What game do you think has the best loot system? #lootsystem #gaming
Exploring Different Loot Systems
Are you a fan of games with rewarding loot systems? Whether it’s a quest reward, treasure from a dungeon, or materials for crafting, finding that perfect piece of gear can make your gaming experience truly satisfying. But with so many RPGs out there, which game stands out to you for having the best loot system?
Personal Preferences
- Do you prefer a game with a smaller loot pool, where each item feels like a valuable reward?
- Would you rather have gear that caters to different playstyles and strategies, like in Kingdom Hearts?
Top Picks
Some gamers swear by the loot system in games like Borderlands, but others find the abundance overwhelming. On the other hand, titles like Monster Hunter World and Elden Ring offer a more tailored approach to loot, where each piece feels earned and serves a specific purpose.
Favorite Features
- Do you enjoy games where you have to gather materials from defeated enemies to craft gear, like in Monster Hunter World?
- Or do you prefer games like Elden Ring, where every piece of loot serves a unique purpose?
Final Thoughts
When it comes to looter shooters or MMOs, what are your thoughts on their loot systems? Are you a fan of grinding for specific loot in MMORPGs as long as the combat keeps you engaged? Share your insights on what makes a loot system truly stand out in a game!
Guild wars 2 has an ok system. Most of the crafting loot you collect you can move to your storage with 1 click. lower rarity weapons and armour that drop are categorized under one item, for example you can have 250 green items that take one slot in your backpac. you can open them one by one if you want the actual armour or weapon loot from it, or, you can just sell it. Gold and other currencies are automatically transferred to your wallet
Hover loot system in rust should be in more games. I think all survival games are ass for not implementing it or something better
Monster Hunter is 100% top tier when it comes to loot.
I also love Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries approach to loot since it’s basically Pokemon but with giant mechs.
One game that I LOVE but it’s incredibly niche is Gundam Breaker 3. The loot in that game is also similar to Monster Hunter in that you can target specific parts you want, but the build variety in that game is insane.
I don’t know if it counts but Dead Cells too.
This is where Diablo 2 is still miles ahead of many modern games. There are so many variables to optimizing your character, so swapping 1 piece of gear for another one can have quite some ramifications on the rest of your equipment. It’s a game where you don’t just put the best item in each slot; you actually have to assemble a bunch of items that work together best.
I’m showing my age here, but I enjoyed the original Deus Ex looting. Grab credit chits with zero weight, ammo without weight but capped at a certain limit. And guns will take up inventory space, but also requires some spatial engineering, so if you rotate/orient your gear in an optimal grid you can free up space to carry more shit. I was glad to see they carried it over into Human Revolution. Also the weapon mods being limited to available slots so you have to choose e.g. silencer or laser sight.
I like Last Epoch approach.
It is the typical ARPG loot system, but then items have a score called “forging potential”.
Crafting is a basic part of the game and the game expects you to add/remove/modify properties and stats of items so you fit the item on your build with what you want.
It is not something that you can do as much as you want, every modification that you do cost materials and also removes points from the forging potential. Depending on the modifications it will cost more or less forging potential points until you don’t have any points left and the item cannot be modified anymore.
So the game encourages you to loot anything that has good base stats, try to have the best secondary stats and if they don’t have the stat that you want, you can replace them using crafting and add your own or roll random stats, there are a lot of ways to do it until you consume all the forging potential of the item.
It is not as easy as it sounds since there is a lot of RNG involved in reforging items, so you will need to reforge a lot of items to have the perfect one.
Also to do these crafting things you need runes that you adquire shattering other items. Removing or rerolling runes that you don’t want on an item, requires that same base rune, so even if you are a Wizard using spells, you want some items with melee stats so you can shatter them to have melee runes so you can reroll other items with good base intelligence stats but secondary melee stats.
This way makes you want a lot of different items and they will be useful in the long term.
Also it has a very cool advanced loot filter so you can filter by items that have runes that you can shatter to gain cool runes for your class, filter the regular ones, etc etc etc…
Baldurs Gate 3. Exploration is encouraged, fun and optimal, with so many unique pieces of gear.
Escape from tarkov is the only game I can think of that has actual rare items. Like keycards, gpus, and ledx. So you’re genuinely excited when you find one. I really appreciate that and not being spoon fed so called “rare items”
I always enjoyed Borderlands 1’s system.
Troubleshooter Abandoned children. There is random gear drops, there is crafting with materials, but what tops it all is the masteries system: Enemies can drop masteries. Masteried can be everything from minor stat bonuses, to new abilities to ways to manipulate the amount of masteries you can equip. Equipping different types of masteries grants set bonuses, where one mastery can be a part of multiple sets. There are also some class, element and character specific masteries.
The system is a theorycrafters dream, with sheer infinite characters and builds to try. It’s maybe the only single player game ever in more than 25 years of gaming where I put more than 500h.
It’s super stimulating and rewarding. I spent evening only theorycrating new teams and builds, without even fighting because min maxing new build concepts was so fun.
Sometimes you also find a new legendary to build a new mastery setup around, catch a new monster or build a new drone…
Gameplay is similar to XCOM & Final Fantasy Tactics, which the story turning from generic & odd to something actually deep and exciting as you progress.
The Anime artstyle might not be for everybody and some translations are odd, but the game itself gets an unrestricted recommendation from me, especially because the devs kept dropping content patches for a whole 3 years after release.
Souls Series.
Limited amount of bloat trash and garbage with no need to manage inventory everytime you hit a cap.
Gotta be Last Epoch.
The loot filter and the crafting system are so advanced. It’s my favourite part of the game.
