Loot confuses me

[kmoustakas]

The way loot is set up right now confuses me greatly. All the random loot is basically terrible and drops higher than your level so you can't use it. Then you updated cannith crafting and now I don't even need named items because I can craft strength of constitution belt with insightful constitution.

Except weapons. Because weapons can get vorpal. At level 1.
I can have a keen vorpal with a red slot and icy burst at level 1, possibly an alchemical ritual too. Nice. But banishing, disruption etc were too strong? Named weapons are... +1 cold damage.

So since everything is so borked anyway, why can't I have a nightmare weapon? Desert sands or mangling or toxic or crusader? Why can't I have a sundering ooze or superior stability or crippling armor? I mean, even old riptide of lacerating weapons are junk now.

All I'm saying is, can I have a minimum level 1 invisibility guard item please. Thanks.

PS: nobody cares about cap stuff because every new (legendary) pack, your old gear is useless and you were gonna tr anyway so it's quite possible that your level 1 or 10 items are better than your ultra umber level 28 items

PS2: Yes, it's better than the ghostbane era but back then icy burst on wondrous reduced the minimum level into something exciting so you were still looking for them. Also, I hate you for ruining my old red fens weapons but yeah, keen of vorpal repeater is better than +2 of monstrous bane no minimum level.

PS3: Music box should have been no minimum level, it's balanced by the level of the augments. Chronoscope trinket should have been no minimum level too, obviously!

[Saekee]

Ravenloft kind of killed a lot of systems, too OP, bloated stats, free ML10 undead killer

And it was entirely unnecessary

[Drunkendex]

The way loot is set up right now confuses me greatly. All the random loot is basically terrible and drops higher than your level so you can't use it. Then you updated cannith crafting and now I don't even need named items because I can craft strength of constitution belt with insightful constitution.


FYI CC at ML 30, power level 34 is 15 enh + 7 insight.

Ravenloft is 19 enh + 9 insight + 4 qual at lvl 29

Sharn is 21 enh + 10 insight + 4 qual (IIRC) at lvl 29

And these are just ability scores. And without counting raid loot.
This is reason many complain about power creep.

Personally I have no issues with power creep, since if I wanna "challenge" I can always make up "rules".

[Chai]

I'm speculating you're on the heroic reincarnation train, as endgame loot outclasses what can be crafted for most slots.

Not as much power creep pre-20 as it would start to invalidate post-20 gear (though there still is power creep).

[kmoustakas]

I think both of you guys missed the part about 'not talking about end game'. I mentioned end game gear doesn't matter at all as it changes every new pack

[Matuse]

The one thing I miss from the Feather Of Sun days were all those cool composed affixes and suffixes that added all kinds of interesting modifiers.

Affixes and suffixes have gotten so bland and generic. No bursts, no blasts, I haven't seen banishing/disruption/smiting in forever except on the occasional legacy named item.

[Mofus]

The only issue I've had with gear, is mid epic gear. Not a lot of good stuff for levels 22-27. Maybe I'm missing some thing, but most e-star gear seems lack luster now a days. I would like to see some 24ish level loot quests.

[MaeveTuohy]

The way loot is set up right now confuses me greatly. All the random loot is basically terrible and drops higher than your level so you can't use it. Then you updated cannith crafting and now I don't even need named items because I can craft strength of constitution belt with insightful constitution.

Except weapons. Because weapons can get vorpal. At level 1.
I can have a keen vorpal with a red slot and icy burst at level 1, possibly an alchemical ritual too. Nice. But banishing, disruption etc were too strong? Named weapons are... +1 cold damage.

So since everything is so borked anyway, why can't I have a nightmare weapon? Desert sands or mangling or toxic or crusader? Why can't I have a sundering ooze or superior stability or crippling armor? I mean, even old riptide of lacerating weapons are junk now.

All I'm saying is, can I have a minimum level 1 invisibility guard item please. Thanks.

PS: nobody cares about cap stuff because every new (legendary) pack, your old gear is useless and you were gonna tr anyway so it's quite possible that your level 1 or 10 items are better than your ultra umber level 28 items

PS2: Yes, it's better than the ghostbane era but back then icy burst on wondrous reduced the minimum level into something exciting so you were still looking for them. Also, I hate you for ruining my old red fens weapons but yeah, keen of vorpal repeater is better than +2 of monstrous bane no minimum level.

PS3: Music box should have been no minimum level, it's balanced by the level of the augments. Chronoscope trinket should have been no minimum level too, obviously!


Yes to virtually all of this. Its all a bit if a shambles.

[Dunklerlindwurm]

All the random loot is basically terrible

Yes and sad enough, it is that way for a long time now.

