Guild Wars 2

In loot-based games, we always see the tradeoff between access and exclusivity.
The more accessible something is, the less exclusive and therefore the less valuable.

So in this thread, I invite you all to post your preferred ratio of access:exclusivity.

1. How often do you want different classes of items to drop?
—> Remember, the more often something drops, the less valuable it will be. If rares and exotics dropped at higher rates, many of them will end up at vendor prices. Great for buyers, bad for sellers.

2. How much gold do you want to drop?
—> This impacts on inflation, gold sinks, etc.

3. How easy should exclusive content be to obtain, in your opinion? Legendaries, dungeon armours, etc.
—> Once again, tradeoff between rarity vs. value. Imagine if everyone gets one legendary weapon of their choice for completing their personal story. Would this make you happy or unhappy?

Anyways, this is a thread to discuss the battle between access vs. exclusivity, and what people personally prefer.

I’d settle for consistency. Right now farming is quite idiotic. You are given boosters and food and armors that increase ‘magic find’, and they make crafting require items dropped by mobs. That’s fine, but after 30 minutes to an hour at a spot that drops what you need, even with boosters/food/mf gear, you don’t get much of anything because of the diminished returns. Not sure why it’s that way, but I’d rather have a steady loot drop rather than just more gold/class specific drops/etc.

That’s an interesting point. Let’s say you want a rare item from a type of monster. It has a 1 in 100 chance of dropping. (and lets say, the gods of RNG have decided that actually you’re going to get that item from the 100th monster, all things being equal.)

After killing 99 of those monsters and getting various other drops, gold and stuff, DR has kicked in to the point where actually you now have a 1/1000 chance of getting that item. So sadly you don’t get your item on the 100th monster after all.

Of course, we don’t know how the DR system works exactly. Maybe it only affects common drops. Maybe it only affects quantity and not rarity. I have no idea.

But if it does work the way I describe, then it has a very negative edge case where someone who really wants some rare thing, has quite an uphill battle trying to get it.

I am personally fine with mobs dropping blues and greens and whites.
What I would like to see is for champions and group bosses/dragons to have a higher rate of rares/exotics.
The gold drop rate is fine as it is.
I would like to see more dyes.
This is just how I feel about it

I would like to keep the drop rate the way it is but with a twist…players are rewarded for time played with a bonus drop.

So for example, every 50 hours played 1 guarenteed rare drop.

Every 100 hours played 1 guarenteed exotic.

Of course the drop may still be useless to you but it would offset the rng a bit and give players another goal/mile post etc…

The times are just for an example, they could be shorter or longer.

Like Notorious BIG said once: GIMME THE LOOT)

IMO the drop rate for <80 mats should be ALOT higher. I never understood the reasoning behind making players speed throughthe 1-80 levels and REDUCING the drop rates to near 0. Players should be gathering enoughmats to at least make their own gear in 1 craft profession possibly even both of your chosen professions. There is no reason for the crafted gear to be cheaper to buy than the mats to make it. Now at level 80 (or whatever the current cap is) that changes because you are not out leveling the gear anymore. In GW2 it’s compounded by the fact that crafting the gear will sometimes make you outlevel the gear you just crafted before even setting foot outside of town to use it.

Also I despise RNG, and in GW2 even more so because this game seems to have a 1:100000 chance of actually getting a useable drop. (FYI devs, blues and an occasional green are not even close to useable drops at 80, hell even rares are only good for salvage at 80 most of the time)

I won’t even bother killing champs/dragons let alone normal mobs in this game unless they are tied to an event because I have a better chance of winning the super lotto.

And I certainly wouldn’t spend a dime on the GemStore (other than char slots), with everything being RNG. Only a fool would give them money for an RNG box.

In short, the drop rate for getting something useful should be approx. equal to the amount of time it takes to gather karma/tokens to buy a useable item. Right now it is at least 100x faster to get the tokens to buy a piece than to ever see one from a drop. in fact the only exotics I’ve ever gotten (on 5 level 80s) outside of zone completion rewarsd is from karma/tokens. I’ve seen very few rares drop from mobs but not a single exotic, useful or otherwise.

Not to mention the Bosses and Champs STILL aren’t dropping their guaranteed loot. I see maybe 20% of all champs and bosses I kill (solo or group) ever dropping anything at all.

As for my personal preference, I like how Dark Souls balanced horiz vs. vertical progression.

Basically, the final upgrade for a weapon required a special material, which was exceedingly rare from random drops. The second-last upgrade is almost as strong stat-wise, tho, so it’s not a big deal.

However, by playing through the game normally, you could get a couple of those special materials from guaranteed locations. So everyone would always get at least enough to fully upgrade one or two weapons. If they wanted to upgrade a wider range of weapons, then they would need to farm (or play through the game again in newgame+).

