I’ve written about loot, looting, crafting and some combination of them a hundred times during my decade with Destiny and Destiny 2. Today is still not a rant about crafting (more time for those later!) but something I haven’t understood Destiny’s loot philosophy in many, many years.
Why does Destiny 2, a loot box, almost exclusively have no real, meaningful loot in the wild? Almost always?
What I mean is that when you kill an enemy and an engram drops, you pick it up and it’s a piece of loot with perks and stats. How many times does this happen in a given game session? Where does are the loots from then?
- Seasonal Gear Drop β End of Activity, Rare Hidden Chests, Focus
- Dungeon Gear Drops β End of Encounter
- Raid gear drops β End of encounter, focus
- Ritual Falls β End of activity, focus
- Exotic Falls β Weekly Challenges, Xur, the end of the Lost Realm falls, the world falls but has no focus
Wellβ¦ yes, there is loot. I’m not saying there isn’t loot. But real world drops, letters drop when you kill enemies you pick up and are gear in your inventory are limited to:
- Legendary armor β which is literally useless to 95% of players due to hard stat caps
- Legendary Weapons β which were previously deliberately given lower rolls but after all this year there have been some really good ones.
Why is this happening; And why can’t things change, even a little? What I’m proposing here is a pretty basic solution. I would suggest that the gear you get from a certain activity can also drop rightβ¦ while playing that activity.
As in, killing an enemy in a seasonal activity, dungeon, raid, or strike could net you not only the extremely limited global pool, but specific weapons or armor from this activity.
I’m not saying anything should change about end-of-encounter/activity drops, focus, or even crafting in this case, just that it would be nice to farm for a specific weapon, maybe, once in a blue moon , it would drop somewhere else in an activity other than a specific encounter or after completing your tenth ritual.
Those activities intended to drop this loot must Literally drop loot in addition to the same global drop pool that we see in every PvE activity in the game. I don’t know if there is an identical solution for PvP since dropping engrams isn’t a thing, so maybe just better price period, but for PvE? It is so strange that we have had this current system for so long.
If players are telling me they need crafting to make up for the low drop rates, that would be it at least some kind of help with that, rather than limiting a whole bunch of something to 3-5 drops total. I’m not asking for everything to be random, but I can’t deny the idea that it just makes sense that killing something in a dungeon might drop a dungeon weapon from time to time. Or killing something in a raid should drop raid armor periodically.
The pushback here? This I would mainly wonder if players would be able to take advantage of the way Destiny engrams spawns work. Like before, you could just farm low level enemies to keep generating activity drops very often. Sure that’s a potential problem, but I also think there should be solutions to mitigate that if it’s the only objection.
I don’t think this is a radical idea. Give players activity loot sometimes for killing enemies within that activity. But it just didn’t happen, and I can’t really understand why.
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