Guild Wars 2

the loot system, does it make sense to you?

pro:

• you are excited about drops while leveling, you often loot something you can use

con:

• as a non-alt player you spend more than most of your time on lv.80… so 99% of the gear that drops is not interesting for your character any more

Looking at these 2 points makes me think that the system needs a revamp. I want excitement out of looting, and statistically inferior drops aren’t doing it for me.

Do you have any suggestions how this could be adressed?

Change in which way? Because i don’t see your point. With my level 80, most loot is useful. Exotic get you money, Rare for ecto, green and blue for luck, and most crafting material can be use.

But luck makes no big difference imho (except in the very longterm… statistical). I’d love to say “I feel the difference”, but all it does for me is giving me more greens (uninteresting) and sometimes a yellow (which isn’t that fun to me either).

Other games (which don’t have trading post systems) have drops like set-pieces, which makes you want to collect full sets. In GW2 you can just buy the rune in the trading post, which takes away the excitement of loot.

To iterate: GW2 could include new drops in form of set pieces which are non-tradeable. Set-Boni could then be purely cosmetic (like changing the color of guardian aegis effects etc.) or quite significant (runes which can’t be bought on the TP, with unique effects).

an other idea: give each piece of armor a new “cosmetic slot”. It would work like the minor glyphs in WoW, which only have cosmetic / utility effects. Then include such cosmetic glyphs on gear all over the game (low and high level areas). Important: non-tradeable.

Now people would go out and have something new to find to upgrade their gear. Even low level drops would have the chance to drop something interesting (since it’s a cosmetic change only).

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

To iterate: GW2 could include new drops in form of set pieces which are non-tradeable. Set-Boni could then be purely cosmetic (like changing the color of guardian aegis effects etc.) or quite significant (runes which can’t be bought on the TP, with unique effects).

Oh great, massive inventory clutter. ~.~

In order for drops while at max level to be useful to that character it has to be very time consuming to gear characters up, otherwise most people would already have it. This, creating a near never-ending gear treadmill, is precisely the kind of poor game mechanics that many people hated about other games and drew people to Guild Wars 2. I would much rather be able to gear a character up and start doing things that are fun with them than wasting time farming away for good gear.

@OP…

- the extra drops are for salvage to be sold and support the economy.

- As far as loot excitement goes, try the mystic forge for a bit. Exciting like a trip to Vegas. That and holy kitten! a named Exotic dropped! WoooT! Thank you QD train! Now to check the TP to see… oh. 2G. /sigh Its something… better start up boar.

You’re right that the excitement of general gear dropping in PvE has waned a great deal with the sort of lukewarm loot system in this game. As long as people keep playing, Anet will stay the course. People start dropping out of the game or stop buying off the gemstore and baam! Double Loot Chance weekend and *+100 magic find consumable bonuses on the Gemstore.

So once you’ve geared your character, you stop looting? But this should be part of the fun, don’t you think?

I see that the gear treadmill is something which we don’t like, this is why I later wrote about cosmetic changes, which still make you want to enjoy looting.

People start dropping out of the game or stop buying off the gemstore and baam! Double Loot Chance weekend and *+100 magic find consumable bonuses on the Gemstore.

we had +300% luck on Southsun Cove during a Living Story chapter, but this didn’t make such a huge difference. And I don’t want more of it (more greens, more blues, sometimes more yellow), I want more interesting stuff included.

Maybe it’s just the variety which I find lacking. Maybe I’d wish that other things would be included in loot drops, not only gear. Something that would be fun to collect.

After you get the best set, you can still change the skin of the set even if it is lower level, but instead of an unique slot for skin you use transmutation crystal/stone.

what I’m saying Belzebu: the current options just don’t do it for me. There is much more potential here.

Potential to add loot which is nontradeable, probably non-gear, has a much better droprate (because it can’t be bought in the TP) and will make people to enjoy looting more.

What if a full set of a current low level armor could be turned into a whole new set (or a redesign of that set —> e.g. the flamekissed armore). Imagine you have the full set and a specific non-tradeable runestone which drops on specific maps. Combine this to get the new (improved) set.

Purely cosmetic

What if all those gem-store exclusive armorsets could be rewards in the open world also? Non-tradeable but instead with a relatively ok droprate + a 2nd ingredient which enables you to use it (which is a rare reward for certain challenges).

