I wasn't involved in that chat conversation, but this topic has come up on the forums before and I'll say now what I said then. I would argue that this "feature" makes it unnecessarily tricky to balance combat for everyone.
When you have players who don't abuse save-game functionality and are working with truly random drops, and other players who are reloading saved games to cherry-pick the best spawns out of every loot table, and both of these groups are coming to the forums and giving their opinions on how difficult or easy combat is, how are the developers expected to make heads or tails of the conflicting reports? It's comparing characters outfitted like patchwork peasants to characters that are hand-tweaked demigods.
Good luck balancing combat like that. Why not get everyone playing from the same rulebook first instead and save the developers some unnecessary combat-balancing headaches?
Worse, this community wants the developers to police some bad habits while allowing others. For example, when certain encounters with the summoning ability allowed for scenarios where huge XP gains could be made (by intentionally allowing the summoner to live), many objected and demanded summons be worth no experience - despite the fact that intentionally farming these encounters (to borrow a quote from this thread) "..really only effects the one who uses it".
So, infinite XP is bad, but infinite loot rerolls is fine. I don't see the difference.. if you're going to plug exploitable mechanics, then plug them. Not just the ones you don't have an interest in abusing.
The fact is, there are ways to generate loot that don't allow for this behavior, so why not use them? Players are reluctant to back that, however, because we all love the shiny stuff. And we all dislike a treasure chest that doesn't have anything useful in it. And, because of that, many seem willing to trivialize and ignore an obviously flawed mechanic.
It's supposed to be "random loot" in those treasure chests, right? Not "try as many times as you like" treasure chests. I just want to be sure because, if it's supposed to be the latter, then just make them magical talking treasure chests. You can walk up to them and strike up a conversation, the chest will tell you what's available on the loot table, and you pick whatever sounds interesting. Do away with all the boring game loading. You know.. polish the "feature".
Or.. just fix an obvious flaw.
