In my opinion, Anthem loot rates are correct up to Grandmaster 1. Every difficulty should have a purpose:
- Easy - for people who find Normal too hard, or perhaps people soloing
- Normal - go through the initial story
- Hard - finish levelling to max, equip Javelin with epics
- GM1 - replace epics with masterworks
- GM2+ - replace masterworks with better versions
I think that GM1 loot rates are fine for that primary job. It won't take you very long get masterworks for most of your slots. At which point you should move up to the next level.
It's like Torment I in Diablo 3. Torment I doesn't actually drop that many legendaries, probably a bit less than one per rift. You farm Torment I until you have legendaries for most slots, and then you move up.
Anthem, however, does make that last stage, where you are chasing better versions of your masterworks, more difficult than it needs to be. I do think that drop rates in GM2 and especially GM3 could be increased a fair bit.
I also think the community outcry is excessive. It's been two days, over a weekend. I think it's unreasonable to expect a response on an issue like this so soon.
In some ways, maybe this is Bioware's fault for trying to respond to earlier issues so quickly. Rather than giving them credit for that fast response time, it's just conditioned the audience to expect that, and become upset when responses don't appear that fast.
I agree, but I switched to Hard for most of the story to tier up faster. Loot felt good and kept me interested until I was in MW gear.
ReplyDeleteI’ve soloed titans and other events and dungeons above GM1 in freeplay but I just can't seem to justify not playing in GM1 (regardless of mode). I find that it just takes so much more time above GM1 with little to no extra apparent reward that I am better off running multiple GM1 instances. Perhaps with a dedicated team things would run more efficiently. Or perhaps my small pool of GM2+ encounters was unlucky, but it seemed consistent with the community response - flooded with Epics.
Perhaps I'd be more interested in GM2+ if it only dropped a dozen or so MW+ or if Epics had a decent chance to produce MW Embers, but even a Legendary scraps for a single MW Ember so this seems unlikely. White/green is gone, but blue/purple means every bit as little to me now so I don't see that as solving anything. My return to Fort Tarsis involves scrapping each of dozens of drops without really looking too closely at any of them. Sometimes I'll keep an Epic if I notice it's for another titan that I haven't used. I wish that I could double-click an item to (un)lock it (preventing scrapping while locked) and then hold a key to scrap all items.
I tried crafting several MW with absolutely no luck and I wasn't trying to replace anything special. I figured I could buy some embers to keep trying only to find out that it's 75,000 coins per attempt, which seemed like a bad deal given that I had just scrapped a half-dozen attempts and coins increase so slowly. Same experience trying to replace an Epic support but with far more failed attempts and so far still no success. So it seems to me that there is enough breadth of undesirable inscriptions that flooding people with MW at the GM level wouldn't hurt anything at all. And in the end, MW still have to be replaced by Legendaries with the same breadth of inscription pool.
Legendary drop rate is probably fine since those should be the chase items and they're rare enough to be somewhat exciting when they drop but I think there should definitely be more MW to help maintain a sense of progress through the inscription pool and better facilitate progress into GM2+ strongholds. This might help enable more exploration of builds and give people more options of how to play their titan within the same content of their desired difficulty.
Anyway, I think loot drops are only part of the equation with their scaling system being another significant variable. Take the Level 1 Defender "feature", for example. Scaling can be a good thing but not if it breaks through barriers that should remain in place. A Level 1 Defender shouldn't be able to out-DPS a MW in the same javelin. Similarly, the scaling of hitpoints between GM2 to GM3 (multiplicative) shouldn't make what looks like a good gear damage upgrade (additive) effectively insignificant. Plus, damage numbers rarely seem to reflect what is on the gear such that they may as well be entirely random and so the gear inscriptions feel as though they may be irrelevant.
That said, I'm not sure that the community will ever not complain about loot or endgame. If it becomes easier to gear up in top tier MW inscription rolls, but difficult to get similar Legendaries people will very soon want improved Legendary drops. If Legendaries then drop like MW, there will quickly be nothing to aim for and people will tire of existing content, complain about a lack of endgame, and demand rarer items than Legendary. I've already seen a call for Ancient items.
Maybe the biggest challenge isn't for the devs to "fix" the loot so much as it is for players to enjoy the gameplay and skill-based (rather than loot-based) challenge that GM2+ provides while merely taking loot as a bonus of that experience? Hard to do in a game that so heavily emphasizes the detailed and tiered nature of its loot despite that loot's significantly obscured effectiveness.
I moved up to GM2 difficulty and after slogging through challenging content only to get a single MW I knew the loot was broken.
ReplyDeleteIt should be similar to what you say. Hard drops primarily epics with small chance of MW. gM1 drops MW with small chance of Legendary. gm2 increases legendary chance noticeably, and GM3 drops primarily Legendary items. Then there is a clear gear path.
Every purple drop is garbage soon as you start GM2. Most of GM1 too.
Currently there is no progression path for many that feels like it rewards them for their time with 4 MW javelins.
Poor planning, poor programming, whatever it is it's not that shocking though.