E.g. aetherblade armorset from the gemstore: drops from aetherblades + the 2nd ingredient drops sometimes from the aetherblade jumping puzzle.

(+ you get a discount for the armorset in the gemstore when you have that 2nd ingredient)

Marcus…. I completely understand where you are coming from. You get to the endgame and you think, wow that was awesome… now… uh… hrm… So, LS comes out every so often, that’s kinda interesting with some rewards (get em fast, they go away). There’s dungeon chaining, which… profitable, yes. fun… meh. There’s event farming, world bosses and trains… varying degrees of… yeah. All of this has a 100% chance of “something” and a .00000001 chance of “awesome” dropping at every turn… which you’ll probably sell to afford something you DO want. So… yep.

Basically, you’re starting to understand the limitations of the current endgame. It feels a lot like you just went on an epic quest, saved the world, rescued the prince(ess), got upstaged by Trehearne, the credits roll and then… you found yourself in a bar… with everyone else gathered around tables playing cards… who… did the exact same thing you did…. So you saddle up to a table and play a few hands. Fun, sure. Nothing particularly epic or game changing. Its… just.. what it is.

You might level up a few alts as a chance to see more of the pre80s game. Maybe have a bit of an identity crisis till you find “the best” class for you. Level er up. Hit 80. End up at the same kitten ed bar. You CAN make the best of it. Make friends. Make the most of the situation. Relax and enjoy the free to play game and expecting, about the same level of overall game progression… Or you can get crotchety and come post rants or question the meaning of our game-lives on the forums.

The rng loot that drops in GW2 is soooooo boring…

Mainly just endless greens, blues, white trash that’s basically virtually worthless…and crafting materials, that you wait till you get 250 of then just sell for 50c each or something….

Honestly, about the best drops I get is unidentified dyes, wxp container, the occasional rare…

Its all soooo uninspiring and boring…yawn…

if anything, despite our constant complaints the loot gets worse and worse…

As a hardcore farmer, here are my loot changes:
-Remove DR – Botters are still around but alone don’t make a huge effect on the economy right now. Remove DR since it punishes active players
-Turn Essence of Luck into an account bound currency that can not only be used to increase MF %, but get exchanged for special items. This not only further increases the value of loot dropped from non-80 zones, but it gives value to those who have maxed their Luck.
-Collect all unique named champs and introduce unique skins to them with a low drop rate
-Increase the quantity of drops per mob the longer a mob has not been killed.
-Have a ‘map currency’ for each map with rare and hard to obtain skins.

I was kinda disappoint when I came to this game directly from Diablo. Indeed, there is little excitement in loot. Precursors are about the only worthwhile drop on level 80 and they are so vanishingly rare that you don’t realistically expect them to drop ever and therefore, there is no excitement.

Skins, layovers what ever you wanna call then. Sine thing to make the grind ok. Something you don’t need to convert hind to gems or bust our the wallet.

In short, gw2 has the worst loot of any mmo I’ve played, ever (I’ve been around). The garbage drops are plentiful enough, if you’re a fan of garbage.

I totally understand what the OP is saying. The most and only “cool, exciting” thing that’s dropped for me is ascended armor chest. Other than that it has just been thousands of greens, blues, some rares and occassionally the very, very rare exotic worth more than 1g. It would be fun to maybe have a mini drop, or some cool skin, or … just anything different. Even the chance at something interest would be more fun than knowing you’re gonna get the same stuff today that you got for the last year… yawn. So yes, I agree we need more, different loot.

I really don’t get ANet. So much nerf. So few fun stuffs added. I’m getting perilously close to not logging in due to boredom.

I think one of the core problems is that the most items are tradeable. Anet knows that we can buy almost everything for a number of gold on the tradingpost, so they can make those interesting drops (like the new champion weapons) quite rare for the individual. Hundrets of champion bags and not one of those new skins. That’s not fun to me.

If it weren’t tradeable, they would have to increase their droprate… which would be a lot more fun. And I’m not saying from 0.01 to 0.02. We don’t feel this while farming the champs, we feel this when looking at the TP.

That said, I love that the ascended stuff is nontradeable like I suggested. The problem here: it’s best in slot and Anet decided that the droprate stays abyssimal for these items (which is understandable since it takes a while to craft these)

The loot in GW2 revolves a lot around the crafting system, if you like crafting then you are probably okay with the loot that drops but if you don’t do crafting then the rng boring drops sucks…