Personally I dont even look at random loot anymore. No matter if I am Level 1 or 30. In most cases I dont even pick up Random loot to sell it. I just take the gold coins and gems because it does not fill my inventory.

Back when the Underdark expansion came out, the random loot system was great (with all the interesting names and possibilitys). But the developers know that. Because we said that again and again in numerous threads here over the last 6-7 years.

There must be a reason why they hated that loot system. What we have now is better than what we had in the ghost-bane era, no question. But compared to the great loot of the MotU era its junk.

[Goalt]

Clickies. :(

[janave]

Tiered loot systems are not exciting, hard to extend and maintain, that's why most big ARPGs use overlapping systems and tradeoffs ( on the highend stuff). In the overlapping design schema no system is abandonware, and has the chance to rarely produce super amazing stuff.

No problem with updates either, the system allows easy extension at any given level, due to the best pulls featuring tradeoffs ( no generic BiS for "all content" is produced ), and generally the stats are granular enough that a perfect affix combo + socket + metal + other system specific stat is unlikely, but it also very likely to pull somewhere in the range to get a better pull -- just by playing the game at level content, no need to farm the same quest 140 times.

Static loot missing from RNG ( hasnt been maintained), rand loot used to drop Frostbrand, Sun blade, Gauntlets of Ogrepower, Ring of regeneration, Ioun stones, etc... if these were maintained and scaled, it would help a lot making looting a lot more interesting.

[droid327]

Yeah random loot is an afterthought except for a few specific cases where random loot can drop with more useful affixes than named items or crafted. Like you said, low-level Vorpals are still good because crafted weapon tables dont give you many useful affixes, and named item scaling is capped very low at that range.

I think the most valuable random items, though, would be boots with 25/30% Striding and Master Craft to get their level as low as possible...for some reason runspeed (despite being nearly entirely just a QOL affix) is kept really inaccessible through Heroic. You cant craft 30% till the end of Heroic, augments either, named items dont drop with it till L14 outside of deprecated raid items - but for some reason random boots can still have it as low as like L7 :D

[Loromir]

Ravenloft kind of killed a lot of systems, too OP, bloated stats, free ML10 undead killer

And it was entirely unnecessary


The bloat actually started in earnest with the release of Slavelords. Before that...power creep was just that...a slow creep. Now it's a race to see how powerful items they can release.

[capsela]

The only issue I've had with gear, is mid epic gear. Not a lot of good stuff for levels 22-27. Maybe I'm missing some thing, but most e-star gear seems lack luster now a days. I would like to see some 24ish level loot quests.

Agreed. Nobody complains because they craft all their mid epic gear.

[glmfw1]

The main problem that I see with random loot is that it is too random.

DDO has 9 alignments, even if we can only play 6 of them. NPCs don't have that restriction, so behind the scenes, in theory, we should have NPC crafters of all alignments making item for loot drops. This should result in 8 out of the 9 alignments (~89% of crafters) producing fairly useful items, with synergy in the abilities. That leaves 11% Chaotic Neutral crafters... most of them will be Neutral because they have no preference between Good and Evil aims and Chaotic because they don't like following Laws for the sake of them. Only a small proportion of the CN crafters will fall into to the "Chaotic because I'm completely random" category, because they still need to maintain a basic level of sanity in order to be able to follow crafting procedures correctly. So were talking (being generous) about 10% of the CN crafters crafting at random, or ~1% of the total NPC crafting population.

On top of that, NPC adventurers and monsters (the presumable original source of most of the random loot) would either have self crafted their loot or bought it from the NPC Auction House or direct from the crafters, meaning even less of the loot would be generated completely at random, as they would pick from the 99% of useful stuff rather than the 1% completely random.

This means only ~0.5% maximum lootgen should be completely random. All the rest should be with abilities that are synergistic or of use to the same character class/build. This means that, just because an effect can go on a suffix slot it shouldn't go there if it doesn't fit with the prefix.

Each ability needs to be linked with other abilities that make sense. Rather than a random roll on Prefix, Suffix and Extra, there should be limits, e.g.

Roll 1d400

If result is 1 or 400, roll all abilities at Random
If result is 2-200 roll prefix first, then roll suffix from list of linked abilities, then roll extra from list of linked abilities if ML10+
If result is 201-399 roll suffix first, then roll prefix from list of linked abilities, then roll extra from list of linked abilities if ML10+

Roll for augment slots

Lists of linked abilities could ensure you don't end up with Healing Amp on random docents or Repair Amp on random armours or boosts to perform (bard specific) and light spells (Divine specific) on the same item, except in the rarest of cases. Generally niche items for specific builds are needed for multi-classes played by expert players who already have the crafting levels to be able to make the items themselves.
The lists of linked abilities could be fairly expansive, but at least exclude options that made no sense - you'll still end up with unusual items, but you shouldn't end up with pointless ones (or that only have one relevant ability) as happens at present.
If the abilities make sense, then the people who get them can save them for when they would be useful OR sell on the Auction House and find people wanting to buy them to actually use, rather than burn to gain crafting levels.

