Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity - Original Sin - General The random loot system is lazy and mars the game.

I think both fixed loot and/or some respawning enemies would be interesting personally.

I wonder if both are moddable. Itd be a big undertaking to go over everything and handplace appropriate rewards while disabling all random drops but still.

Weird. I don't think I've gotten any leather with strength or metal with dexterity in my 20+ hours of game time. =/

Hmm... I guess when you do obtain such, you will be doing a jig in the middle of the street!

As I said, it is kind of the point.

Now... if you play through the game and your "luck" is essentially getting crap the entire game, well... that is the RNG and honestly... a poor RNG is a design fault as one can without too much effort design an algorithm that will avoid the curse of common RNG's in games.

Question is... are you really "lucky" ie "unlucky" in your rolls, Or.... are you... weighting your results for the betterment of your argument?

If not, then this is a good objection to bring up to the devs. That is, requesting that they provide a more realistic RNG.

A much simpler solution is to make unfitting stat rolls on items rare.

Diablo 3's smart loot is a decent example of how to make random loot more fun, but obviously it wouldn't fit perfectly in a game like this where not every character gets their own loot.

I never played Diablo 3 (for many reasons I won't waste peoples time here), but I have read many who argued that the system you explain is what they think killed the series. /shrug

There are many problems with Diablo 3's loot. You know, basically everything besides smart loot. Smart Loot was however very amazing. The only real complaint anyone ever had about it could not physically apply to Divinity as you cannot grab an item on one of your characters and then give it to a different one in a different game.

However that's also why it wouldn't fit perfectly. Smart Loot worked because everyone had their own gear drops tailored to them. A smart loot inspired system for something like Divinity would be a lot more complex since loot is shared by the whole party.

They're idiots then. What "killed the series" (at least the parts of it relevant to your statement) was the in-game (real-money) AH, followed by the even more bizzare total removal of all trading. One of the few things they did right was the smart loot.


It wouldn't need to be very complex, though. You could just put weights on the characters' attributes and abilities then base the loot on that. It may not be perfect (I'm sure somebody could come up with a better solution), but it would beat drowning in dex/strength gear when your party consists of two lone wolf mages.

In fact, the ability to do this is one of the good reasons to to use the game's current loot system.

But they didn't exploit it.

I like the current system.

Don't want smart loot. If you want to get items tailored to your build you should invest in crafting.

Smart loot = what's the point in crafting?

Crafting gets you basic non-magical items and allows you to boost items. With enough crafting you can make items with much higher damage rolls than your level and then boost them further, but that's about it.

You can also boost key stats etc with jewelry to make up for the fact you may not be getting the drops you want.

The point I am trying to make however is that smart loot:

A) Wouldn't feel right in this style of game,
B) Would make crafting a lot less useful,
C) Isn't suitable given current design constraints.

I think loot should be random as there is more anticipation. After a while in Diablo 3 you KNOW you're going to get loot tailored for your class, and it actually becomes somewhat boring.

Also, +1 in this game means a lot more than +1 in a game like Diablo 3, so constantly getting smart loot in Original Sin would also effectively mean 99% of your loot is worthless after you get decent items, ie, no incremental upgrades.

You're just making assertions

A) Having all the items that drop be worthless vendor trash feels wrong in this style of game. Better design is less, better items, so that you don't just vendor everything you find without even identifying it, like I was doing.
B) Crafting is a grindy timesink that only exists to compensate for the current loot system, and - since you brought it up - feels very wrong for this sort of game.
C) What's the basis for this?


There is no anticipation when loot is random, because the odds that it will be good are too low. Like I said, I just vendored almost all items without even identifying them, because it wasn't even worth the time, in my opinion, to identify them all before selling them, because the odds that they were useful were so low. A better design would've been to make those worthless items gold drops.

For your second paragraph, that is currently the case, so I'm not sure how you can use it in support of your position since you're defending a loot system that works this way.

