Since I finally made a character that is able to do some Nemesis farming I took a run through the ones i found. It is not safe or fast to do this with my current gear, but it is doable.
I ran to the Warden,Cronley including most of the mines and Four hills (and found Fabius), Arkovian undercity (Moose), Steps of Torment, Festering croplands including hive and Amalgamation (found Valdaran) and the rift in Blood grove.
During this run i found five quite common epics (have several of each) and lots of components.
Is this extreme bad luck or are the drop rates really this low? I mean I must have fought 50 bosses of varying difficulty and 3 nemesis monsters, that gave bubkus for loot.
The drop rates are indeed prettt rough. I remember a post here where a guy farmed every common run a bunch of times and kept track of how many legendaries he got per hours. Maybe you can find that thread or someone will link it, i cant remember what it was called
Don’t farm the main campaign. Farm the Crucible instead.
I won’t lie: the odds of getting anything really good loot are VERY low everywhere. The Crucible is your best bet but don’t get your hopes high: it’ll be many, many runs before you’ll complete any LVL75 set (and not necessarily the one you want).
IMO after leading a character through normal/veteran, elite and ultimate you’ve deserved some farmable endgame and should not be dependent on cheap arena modes. This goes in particular for nemesis loot, which definitely needs some improvement. Also the legendary drop rates of Sentinel, Mad Queen etc. are too low.
Apart from that, epic and legendary drop rates are mostly fine and nothing I’d complain about. However, they should be complemented by some other things:
No weighting within classes: All epics/legendaries should have equal probabilities to drop. (Markovian set items anyone?)
Moderate duplicate reduction: Game should track number of picked up epics and legendaries and should, for each copy of an already dropped item, use re-rolls to slightly lower the probability to drop it again, not avoiding but lowering the total number of duplicates.
Meaningful and creative trading/transforming/gambling mechanisms to make use of unneeded epics, legendaries and components (other than tedious and boring dismantling).
These points should contribute to stop completing a set or looking for missing blueprints just being a frustrating PIA.
For me, epics are as common as sand on a beach. They’re everywhere. Legendaries are, for my taste, a bit too rare and you always get the ones you already have four times. Random Number God is a petty bastard.
I looked through my GDStash and there seems to be sets where some pieces are extremely more likely to spawn than others. For instance I have 51 pieces of the Dawnguard set, but not one single instance of the weapon.