If the system already contains this functionality, then the lists definitely need to be seriously reviewed, as pointless combinations come up way too often and useful ones far too little.

[janave]

Ravenloft kind of killed a lot of systems, too OP, bloated stats, free ML10 undead killer

And it was entirely unnecessary

Yup, one of the stats hit hard is Accuracy (to hit),

before: Accuracy is useless
now: Can't have enough Accuracy

Max CC values: 23+11
Current named values: 33 + 16 + 8 (+2 if raid gear but that is totally fine)

The real kicker tho is deception in RNG and CC ...where things get really downhill. 16+8 ( +4 only on raid gear thats ...ok)


I am fairly sure the debuffer proc also used to drop in RNG ( at one point if i recall correctly), checking wiki:



Destroying (https://ddowiki.com/page/Destruction_(enchantment))
Found on: Armor as a Prefix

Base price modifier: +4

Effect: On Hit: Your target gains a stack of Armor Destruction.

[janave]

Looted these running epic wheloon :). I would expect more useful items from expansion content's loots... they are also RNG rolled so useful combinations are very limited. I would say they are roughly <15 heroic loot level in power right now, they bind to character (super bad thing alone), dont know if they can come with augment slots and metal flags but i guess it does not matter until they are up on par with similar level drops.

I know everyone gets excited for new stuff, but honestly these things need healthcare badly.

https://i.imgur.com/c4QpXdm.png

[kmoustakas]

Looted these running epic wheloon :). I would expect more useful items from expansion content's loots... they are also RNG rolled so useful combinations are very limited. I would say they are roughly <15 heroic loot level in power right now, they bind to character (super bad thing alone), dont know if they can come with augment slots and metal flags but i guess it does not matter until they are up on par with similar level drops.

I know everyone gets excited for new stuff, but honestly these things need healthcare badly.

https://i.imgur.com/c4QpXdm.png

Oh, those were recently nerfed to oblivion. I actually got a mythic +4 greatsword out of there but there are not even vendor trash.

[Ausdoerrt]

PS2: Yes, it's better than the ghostbane era but back then icy burst on wondrous reduced the minimum level into something exciting so you were still looking for them. Also, I hate you for ruining my old red fens weapons but yeah, keen of vorpal repeater is better than +2 of monstrous bane no minimum level.

Thinking back, the ghostbane era wasn't so bad after all, was it? It kinda killed random armors, but at least the weapons were still fun...

[Cantor]

Tiered loot systems are not exciting, hard to extend and maintain, that's why most big ARPGs use overlapping systems and tradeoffs ( on the highend stuff). In the overlapping design schema no system is abandonware, and has the chance to rarely produce super amazing stuff.

No problem with updates either, the system allows easy extension at any given level, due to the best pulls featuring tradeoffs ( no generic BiS for "all content" is produced ), and generally the stats are granular enough that a perfect affix combo + socket + metal + other system specific stat is unlikely, but it also very likely to pull somewhere in the range to get a better pull -- just by playing the game at level content, no need to farm the same quest 140 times.

Static loot missing from RNG ( hasnt been maintained), rand loot used to drop Frostbrand, Sun blade, Gauntlets of Ogrepower, Ring of regeneration, Ioun stones, etc... if these were maintained and scaled, it would help a lot making looting a lot more interesting.

ARPGs tend to do much better with this approach. I'm not sure how it'd work in to DDO.

I think the whole thing ran off track with the cannith crafting change. Crafted should never have been top tier every craft, that makes random useless. Also it paved the way for slavelords being OP and fully craftable, which made every thing after pure number bloat.

[shores11]

The only issue I've had with gear, is mid epic gear. Not a lot of good stuff for levels 22-27. Maybe I'm missing some thing, but most e-star gear seems lack luster now a days. I would like to see some 24ish level loot quests.

Borderlands - level 21 gear (carries well into level 26 or so)
Legendary Greensteel - level 25 & 26 (carries very well all the way to level 29)
Most Epic gear that is upgraded to level 20 (carriers well through levels 20-22)
Thunderholme gear (mid epic level gear)
CitW gear - Level 23 (carries well from level 23 to 25)

There are a few more.

[HungarianRhapsody]

The only issue I've had with gear, is mid epic gear. Not a lot of good stuff for levels 22-27. Maybe I'm missing some thing, but most e-star gear seems lack luster now a days. I would like to see some 24ish level loot quests.
I'm still wearing mostly Sharn level 15 gear from 22-27. There are a couple of things that I swap in, but not much.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

The one thing I miss from the Feather Of Sun days were all those cool composed affixes and suffixes that added all kinds of interesting modifiers.

