One Thing That Has Never Made Sense About ‘Destiny 2’ Looting

I have written about loot, looting, crafting and some combination of all of those a hundred times over the course of my decade with Destiny and Destiny 2. Today is not yet another rant about crafting (plenty of time for those later!) but something I have not understood about the looting philosophy of Destiny for many, many years now.

Why does Destiny 2, a looter, almost exclusively not have actual, meaningful loot drop in the wild? Almost ever?

What I mean is when you kill an enemy, and an engram drops, you pick it up, and it’s a piece of loot with perks and stats. How many times does this happen in a given play session? Where does the loot come from then?

• Seasonal gear drops – End of activity, rarely secret chests, focusing
• Dungeon gear drops – End of encounter
• Raid gear drops – End of encounter, focusing
• Ritual gear drops – End of activity, focusing
• Exotic drops – Weekly challenges, Xur, end of Lost Sector drops, world drops but unfocused

So…yes, there is loot. I’m not saying there is not loot. But actual world drops, engrams dropped when you kill enemies that you pick up and they are gear in your inventory are limited to:

• Legendary armor – which is quite literally unusable for 95% of players because of hard stat caps
• Legendary weapons – which previously were given sub-par rolls on purpose, but finally this year there have been some genuinely good ones.

Why…is this the case? And why can’t things change, at least a little bit? What I’m proposing here is a pretty basic solution. I would suggest that the gear you get from a specific activity can also drop just…while you’re playing that activity.

As in, killing an enemy in a seasonal activity, dungeon, raid or strike would be able to give you not just the extremely limited world drop pool, but specific weapons or armor from that activity.

I’m not saying that anything should change about end of encounter/activity drops, focusing or even crafting in this case, just that hey, it would be nice that if you were farming for a specific gun, maybe, once in a blue moon, it would drop somewhere else in an activity besides a specific encounter or after your tenth ritual completion.

These activities that are meant to drop this loot should literally drop the loot in addition to the same world drop pool that we see across every single PvE activity in the game. I don’t know if there’s an identical solution for PvP, as dropping engrams there is not a thing, so maybe just better rates period, but for PvE? It’s just so strange that we’ve had this current system for so long.

If players are telling me they need crafting to offset poor drop rates, this would be at least some kind of help toward that end, rather than limiting an entire run of something to 3-5 drops total. I’m not asking for everything to be random chance, but I cannot shake the idea that it’s just plain logical that killing something in a dungeon should maybe drop a dungeon weapon from time to time. Or killing something in a raid should drop raid armor periodically.

The pushback here? That would be me mainly wondering if players could exploit this with the way Destiny engrams spawns work. As in, could you just farm low level enemies to keep producing activity engram drops too often. Sure that’s a possible problem, but I also think there should be solutions to mitigate that, if it’s the only objection.

I do not think this is a radical idea. Give players activity loot sometimes for killing enemies within that activity. But it simply has not happened, and I can’t really understand why.

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