Yeah, that must be it! /boggle

No.

In a smart loot system in the case of DoS, once you get a good item for that slot, you basically will never find an item that surpasses it, until you increase in levels. This will happen quite quickly in DoS, and thus with slower leveling, there will be zero anticipation for the majority of the game.

In the current system, there still is anticipation of getting a good drop. You however are bypassing that system but not even bothering to identify items.

A smart loot system is designed for faster leveling with more incremental upgrades like Diablo 3, and even then it becomes mind numbingly boring quite quickly.

That's beside the point, as I don't think the target market for this kind of game is a smart loot system.

Must be, because Diablo 3 is a whole lot more fun now with its smarter loot system than it used to be. The press seems to agree, and loads of people have returned and/or are still playing, so I'm not sure how the transition can be labeled as "ruining the game". Ruined for someone with overly particular tastes, maybe. Maybe you should have played the game both ways before speculating about the smart loot system?

I just read a complaint on the D:OS Steam forum where someone was unable to craft a bow because (across the entire game) they only ever acquired one of the two sinews they needed. Because of that they spent most of the game with a level 4 bow before obtaining an upgrade.

Let's talk about how completely awesome random treasure tables are some more! I say this after visiting the Library in Cyseal, getting permission to borrow books, and finding every single bookcase *empty*. Wheee! Are we having fun with random loot yet?

I agree with OP. Random loot is bad when there is no grinding in this game. Its all finite resources, nodes/plants dont respawn, only metal 1H/2H can be broken down into components and etc etc which doesn't help in getting ingredients for crafting. Plus vendor items are randomly rolled out. I've done 2 playthroughs and my 2nd playthrough was horrible in that i had extreme difficulty in finding certain ingredients which hindered my crafting in addition to the fact that my 2nd playthrough i've done up an optimized build so i can tap on crafting only to realize i can hardly use it.

They should tweak it a bit, make certain items drop, have a fix inventory for certain items in vendor bag, respawn nodes/plants, make more armor/wep able to be broken down for ingredients or something along those lines. Respawning mobs is out of the question definitely, ppl gonna rage plus it kills difficulty of the game if ppl could just outlvl content.

i'm feeling like playing Diablo 3 Vanilla.
Int Robe with Strength requirement.

Fix loot table for a RPG is better. maybe it's getting boring after the 5th playthrough, but only a small amount of players play a RPG more then once with the same player constellation

Fixed loot... I can see it now, more complaining on the boards about how loot drop isn't properly balanced for [my character build X]

A question, are there unique armor drops in the same vein as Clobberin' Time or Braccus's Axe?

Yep, those who don't agree with you and him must be idiots because you subjectively established the game to be "more fun"! We know this to be sure because the "press" seems to think so, but lets not look closely at the record of the press and how they score games as well as how their scoring compares to the public (lets see Metacritic Diablo 3... Press 88 Users 3.9), but hey... the press knows what good games are, why... just look at their Dragon Age 2 score!

I didn't "speculate" on the loot system, I read many arguments from people who did play the game. Diablo 3 is what I consider to be the example of the deterioration of cRPG gaming as it has defined the standard for what today's generation thinks what an RPG should be. I as well as many of those who were waiting for Larian to make this game... are at odds with those action junkie click fests.




I read a lot of complaints on steam where the user exaggerates or is ignorant to a given aspect of the game.

But the real issue here is you want tailored loot (where every chest opened is a twilight episode of "it is what you need"). That has been your goal from the early complaints through alpha/beta. Larian has used this system in all their games, it is nothing new. You either accept it, or move on. Coming here and complaining over and over about it when you knew the game was designed this way from the beginning, knew this is how they design their loot systems... well... it boggles the mind! but.. hey... I guess we are all just "idiots" because we don't see the wisdom of Diablo 3's design!

Yep, it's usually quite hard to see something that doesn't exist.

Though there are a few words we typically used to describe someone who does see things that don't exist.