Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Loot progression

Did anyone else find that loot progression in DOS2 was pretty marginal in terms of upgrades? Any gear you found was either at best fractionally better than what you already had or most often just a sidegrade? Obviously every drop cant be 10 levels better than what you've got but there was never a "wow" moment (like you got in (ironically) WoW) of finding something epic, it was always "meh, the damage is the same but it has +1 strength so i guess ill use that instead"

Hoping its not the same in BG3 with it having less random loot

Loot was my number 2 biggest complaint about DoS2(#1 being the armor system) You were forced to upgrade every level on the harder difficulties just to stay at par. A equal level green weapon was more damaging than a purple a level before. The possibility for real epic loot wasn’t even there due to their scaling system. Upgrading was a necessary task and not something that sparked excitement or was in any form fun.

BG3’s loot is all hand placed and uniques and magic weapons will hopefully be few and far between or varied enough to not pigeon hole everyone into one singular weapon path. That was one of the beauties of bg2; almost every weapon category had amazing weapons that made a substantial difference to your combat. Not all we’re just moar damage, some enabled higher backstabs, perm invis, knockdown effects etc. if they just use the same weapons provided in bg2 without being creative at all, the loot system should be flawless.

As I have written before I also did not like the loot system of D:OS : totally random items and highly level dependent with inflating stats.
I guess its a relic from the fact that Divine Divinity (Larians first game) was a Diable clone in terms of combat mechanic, though story, writing and environment of DD are much better than D.

I think it is good that they move to DnD.
I am not a huge DnD fan, but any system that avoids totally random items and inflating numbers is a progress and DnD is one of the better options.
At least DnD has consistent rules how to generate loot.

in any case, the loot must be large and adapt in such a way that it gets better and better, a character improvement is always an incentive to continue playing and to have fun, who does not love to search and find treasures, if again like in divinity original sin2 is where a lot of bad prey falls and lies around then the game is only a short appearance, with better prey the game is also played more often, cards that are thrown together each time you enter as with path of exile do their good here too, but Better loot and the steady increase in value is a must.

But don't forget one thing, nobody needs dealers who only sell crap, the dealers have to sell good loot to the endgame, it can't be that in role-playing games these days, the dealers are only good for the beginning, gold you should find too can spend sensibly.


no idea how the dnd weapon scaling is or the armor values scale, but it has to be essential that there are values that you can orientate yourself to, as for example with a weapon you have to see this damage does it and the found one is better by this value. .. everything else is not good.

Otherwise the collecting and finding is completely missing. You have to be happy about loot and that often and throughout the game
The game is measured in large quantities via the prey, bad prey bad game
a huge big part

I will give you a short introduction to DnD.

There are several types of weapons and armor. Each type has a base value of stats as written in the rules. For example every longsword has 1d8 slash damage which means it causes 1-8 points of damage, plus some other bonus damage for example from having high strengh.
Every char should be profient with the type of weapon and armor they are using, which depends on his class, race and feats. A human wizard won´t hit anything with a sword and cannot cast spells when wearing armor. Better give him a staff and a robe. A fighter can use almost any kind of weapon or armor for example.
In the beginning you can get a generic weapon of almost every type. Later you find a generic magic weapon like a longsword+1. It has a higher hit chance ( +5%, unless the enemy armor class or your own attack bonus is extremely high or low) and deals one additional point of damage, so its 2-9 points. Some enemies are resistent or immun to some kind of damage so you need magic weapons against some enemies.
When exploring dungeons or beating bosses you can find artifacts, equipment with unique magic abilities. Some famous examples from BG2 are celestrial fury (Katana+3, high chance to stunn enemies on hit), mace of disruption (high chance to destroy undead on hit) and the holy avenger ( greatsword+5, user gets resistence to magic, dispells enemy magic effects on hit, can only be used by paladins).

In general, magic items are rare (at least in the beginning) and artifacts are very rare. Each artifact is hand crafted, hand placed and has unique abilities.
DnD tries to keep the numbers low and each magic item you find should feel meaningful and make sense. ( does not always work)
There are no random items, so you will probably not find a sword that increases bow skill or an axe that raises you intelligence unless thre is a good reason for it.