So we could have a similar system in place for GW2. I always thought it was rather dissappointing that special one-time content (like completing Dierdre’s Steps) didn’t really give anything exciting. I would have liked one-time achievements like that to maybe award some special token that can be exchanged for something good (like a piece of lvl80 exotic armour.)

So yeah, imagine if you got an ascended weapon of your choice of stats (but a default skin) for finishing the personal story, you get a piece of ascended armour with your choice of stats (but again, default skin) for doing world completion / dierdres steps / various other jumping puzzles and one-time achievements. (soulbound.)

So by playing through the game and doing all of those one-time contents, you are guaranteed a single ascended weapon and a single set of ascended armour & jewelry.

If you want additional sets for different stats, or different appearances, then you have to do the various things that exist in game now for them.

I’d be quite happy with a system like that.

I am mostly OK with drop rate of rares. They are suppose to be rare after all, right? My biggest gripe with BIG chests. I do some loooong event or really hard and epic fight with some temple boss or dragon and all I get from chest is loot worth way less then raw materials I could gather in the time the event took. I mean, let’s look at Grenth. The event for the most part is just killing wave of mobs after wave but during the final fight it is not uncommon to die a lot (especially when 90% of the people have no idea how to kill shades) and after that I get few blues lvl 78. Nice, isn’t it?
Or let’s take Jormag event. Long fight, lots of deaths, lots of resses and all you get is 3 blues and some crappy crest (99% of time it is Crest of the Rabid). Oh, forgot about Arach events like Risen Wizard (or something) that spams some death rays and makes people kill themselves while activating a skill (again LOTof people does not know about it). Loot from chest? Right, again 3 blues and extra crest if you are lucky.

Now, event mobs usually drop nothing so if you die few times rewards will not even compensate WP travel and repair fees! Is it intended that 30+ min fight (often struggle) rewards you with so little? Also worth mentioning is that those events are not really farmable as they happen every few hours.

Now let’s look for fractals. Done 3 of them and it gave me total of 7 rares, some T6 mats and quite a lot of greens, actually so much I had to summon merchant coz I ran out of salvage kits. Dungeons? Sure, at least 1 rare per path, some tokens that I can use to buy stuff TO SALVAGE and 1-2g.

What happened to “PvE should be as reliable source of gear as running dungeons”? If I wanted to depend on PvE drop while gearing up my alts I would still run in lvl 10 blues while being lvl 30. That’s how drops are messed up now. I am sure it was not the case while I levelled up my first char. I remember clearly getting lots of rares as soon as I was in the rare level range.

To the OP, I can really appreciate your questions, but for me none of them really address the issue I have in this game regarding loot.

As a player I prefer a steady progression line for my character. I totally don’t mind seeing items that are ridiculous (to me personally) to achieve; like the legendary items. Simply put, I’m not going to push for one until I feel they’re more reasonable to obtain for my play style. If this never happens, well then no biggie for me!

There are two big issues that bothers me with the system ArenaNet has implemented in GW2. First, there isn’t a smooth step from the bottom of the progression line to the middle, and top. An example would be, buying exotics on the TP transition to the RNG / FotM method of obtaining Ascended equipment. An incredibly easy technique of obtaining gear to a very unrewarding way to obtain gear. I don’t find FotM RNG too outrageous, but I absolutely despise how the FotM dungeon has been implemented by gating off members of the community with ‘fractal tiers.’ However, this will be remedied once they put Ascended items up for karma, and they allow other players to join their friends in higher tiers of fractals.

Secondly, I don’t feel there’s an adequate balance between structured group events, and going out with a mob to ‘zerg.’ The amount of time spent sticking with a very long, and difficult chain of events (dungeons, long dynamic event chain, etc) just doesn’t equal the reward given. I understand there are numerous posts on these forums how individuals have made fortunes of gold by running dungeons. I’m not going to contest those methods, and how these practices affect their gameplay. Yet, for my own experience in GW2 I have never made more of a profit from running dungeons compared to the mindless events in Orr. Perhaps I’m just running the wrong dungeons.

Now to address other items such as the unbreakable choir bell; I thought the amount of backlash this item received was absurd. You can buy as many temporary choir bells as you want for an absolute reasonable price. Gambling items are meant to be fun. “Hey, I opened a few, and I got one! Neat!” The problem with these items is the fact people just don’t have self control. That isn’t ANet’s fault, that’s the consumer’s fault. I would have a huge problem with this item if say ANet stated specifically you would get one within 200 boxes, but they didn’t. No one has tricked anyone into opening / spending that amount of money on those items.

There’s a very fine balance in this game between reasonable, and unreasonable. So long as there is a reasonable method of obtaining a comparable item to the unreasonable item, I’m fine with that.

Personally, I miss gifts of the traveler. That was the main way I made money in GW1. I’ve yet to find a profitable way to make gold in GW2, but I’m sure as time goes by there will be something that allows me to purchase the items I want. Until then I’ll enjoy the game as it is.

