This was originally a reply but I decided this needs it own thread. EQ2's loot RNG for loot is terrible. I've seen heroic myths drop more often, in my groups not the global message to be sure, than fabled items I am purposely shooting for from heroic zones. I am falling backwards onto myths while I can't even see, not win, SEE the fabled items i am gunning for drop. I spend more time raiding than grouping and I have seen more myths drop than tank ears off virtuoso that we have been killing since last year. I ran a group DOMINATING contested ossuary names for 4 hours the other day with only a lesser heal focus drop to show for it. These are just RECENT examples. This is unique to EQ2 in my experience, other games yeah sometimes the thing you want doesn't drop right away, but it doesn't take 10 or more runs to even confirm it exists by dropping. Why should I continue to spend time doing these things? For some sliver of hope the RNG won't be complete garbage at least once? Something really needs to be done to either offset these occurrences like merchants selling the loot if you have the kill achievement and tons of currency, or maybe special currency from that specific mob that lets you purchase items from his lot table. Maybe something to normalize loot drops right down to the player, not just making sure it drops the amount its supposed to 'game wide'. If everyone in the group has ran a zone plenty of times but seen an item with 25% chance only drop once, its drop chance is increased until it approaches close to 25% rate averaged out across the group members (apply to raids as well). There are numerous other ways it could be helped and only a few ways to make it wore but that just shows how much of a problem this is. More loot patterns, loot dropping in individual chests instead of shared, quests that get you the item you want, transmuting loot you don't want into special currency to buy stuff you do want. The list of possible solutions goes on. Whatever method is chosen to improve the situation needs to be in DAY ONE of content release, not 4-6 months in. Yes I know the difference between drop rate and drop chance and how they play out mathematically. The point is in practice the drop rate is supposed to be close to the drop chance, ideally down to the individual character. This isn't a casino where if by the end of the day the overall numbers line up so everything is fine. If each player doesn't see the relatively same rate they are getting a completely different experience of the video game based off chance. That's insane. Not wanting to control the player experience as much as possible to help ensure quality is insane to me. "hey lets make the chances of the player having a good time a gamble" this is not a good idea. The RNG is not fun. Its not interesting. Its not cute. Its not a special quirk EQ2 has that makes it unique. Its not 'cool' when you have dry spells and sudden streaks of loot. Its frustrating and maddening and I know for fact I'm not the only one that feels this way because every time it comes up all new people chime in about how its terrible. And its not 'sour grapes' over not getting loot, people can recognize relatively large differences in occurrences. You don't need to be a genius to see one thing happens a lot and a second thing happens a little when compared to each other. When I run a zone 15 times not seeing the supposedly, relatively common item i want even drop it makes me want to to quit running heroics outright.
I agree 1000% with this post and something should be done...i like the feel of progress that i can work towards a item rather than hope that it will drop for me.
I wouldn't mind it being a long grind either like 20k ferrin plus requiring the achievement that you have cleared the zone in order to buy the item.
The loot merchants should be added in earlier rather than at the end of the expansion when all of your gear will become obsolete anyway. They don't need to have everything, like mythicals, but require the kill achievement to purchase certain items and make them cost a lot of currency. Maybe they think people won't run zones as much because of this, but I think it would have the opposite effect. A lot of people get discouraged from running zones because they feel like they will never see a certain item, and if they do, they will lose the roll on it anyway. And because of the high cost of the items, people would have to run a lot of zones to purchase them. It may reduce the amount of traffic to some zones, but overall I think more people would run heroics if they were at least guaranteed something that they want, instead of being so dependent on RNG.
Overall I think having a clear path to get items like a loot merchant with the RNG drops as a pleasant surprise at a chance to get it earlier is best. The RNG would be seen so much more positively as well. I don't think myths should be on a merchant either but outside of that it should be total otherwise it runs the risk of being completely useless after only getting a few items, then you are back to RNG grinding. There are numerous ways this could be improved upon which just goes to show how poor the system is. RNG loot in EQ2 is like a busted up car where even liberal use of duct tape would be an improvement.