I prefer the DnD system over D:OS any time.
In D:OS2 all items felt meaningless because it was totally random and you will find something better some minutes later.
Diablo was very boring for me, you fight random enemies in random places to get random items.
I rather find the holy avenger after beating the red dragon at the end of a huge dungeon and use it for the rest of the game.

I think the right level of good loot is important, and in general I feel it should be somewhat rare, or certainly not randomly dropped. Drops should be stuff like potions, scrolls. Wearables, weapons and armor, and true artifacts, should be placed and placed with thought and care (and well defended!).

BG and BG2 were both pretty good in this regard, you would find a good weapon and it would carry you for a long time. Varscona +2 in BG and Carsomyr in BG2 are a couple examples. Flail of Ages, Crom Faeyr are others. BG2-ToB became a little more loot heavy, there were +3 weapons on pretty much everybody you fought, however by that point, +3 vanilla was not good enough for any characters and was just sellable treasure. There were some really good weapons of every stripe (the Cespenar upgradeable stuff), so you would seek out and use the ones that fit your party, so even with tons of stuff around, you would tend to stick with the best weapons for the balance of the game, and upgrade them when you could. And being epic levels, tons of loot was sort of expected.

IWD on the other hand, I found had too much loot. I am not as familiar with that game, but I do remember finding a really good +3 weapon, then using it in just one fight only to find a better +3 weapon of the same type. Everything seemed much more discardable and certainly less iconic than what was in BG series.

They can just follow BG1 and BG2 in this regard. Higher level enemies dropped better loot; after some level enemies always dropped +x gear; unique encounters or finishing a dunegon dropped unique gear. Please, tons of optional gear, and places like Durlag's Tower and Watcher's Keep with hard enemies that give top notch loot.

If what they showed of the looting in the presentation is similar to what it will be like in the game...then sad face. When Swen looted the corpses of the guys he killed, where did their armor and weapons go? Why was everything worth tons of gold?

I get this may be one of the areas where they had to depart from D&D for whatever reason, but in D&D if you wanted to pick up every goblins shitty sword and leather armor and try to pawn them you could. Would only be worth copper but hey, if that's how you wanted to spend your time/energy go for it.

I think the only time there should be random loot is when you find a chest or raid a dragon hoard or something similar (like a treasury, etc), but even then there may still need to be some garunteed loot that fits the bill; if you defeat someone that is a master blacksmith and pick the lock to their hidden chest it should probably have some of their best work in it...something like that that makes sense.

In the old AD&D, making a simple +1 dagger required a fairly high level magic user or illusionist, with access to permanency (8) or alter reality spells (7). And then more powerful items often required special quests to get unusual ingredients. It seemed to me that such items should be rare and highly cherished, and certainly not something to find in the possession of common patrols in Amkethran.

Thanks goodness for the Bag of Holding in BGII TOB, because otherwise the weight of my seventeen +2 Full Plate mails, eight extra +5 weapons, four +4 shields, and 40 potions of extra healing would have encumbered me severely, despite my multiple girdles of giant strength and gauntlets of ogre power. You see, you never know when you might need something.

Regarding loot, I like BG1 most.
Finding your first weapon+1 felt importent, finally you could damage some enemies at all and weapons could not break anymore.
Unique items are very rare and feel super importent. For most of the game I used a sword+2 with extra ice damage.

BG2 was fine too, you found good items for almost every weapon type.

ToB was too epic for me. If you get a weapon+5 around every corner it does not feel importent anymore.

I think the trick is to finnd the right middle ground. Magic items should be rare so finding them feels importent, but you should find something every now and then to keep you interested.
I think its good that BG3 will be low level, so its more like BG1 than ToB.


One Problem of BG2 and pathfinder is profiency choice.
You create a char and you have to guess if you find a great longsword or a great bastard sword later, for example.
It was OK that vanilla BG1 had big weapon categories, like large swords, small swords, axes and so on.
Should not be a problem in 5E were most classes have either simple weapons or simple+martial weapons profiency.

I want magic items to be rare in BG3. Unlike previous editions of D&D, which assumes that everyone has magic boots, belts, armor, gauntlets, helmets, cloaks, weapons, rings, etc by the time they reach 20th level, 5e doesnt. Because of bounded accuracy, you can go through most of a campaign without ever encountering magic items.