TL:DR: The game’s RNG isn’t as atrocious as it’s made out to be. There are comparable alternative items for the difficult to obtain items. ANet provides alternatives to the difficult to obtain items, but the balance between progression in the game could be better.

most people have some sort of reasonable expectation when they are trying to do something. for example, in wow/rift i could go farm mobs for 30-60 mins, in order to get the cloth i need for a few bags, sorted. in something like lineage 2 you would farm for hours and hours for just a part of a weapon/armor and you needed several of these to make 1 and that was just a one part of even a larger grind of mats needed, this reminds of gw2 atm. if i need lets say 90 of a t6 mat, like powerful venom sac, i wouldnt even know where to start, farm risen spiders is prolly my best bet and i’d prolly be there for 2-3 hrs for maybe 5 of these mats at best and barely get anything else of use.

the drop rate of most stuff is so LOW that its more feasible to do something that gets you gold quickly and just buy it, which must be true cos of the numerous nerfs/changes made to the game via certain events/dungeons to reduce gold earning. besides dungeon bosses, and mobs i need to kill for event/karma credit, i feel every other mob is just in my way to slow me down and isnt worth killing.

-item drops for me arent such an issue since most the time they have the wrong stats/rune/look that your after they usually end up being glob fodder anyway, once again tho this ties in with complimenting your income from other sources. material drops tho are horrificly low and make me cringe. the fact that someone can kill the same kind of mob for 1-2 hrs and get nothing, while someone else can get 1-2 lodestones OR one person gets 2 vicious fangs and another gets over in the same space of time is just terrible.

-i think money drops arent bad nor good, in most games its just meant to compliment the trash drops as an income source. the lack of said drops/money in dungeons was clearly proof by the update of particular bosses gaining wonderous bags and 10-15s as well. doesnt make the trash any more appealing to kill tho.

-i dont mind exclusive content armor/weapons w/e having a certain difficultly to be obtained. the issue is two fold tho; dungeons were not made equal, neither are the paths time/effort required to complete them. the dungeon armors have varying stats which is good but doesnt actually reflect their difficulty to obtain. compare this to crafting which is, basically if you have the mats its a few clicks but the issue their is getting those mats is a ridiculous time sink, no more so than the dungeons. legendaries are a bit iffy its not even the way u obtain the precursor or the number of mats you need its just obtaining those mats w/o buying any of them takes an INSANE amount of time. if you ask legendary owners what was involved in obtaining theirs i garantee most of em would say they “played the tp” or did “something” to obtain the gold to buy the mats. i doubt many of em if ANY would say ‘yeh i farmed those 200 lodestones and 250 of each t6 mat etc’.

so i go back to what i was saying about reasonable expectations. if i kill 10-15 of a mob, i should get at least 1 fine mat that i am seeking. not kill 5-6 maybe get 1 then not see another for 15-30 mins straight. lodestones should not be THAT rare considering how many different uses they have, averaging 1 per hour is crazy, every 50 or so kills should get me one if not at least a core. as for item drops, its already been said enough times, rares either drop for some people or not at all for others even though lets face it they are glob fodder anyway, as for exotics they rarely drop and for some people infact never have from a chest/mob ever.

some stuff is too easy to acquire and other is just too ridiculous, basically its the people who play the TP to get their gold that get what they want sooner and with less effort, everyone else is just feeding them (with the exception of some ascended items, for now anyway).

I get bored after 4-5 runs. So I’d say if 1 in 5 chance to get something you want or whats the point. Sure there’s plenty of OCD players who will run something 10+ times in a row to get what they want but realistically most of us have lives to attend to and choose to play GW2 for enjoyment however limited it may be.

Personally? I’d like to be able to deck out with top stat eq in no more than a month of casual gameplay per character. Vanity drops can range from just above that to years (but there should be something good in each drop rarity category).

Morrigan.2809:

I am personally fine with mobs dropping blues and greens and whites.
What I would like to see is for champions and group bosses/dragons to have a higher rate of rares/exotics.
The gold drop rate is fine as it is.
I would like to see more dyes.
This is just how I feel about it

I would agree with you. Not only dyes, rares and exotics but maybe t5-t6 mats from Champs/Dragons. Not a super high rate but enough to were players are actually seeing them more times then they are not.

kendokken.3257:

IMO the drop rate for <80 mats should be ALOT higher. I never understood the reasoning behind making players speed throughthe 1-80 levels and REDUCING the drop rates to near 0. Players should be gathering enoughmats to at least make their own gear in 1 craft profession possibly even both of your chosen professions. There is no reason for the crafted gear to be cheaper to buy than the mats to make it.

This, the drop rates for mats are far too low. It basically makes crafting into nothing but a levelling tool and worthwhile only as crafting at lvl 80. Was that really the intention?