I agree. Some really cool loot (mythical hats, mythical bow/wand from castle that have very low drop chance) should be random, All other items - should be able to be bought for currency as well as being dropped. But for example you'll need an achievement of clearing all the instances in the expansion for that + currency amount that is correlating with the rareness of the item (25% chance drop item from easy zone should cost less than 5% chance drop item from the same zone, and less than 25% chance drop item from the harder zone). This system was working pretty well in previous expansions. But this expansion seems really underdone - no solo/heroic green adorns, heroic instances were uber hard at start of expansion, blocking progress for many people, there is nothing to spend shards for - I have around 7k already - and I don't know where to spend them (and I am not running instances every day - I do it once a week and play only for last 1,5 months), in previous expansion you had mount for 3k shards at least - that was quite cool. Solo instances do not drop anything interesting - even no potions for fastening spells research... Nameds in contested zones drop nothing interesting as well. Update for mana consumable things landed too late - they should be dropped from dungeons since the start of expansion - and shouldn't be able to be bought from vendor for loyality points. That is one more dumb thing. That you can get mana just doing nothing (exploring, killing solomobs for 5 days - and you can win up to 5 mana - superdumb!!!!) Is was so cool when you have ethereal loot dropped in contested dungeons. Now it's gone. New blue adorns even doesn't work as they should. And that is only about solo/heroic content.... But there is one cool thing that I really liked in this expansion: Collections give cool item!!! That was missed since TSO when you got nice earring from all rare collections (not mentioning fast collection from the fabled zones in last expansion - it was not so cool..,). I hope in future expansions this trend would remain.
Bring back TSO merchants. Could buy anything if one had enough tokens. RNG is upsetting, especially so many months in an xpac.
Cyan adornments were great for the one or two weeks after they had an update to increase the drop rates. But then they came back shortly after that and added in the new and better Cyan's and the drop rate is back to terrible. It was such a tease to have an update that specifically increased the drop rate and then with in what it seemed weeks the drop rate is returned to being rare as hell.
I have been nagging about this for a while. And while I obviously don't know for sure, the behavior of the loot drops based on what I've observed is consistent with a non-pure rng process, meaning that the rng process is being weighted to conform to desired probability distributions. I suspect the tinkering with drop probabilities is one way DBG can indirectly constrain progression through the content, and in my opinion, it's pretty annoying.
I could literally write a novel about this, but it is just overall terrible itemization. The reason RNG looks so bad is that 90% of the loot is just useless loot. For instance on Virtuoso there are 2 items on that table that people want, 1 being completely useless and the other a marginal upgrade that goes for min bid dkp. The 2 useful items are specifically for tanks, and the other for WDB goes to freaking everyone. So after 1 year if everything is perfectly even 12 peices are auto trashed cuz it sucks, 12 items are min bid cuz why not (12 is overly generous), 3 or 4 are used for tanks and the rest are sold, and 12 wdb items are used b/c they are actually good. With this itemization setup you are expected to be disappointed on 32 of your 48 raiding weeks........That is just LOLOLOLOL. The DEVS have no idea how to properly itemize things. It is quite amazing tbh, since it would literally take a couple days to make it work. We keep getting apologies for prior mistakes and they keep making the same mistakes. We now have crit mit again in the form of resistances (apologized for but brought back), they have made Charms nonupgradable b/c of poor mechanics decisions (Sigil of the War Prince, pretty much all Kerafym type charms), and they are going to put set bonuses on items again which they got rid up b/c of F'ing upgrading issues into future expansion. These weren't previous dev decision these were current dev decisions making the same problems over and over again. This doesn't touch 99.9% of the stupid itemization issues they are creating. You can go slot by slot, drop by drop and go WTF are they thinking.