I agree. That was funny to read.

[lronEnema]

Looted these running epic wheloon :). I would expect more useful items from expansion content's loots... they are also RNG rolled so useful combinations are very limited. I would say they are roughly <15 heroic loot level in power right now, they bind to character (super bad thing alone), dont know if they can come with augment slots and metal flags but i guess it does not matter until they are up on par with similar level drops.

I know everyone gets excited for new stuff, but honestly these things need healthcare badly.

https://i.imgur.com/c4QpXdm.png

I'm always pleased to get items that look like those two. They're only good for one thing - feeding, but the club is better than any of the Wheloon named gear

[glmfw1]

So... just got a random loot drop of a sceptre.
Too high level for my character (currently a wizard) to use yet, but that wouldn't be an issue if he kept it to use a bit later on.
BUT
Prefix - Acid
Suffix - Untyped/Force
Extra - Fire
Why would any crafter have made this item, given that a pure caster would probably want dedicated items for one type that they can swap as necessary (Acid sceptre, fire sceptre, force sceptre) and a part-time caster would be unlikely to specialise in 3 different spell types on top of their other specialism(s) in such a way that they'd want a smaller boost to each rather than a larger boost to one.

[SirValentine]

The bloat actually started in earnest with the release of Slavelords. Before that...power creep was just that...a slow creep.

Slave Lords was yet another big bloat, but it wasn't the start. The first bloat instead of slow creep, was Shadowfail. For example, we went from having max stat bonus of +8 at level cap 25, to having +8 stat available at level 15.

[Cantor]

Slave Lords was yet another big bloat, but it wasn't the start. The first bloat instead of slow creep, was Shadowfail. For example, we went from having max stat bonus of +8 at level cap 25, to having +8 stat available at level 15.

Those weren't even that bad, because those items had no other effects. That was all it had... some trade off.

Crafting pass took it to the next level when it matched those numbers and gave it 3 effects and let you choose them all.

[Fedora1]

So... just got a random loot drop of a sceptre.
Too high level for my character (currently a wizard) to use yet, but that wouldn't be an issue if he kept it to use a bit later on.
BUT
Prefix - Acid
Suffix - Untyped/Force
Extra - Fire
Why would any crafter have made this item, given that a pure caster would probably want dedicated items for one type that they can swap as necessary (Acid sceptre, fire sceptre, force sceptre) and a part-time caster would be unlikely to specialise in 3 different spell types on top of their other specialism(s) in such a way that they'd want a smaller boost to each rather than a larger boost to one.

Not bad for a fiend or old one warlock. Force + fire or force + acid. Soul Eater tree gets burning blood SLA so acid+fire useful for many warlocks.

[Amorais]

For a casual player like me, once you get your Ravenloft weapon, every current weapon afterwards is junk. Super easy to get and its way better than pretty much everything in the game available to a casual. I cant understand why they made this weapon so overpowered? It just doesn't fit in at all with the loot in the rest of the game.

I've found some decent trash loot in the past but finding something useful is rare.

Some of the named loot in the game is woefully bad. I mean orders of magnitude worse than even the worst trash loot for the same level.

[kmoustakas]

For a casual player like me, once you get your Ravenloft weapon, every current weapon afterwards is junk. Super easy to get and its way better than pretty much everything in the game available to a casual. I cant understand why they made this weapon so overpowered? It just doesn't fit in at all with the loot in the rest of the game.

I've found some decent trash loot in the past but finding something useful is rare.

Some of the named loot in the game is woefully bad. I mean orders of magnitude worse than even the worst trash loot for the same level.

I agree and it's a bit of a shame because there's an number of wonderful weapon in that module that they skipped or didn't make as cool as they should be.

I mean, where's the plant bane battle axe, where's the blood spear, where's the revenant's captain greatsword of the top of my head

[Saekee]

The first big bloat was Green Steel. That is why folks ran the Shroud to death. But the stats were not too bad in the context of other stuff; the ML was too low though. Alchemical was more measured and hence why it failed.

I think Estar started off with ability score bloat and the gear was too easy to get. The Estar challenge stuff was more measured and also why they flopped.

Ravenloft was an obscene bloat with freebie weapons. I have no idea why they made a weapon giveaway. It should have been a turn-in only and then it may have not been so killing of other weapons. The gear was bloated for endgame and causes the more measured CC to go extinct. It was a good response to reduce Slavers crafting costs. Keep on Borderlands has measured weapons and gear, good work there.

Later they will raise the level cap and make the same mistakes again.