Hey! Archmage: content in the thread! Excellent. Two points.
That kind of, "Look at this! Isn't it great? Say goodbye, now." is frustrating as hell. Which said, I'd still rather have RNG than seeded numbers.
Fixed results - whether hand-placed or seeded - just makes me feel like a game is on rails.
Seeded crappy loot in a major reward actually feels worse than RNG crappy loot. I didn't just get sucker punched: I got sucker punched however many hours ago I started the game, and I have no recourse to judicious save-scumming to keep the fun from draining out.
Especially in an ongoing beta, spending the time to try to max out my characters' kit is so not happening.
Note: the meaning of the term "fun" in this comment involves not finding disappointment enjoyable. If your personal definition of fun is somehow more moral that that, never mind: this comment doesn't apply to you and we really don't need to argue about it.
I do agree up to a point, I would not like the game to have fixed loot (like you get the staff of whatchamacallit when killing baroness whoshe), but there should be a minor intelligence to loot distribusion. Say for intstance games like Icewind dale had fixed loot in some containers, but they also had "x chance of this item being here" and "the item in here is a random dagger/random staff/random sword" etc. A middle ground would be kinda nice. I was in a party playing coop as 2 mages, and during both our 2 playthroughs of the beta we were selling tons of swords/axes/daggers and didn`t get a single staff/robe drop. We had to buy our mage upgrades at the vendors, and even they had kinda shit items. Best we got robe wise was a 10 armor + int robe. And staff wise it was +1 to two spellcasting skills.