I have noticed trends as well. One being when new items are introduced they drop like candy for the first day or two. Ethereals in TOV were a good example of this. The other is pretty high paranoia but I suspect they use a method, perhaps the hidden gearscore they mentioned having a while ago, so the better items have less of a chance to drop for better equipped characters. Kind of a 'redistribution of wealth' using the loot RNG. When I farm with guild groups our loot is horrendous, but when I run with pugs suddenly good stuff starts dropping. Two myths in 3 dungeons. vulnerability ears. Weapon patterns. Then we see raid guilds further down in progression have more of the 'good raid items' than we do when we kill the mob more often, which is just ridiculous. So not only is what choices we make gear wise limited because of the RNG, in a lot of cases it seems it can even work against you. Itemization itself hasn't been too bad outside of weapon choices imo. The virtuoso health charm is exceedingly useful where more defense is called for, just like the sigil of the war prince. 'Perfectly even' on a player or guild basis would be an insane upgrade. I'm seeing rates where items don't even drop 5% of the time. GAME WIDE i'm sure the rate is closer to normal, but that doesn't comfort the majority of players who see the rate lower than that. And IT IS the majority that see a rate lower than set unless its set higher than 50% or normalized on a per player basis. I still remember raiding pirate kings for over 3 months before one bow dropped, I even had a chance to bring it up at a SOE Live and the devs just said that was odd since it should be weighted the same as the other items. But I did get to hear about other guilds who havent even been farming them as long with multiple bows.
The Sigil of the War Prince nets the raid like 900k for each player if every wears them and is gained 100% of the time from the easiest raid zone. The virtuoso charm isnt even 10% of that.........NO ONE is wearing it unless they are dumb.
I didn't say they were interchangeable, I said its useful in the same situations. Its 10k more HP for every member, so just one is 10k*24 HP raid wide, then multiply that by how many people wear it. Then realize it gets various HP boosting stats, like sigil of the warprince, applied to it so its much more than what it says.
This really does get frustrating and is not a new problem. Who remembers Pirate Kings weapons? 2 weapons a drop and the guild that killed it 1st worldwide never ever got a brawler weapon in the expansion. That means all of Splitpaw didn't get one until the day they released the merchant to trade in patterns for it, when we auto assigned the 2 drops to the 2 brawlers. We're now seeing it with a few items this expansion. Bolster charm from x2s, purple mage armor, red mage bp, Amplifying energy III ring, Amplifying criticals II, Firm Stance III wrist. I had a friend from another guild on the server asking if we only killed a mob once because they got discos off it despite us having killed it ages ago, nope, terrible RNG.
^ We've had plenty of Mage BP's, Amplifying Criticals II and Amplifying Energi III items. We did get disco on the Mage cast speed legs last week or so though after god knows how many serverwide kills.
A few more months and we'll be past the "but these items drop off entry level mobs, so its okay" argument!* *Not directed @ you Chronus. Some people said some (very) stupid things in another thread discussing this exact problem posted on expansion release. You were simply the first post that mentioned select jewelry items posing problems this expansion, and how it will continue to be a problem moving forward.
Lol we haven't had mage legs at all yet. We've had leather go to alts though. I guess splitpaw is balanced in drop rates, you get exactly 50% of the loot 100% of the time and we get the other 50% of the loot.
Not really about being paranoid, just pragmatic with a touch of cynicism . Drop rates are just one way to manage content consumption, which ultimately means subscription fees and sc purchases (this is, after all, the primary objective for DBG and the reason it exists). I am no so much sniping about the fact they may be doing it, as I am about the appearance that they are being too aggressive with their constraints.
I'm holding a blind hope that the new vendors mentioned in the DLC will sell some of the dropped loot, at least loot contained within the DLC itself if not the whole xpac. Exactly. If they are controlling the drop rates to slow down progression its being done very poorly and I think the cost of displeasing so many players has limited benefits. Even if we got everything we wanted off the current loot tables I doubt we would have progressed much faster. As a matter of fact it has already been proven encounter design does this at a much greater rate since for example the last encounter in cathedral of bones was intended to be killed sooner than it was. Slowing down progression by making loot drops severely lopsided would be a terrible idea and I really hope this isn't what is going on. With no levels or infinite AA's to gain, good loot is the best and one of the few ways to trigger the feeling of reward or accomplishment, to toy with that and make it unreliable is just irresponsible from a business standpoint.
