the tricky thing about item drops is that you want them to keep the game fun and interesting. too powerful and the game is fun for a while but eventually you lose all interest. too weak (or rare!) and the game becomes, for lack of a better phrase, stupid. overall foc succeeds greatly with a wide variety and frequency of creep drops (which is by far the game's strongest point in keeping a group of new players going) yet when it comes to bosses everything goes downhill. take at least half of the boss fights in foc (that I've seen, my apologies if there are plenty that do not follow the following). they are against X creature with stats Y big with a drop distribution chart that has been linked with some cases of suicide. if a bunch of players start afk leveling then at some point the game ("the game" is a generic game, not necessarily yours) has failed to be interesting enough for them (granted there will always be some, but the less the better). especially true with bosses. if the only thing someone took out of a boss fight was - "It didn't drop anything good" something needs work. take an ordinary fight an throw in spice. make the characters dodge streams of fire that circle around the boss. add a twist that has the party switch up their usual roles. force the party to use some active teamwork or engage with the environment in some way that requires thought. make interesting fight scenarios (the one with the orc base (horde) was perfect!). basically if a boss fight doesn't include at least a trigger or two (or some jass, whatever you're into), or at the very least, something you didn't see coming, it missed a pretty big oppurtunity, pure hack and slash boss fights are pretty lame. make the sheer difficulty of getting that good item into something that isn't "time spent doing it". doing this can be difficult (specifically: requires creativity and time - yes, hard - no) but it infinitely improves any boss fight. all this being said - include a few named characters scattered around the map with others of its kind as a quasi boss fight, for those who can't quite reach the boss but are long since bored of killing the same thing over and over (this nice addition, on the other hand, takes about 3 minutes). never underestimate easter eggs, and not everything that took time has to be the point of a quest.

as for items themselves, add a few basic sets of common drops for the newbies - if they are going to go around for the first 15-30min of the game getting to a high enough level to get to the rest of the map at least give them something to aim for. the upper eschelon's could use one or two additions for creep drops, most people seem to forget the pleasure of finding a good, albeit not boss level, item off a regular joe schmo. suggestions include: a staff which repulses and stuns every melee attacker around it once every 2 minutes (in addition to regular buffs). a bow that deals aoe damage with a rare explosive arrow. an axe which cumulitively slashes away at enemy armor (with a max negation and temporary effect), a sword which, when attacking an ally, heals them. In general items that do stuff other than grant stat buffs (although these are important too!)

Added (2010-02-03, 6:41:53 Pm)
---------------------------------------------
on minigames: you could make these a part of the actual game by tossing them into a relevant boss fight. for example take a boss thats undead, have the quest be a triggered (by player's choice) start and once begun it unleashes, to put it simply, a horde of zombies which unless fought back take over the map (can you say, zombified foc sponsor?). the game would, for a very short period of time, have a fun element of zombie survival meets medieval heroics. the characters would be initially forced to retreat against overwhelming odds. hold up in some defendable spot (like one of their bases) lose hope as they get pounded away by the zombie horde and then finally grow strong enough to fight back and confront the boss. on one hand this quest would only be fun (in every case - not just when everyone is level 120ish) if it was targeted at the strength of the pc's (always a good thing to have as a established function/method) and runs the risk of whatever bases are not defended being killed (risk being a need to make that not happen), but on the other - if done right I think many people would find it a very fun and involving quest. other examples include going through a valley littered with falling boulders (maze style) in order to reach a big chunk of the map (named anything but "The Valley of Trials") or an icy path that winds its way precariously on a chilly body of water requiring careful navigation, the ice skating trigger is one of the easiest mazing triggers to write so this one should also be no challenge to pick up.

edit: I read dc's original minigame post after writing this, didn't mean to steal his fire on the whole zombie thing.

abilities. in most rpgs the best character has been the one with the most passive crit/evasion/spell resistance/etc abilities (barring the ones with hacked/extremely op abilities) and this is usually because at some point that 1800 damage in a line spell that maxed out at level 5 just doesn't quite cut it anymore. some rpgs use spells which rely on stats (not a great idea with a tome vendor), some use spells which level up continually throughout the game. some replace or have intermittent spell upgrades via tomes. it doesn't really matter, but that 1.8k damage spell is collecting dust on the display come creeps with 10,000,000 hp (or at the very least make it look absolutely awesome).

random map events. rpgs suffer from reptivitity, especially when everything becomes about stats. its a sad fact, but there are a few curve balls you can throw in off the top of my head, and I'm sure you could think of more. have the map generate some parts in a random way. modifying the environment would require a ridiculous amount of time to do with any interesting effect, but change how the course of a boss fight goes and everything the party will be coming back for more next game (or if you keep going with the whole soul thing...). have a list of events which only have a couple occur a game. the return of a warlord, a siege of the central town, a summoner in a tower full of traps (if there ever was a good place for mini games...), . even better have some events for different level groups. for example the stampede of spiders might be exciting occur at levels 1-5, but get to 999 and spider's ain't quite so scary. this point, however, relies on the mutualistic agreement of high levels not to ruin the low levels experience (mutualistic as the low levels will be to distracted to beg the high levels for "help").