Weapons creation question -- how random?

It's a minor question, but how does the game create weapons -- I assume it's a random, automatic process? How and when does the game decide whether to create, say, a spear or a sword, and does it then slap together the characteristics at random? Thanks.

Only the game designers would know for sure. My guess would be a sort of random choice (weighted) tree. Sort of like: Drop? If, yes then what type. If weapon, then what type. If sword, then what mods, etc.

If you mean drops then I think its random. Ele monster will drop bows etc.

There is some randomness. However, there are also some rules

Certain monsters will drop certain types of weapons more often then others. While eles will drop bows, etc, with farming you can see patterns. For example, farming Vaetar Mesmers vs farming Raptor Assassins. The mesmers drop a lot more caster items, and the Assassins drop a lot more assassin and warrior items (though they do drop stuff the other way around as well).

Certain weapons can only drop certain places. So when you play in a different zone/area of the game, you will see different weapon apperances.

As for how the game determines it, it has been proven that what items the monsters on a map will drop are actually determined by some sort of random code related to the time stamp of when you enter a certain map. Ie, 2 different players entering the same zone (but separately as 2 instances) at the exact same time actually get the same or very similar drops from all the monsters on the map.

My best guess is that each specific foe (or perhaps its done by mobs) has some sort of drop sheet that lists the possible things it can drop. After that, it's probably more or less as Quaker described. A drop is to be selected, so a random number generator determines which drop from the drop sheet, then a secondary random number generator selects the mods from a different sheet which corresponds to the rarity of the drop. That is, first the item type is determined, then the rarity and req, then the mods. That way, if a common (meaning white) rarity is selected, the sheet for possible mods will be empty, etc.

I'm not sure that would be the best way of doing it from a computing perspective though. If it worked the way described above, each drop would require something like 7 random numbers to determine (drop? skin? rarity? req? inscription? front mod? back mod?). One possibility is there could be a functionality in the software to randomly generate a 7-tuple, but who knows. In fact, there's reason to believe this is not quite the case, as otherwise it should have been easy to change the drop system to allow inscriptions on prophecies and factions weapons.

Interesting. Thanks for the replies.

My guess is that it's extremely similar to D2's drop system, given that a lot of the same people worked on both and the behavior seems very similar.

It would seem that all creatures have lists of what they can drop, with rarity assigned to it (for example, in the Echovald forest, you can observe common drops of amber staves and wands and similar, and rare drops of shields and axes).

While monsters of different professions could be different, the only actual difference I have observed was that monsters only drop tomes of their own professions.

Apart from that, I've seen staves drop off melees and so on, so I doubt the lists are different within the monster "families".

I seem to have days where certain things drop...yesterday was runic hammer day (have had bow days too--in the same area that the hammers dropped!).
no idea why or how it happens that way---