As far as NWN2 is concerned, I disagree with you Gregorovich full-heartedly. That game had a loot system I could live with any time. It had truckload of hand-placed, quality loot you could count on. Yes, crafting great items was difficult. In fact, you could only create one set of "gear for life" for each of your characters. But that was more than enough for the end game. And it brought its own challenges...you had to calculate what you could possibly create with the given essences and gemstones and then decide which items were the most important to you. And the rest of your gear was still useful and good but not the very best, which is OK in my book. I enjoyed that system very much. So much better than D:OS in terms of loot.
I have no problem with NW2 loot, just the crafting. As you say crafting was it's own challenge given the limited number or rogue stones and king's tears etc, but my problem is that you don't know how many of those you are going to get. In the end after first playthrough i didn't bother with crafting at all as it was too much hassle for too little return. Just relied on loot and purchases which was, as you say, fine. To me NWN2 crafting is a con - I'm not interested in fiddling with crafting systems for their own sake, only if they bring tangible worthwhile results.
