by Leanna:

What counts as tempering? Dealing the killing blow with fire or cold damage? Do mobs encased in ice count as tempered?

I posted my personal experiences with farming bosses for materials in this thread, though needless to say I might be wrong about everything I posted there since it's all conjecture based on my playtime with the game.

The short version is: I don't know about normal enemies, but my experience has been that as long as you deal the killing blow with the respective element, I think it counts as tempered. In my experience, tempering things like the armour pieces on boss arks and then bashing them off also seems to increase the quality of some materials you get from them, though other people in the thread I linked say this may not be the case, or it may just increase the chance to drop a high-level material, but untempered armour pieces can still drop them. Also keep in mind that tempering enemies with fire destroys low-level woven and tanned resources, while killing them with ice destroys low-level forged and carved resources.

How do you kill enemies with ice? Is there a damaging ice mage unlocked later on?

[Cahalith]

Originally posted by Leanna:

How do you kill enemies with ice? Is there a damaging ice mage unlocked later on?

Yes, there are two more ice spells aside from ice wall, which you unlock later. I'm pretty certain killing bosses with the frost mine probably counts as tempering them. I assume the third one also counts as ice damage for the purpose of tempering, though I admit I never really used that one much. There're also weapons which have special abilities that probably count as frost damage.

But again, keep in mind all of this may be wrong. Maybe it already counts as frost tempering to kill an enemy who is affected by ice wall? I didn't do extensive tests on that one, I just wrote down how it felt to me after grinding bosses a bunch.