Smart drops for -story quest- rewards?

A quick browse of the forum here and on reddit would show several threads on the perceived “poor” RNG drops, and it seems like those are usually made from players who just start out or only play one or very few characters, which put them at odds with RNG and the vast selection of possible drops within the game, especially if they play solo and don’t have friends to trade drops.

So here’s an idea, since the popular opinion on the forum seem to dislike having D3 smart drops to dictate loot drops in general throughout the game, would it be better for a similar system to work for story quest rewards only? That way, even if a new player has horrible luck with RNG, he might still get something relevant to his character as he makes progress through the game. I mean, it’s already kinda in the game when you turn in the story quest at end of act 3 and 4, so maybe it’s not far fetched to add more rewards like that, and tweak it so that the item reward isn’t totally random, but checks the player’s classes/skills?

I was fortunate enough to start playing this game with two other friends, so we always traded gears even well into ultimate, but for others who start this solo, knowing that they are more likely to get good upgrades as they go through the story could be a great source of motivation and encouragement. And it’ll still leave majority of the loot drops to the RNG…which is also what lured me into making over half a dozen alts in the first place. Maybe it’s not the best of both worlds, but probably better than completely leaving newbs at the hands of RNGesus.

blasphemer

actually i agree somewhat. certain quest rewards should give you an item you can be guaranteed to equip and don’t already have. like the final mission. i dont think those 2 constraint would be hard to implement

Hahaha well I agree that full smart drops is not suitable for this game, but story/plot quests aren’t exactly plenty, so it should be just enough to help a new player along, and the game will still retain its RNG loot that promotes alts and experiments.

I figured it could be a reasonable solution, this is a mostly solo game with some multiplayer capabilities, so for some new players, getting a few upgrades as one goes through the game is often a big encouragement to keep on playing. It’s also my observation from reading some new player feedbacks - getting viable drops validates the sense of progress and accomplishment, so when a newbie finishes normal or higher with bad RNG loot on their first character, it’s a huge blow to the supposed fun they expect to get out of this game. And at that point it’s much harder to ask them to devote even more time to play something that doesn’t “feel” fun.

Some of us more seasoned players have invested more time to get to the point where loot doesn’t concern us as much, but I think this could be a good idea to help building a larger player base and retaining it.

I can accept this… make it so

as much as I hate smart loot, I think this is a great middle ground that will be likely to make everyone happy without making anyone feel pigeonholed into building a certain way. It’s better than getting an Inferno relic recipe for the 14th time as a quest reward anyway :eek:

as an idea it is ok, I doubt it works in practice though. The drop mechanic for smart drops would need to be completely different from what we have now in order to be anywhere near ‘smart’.

Changing to smart is not easy at all, so I do not see this happening any time soon.

Also, the drops are not that bad, sure you do not easily find an upgrade every level or BiS gear for whichever level you currently are at, but you also do not need it, you can easily finish the game with what you find on veteran and probably epic. If you continue past that point, farm, trade, download stashes, hack, etc. as you would not be able to rely on smart drop quest rewards either :wink:

Honestly, it wouldn’t be that hard to set the quest to have a 100% chance of a decent item for a build. You couldn’t lock it down to only 1 of an item popping up period, but by setting it to read your class combo, and make it pick from a set of items based on that combo (Say, a Nightblade+Arcanist might have a VERY high chance of rolling a Shard of Asterkran, while a Nightblade+Occultist would be fairly biased to dropping a Venomlash). Some classes have multiple build combos, that do radically different things, but to know that the game at least tried to get you something relivant for a quest reward would be nice.

Another option could be that it picks, oh lets say 5, items to show you, and you get to pick one. This ensures that at least you had a choice, and could aim the item to be as optimal as possible for you, even if it isn’t a 100% chance of it being good. It also makes alts work a bit better especially if leveled in sync because while you might not get a specific item you want, you could at worst try to aim it for an alt that you were already planning/leveling.

Hmm good point, what if the quest rewards include a special token, which you can redeem at a blacksmith NPC (new or existing) once from a list of possible gears? Won’t need to redesign a new loot drop system, it’s essentially a new crafting material for a list of gears without (too much) RNG. I mean, we start with an end goal in mind, and work out a path to there, so it’s a matter of coming up with ideas and viable solutions, yes? If anything, hopefully the devs can take away some ideas for later use.

Well yes, in my case I was lucky to play with friends, other smart/experienced players like you know how to work with what you got, but I came up with this idea after reading more than a handful of new player complaints, and they all revolve around horrible RNG that gave them nothing worthwhile as they started out on their first character. They also weren’t savvy enough to try out all possible options for loot, so by the end of normal (or worse, one guy somehow finished ultimate horribly undergeared) they just wanted to rant and give up. I mean, yeah, it only gets better, but wouldn’t we want to string them along with good drops here and there, rather than telling them to spend even more time when they just about had enough?

I get the logic of how to do it, but it is not simple just because you can easily describe it :wink:

The loot drop tables have no field to store a mastery or combination in, obviously the logic does not consider either when using those drop tables.

I guess what I am getting at is that once you do it for quests, you have already done it for the entire game… doing it for quests is no simpler than doing it overall

I play self-found, i.e. the char uses what he finds, nothing else. The drops in normal / veteran easily get you to the end of it without any need for farming.

The drops really are not that horrible. Sure, better gear is always making you kill stuff faster, but balance wise you do not need it at all…
If you expect to find the best gear in one walkthrough to Ultimate without farming, then the problem is your expectation…

If anything the drops are better with this patch. On new characters I am noticing an increase in both quantity and [variety]<–this is most wanted, of epics from prior versions.

On just Normal only they are dropping like candy and I’m finding that I often get 2 or 3 by level 10-13. On a current level 20 character I have already had around 10 or more epic drops, several of which are of use. And this is happening on all characters I’ve been making lately.

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk

Please a smart drop for killing log. !!!
It would be enough imho.