Fallout 4
Not because it gave you such cool items, but because it made trash useful and you felt more like a scavenger which helped the setting
fallout 3
i loved that most dungeons, meaning caves, vaults, or deep places, had so.e kind of unique or great reward such as a unique weapon or schematics.
also the weapins could be used to repair or sell,and bloating was not the worst.
Hands down Diablo 2
Diablo 2 for me and wow classic and any other game with the same loot system. Nothing worse for me than looting 100 times the same legendary items known for 1000 years in the story and throwing them all way because of crap stats.
Here you have Excalibur 7dps and +2 to rat slaying. Legendary sword of kings 🤴
Yeah Elden Ring seems like the only obvious choice to me. I hate randomized/procedural loot, I can only get excited about cosmetic loot or moreso, loot that affects gameplay. Elden Ring has both, and there’s more of it to find and tailor a build/character with than any other games I’ve played by a fuckin’ landslide.
Borderlands 2. Borderlands 3 is terrible since you are showered with legendaries so often that you will never use anything else and the contrast between loot is shallow because of it
Ultima Online around 1998
Yup 26 years later it’s still Ultima Oline.
The only game where you can truly have a 1 of a kind unique item Noone else has. Such a deep and meaningfull loot system .
Modded Minecraft.
Diablo II, Souls series.
Horizon Zero Dawn has a good system. You buy equipment with shards (currency) and upgrade it with parts of robots. You’ll have most parts just by progressing campaign.
Easy, Nethack. It has item weight and a notion of what you know about an item. Everything had to be identified one way or another on every playthrough. You could even name specific items.
low key slime rancher
Dark cloud. Leveling, enchanting, combining and ascending weapons almost made the loot system as complex as other entire RPGs.
Phantasy Star Online 1. It took the fantastic base of Diablo 2 and perfected it. A lot of people don’t actually realize how much of a Diablo clone the original PSO was because of the aesthetic and camera but it’s there.
All items were on loot tables tied to your section ID that was auto generated based on your character name. It wasn’t as simple as “blue gets melee weapons and purple gets guns” but some IDs were a bit lopsided. It’s noteworthy that there were wild card IDs that got a bit of everything or the fact that redria ID was the only one that could really hunt for the coveted red weapons. It was supposed to encourage trading and grouping since you could load into a lobby hosted by a different ID and get items you can’t get on your own.
The game also had unique quest rewards, monster material weapons, weapons that had unique hoops to jump through. For example one of the best weapons for a mage type is called “Striker of Chao” where you needed to find a specific weapon then raise a mag (little helper guys) to a level where you could transform it into a chao… then combine them to make the weapon. Or the legendary “Sealed J Sword” which was a pretty garbage weapon but if you killed 20k enemies with it you could unseal it and it became one of the best weapons available.
This isn’t even getting into the end end game grind where you hunt hit% versions of your rare weapons which made them even more powerful. PSO1 had literally every kind of cool loot ideas you could think of. It also is one of the only games that has genuine horizontal progression as some of the most important weapons aren’t even for damage but for utility, while certain others were only good for certain situations. No game imo has come close to PSO in terms of rewarding loot.
I like the loot system in the Slormancer, a game that isn’t even finished yet. It’s all like, randomly rolled loot, ranging from common-magic-rare-epic-legendary. But there’s filters for loot – automatically change any loot below a certain rarity into money or crafting resources.
And you know how, in some games, you find an awesome new helmet with great defense stats, but your current helmet has health regen, which you need? No problem. All stats can be re-rolled for resources, at a fair cost, IMO, and not just the numbers – you can reroll what the bonus is. So it has good defense stats, and a anag regen which you don’t need? Reroll that until you get the life regen you do need.
Plus you can add ranks of stats. Your new helmet which is Rare? Pay some resources and put an epic level stat on it. Your legendary only has a legendary stat on it? Add common and magic and rare and epic on it.
Plus the items themselves can be leveled up – this armour was good, but wear it long enough and you can make it a +1 and increase all its stats slightly. I think it goes up to +15.
Oh and all items have a level as well. So you maybe have a level 5 legendary. Guess what? You can use resources to increase a weapon level too.
So you can find a ton of loot, with lots of differences, but you can always make a piece fit your build if you have the resources for it.
I really liked Tom Clancy’s The Division 2.
So say you kill an enemy, and a gun drops. It comes with stats, like damage, accuracy, handling, rate of fire, etc., and perks. And all of these are rolled randomly. So if two identical guns drop, one may have more damage, but the other is more accurate with better handling, or a perk that fits your style better. Also depending on quality of the drop (gray, green, blue, purple, yellow, red) you get higher average rolls on the item stats. And on higher difficulties, higher quality drops more often. So the game encourages you to move to harder difficulties when you can.
This is combined with a crafting book. So say the first gun that dropped rolled 100% rate of fire possible for that gun, but all other rolls were garbage. And the second gun rolled everything high, but rate of fire is absolute shit. But if you disassemble the first gun, your crafting book will remember one thing from it (you choose which). So you take the first gun and click disassemble, and select rate of fire. And the book will now remember “gun type, rate of fire, 100%”. From now on, and forever, and as many times as you want, you can put 100% rate of fire, on that gun type. So you take the second gun, that had good everything but bad rate of fire, and slap the rate of fire from the crafting book on it. Now you have an amazing gun!
So there was almost no “garbage loot”. Not for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time. Because you were constantly hunting for higher rolls for the book, for all guns, and for all perks. And the game’s UI marked items in your inventory with a little arrow, so you know that this item has some high roll, that isn’t in your book yet. So you should disassemble it and not just sell it. And even if you unlocked everything, at 100%, in the book, you still need to find a good core weapon with high almost-everything, because you can only modify one thing on an item. So you can’t take a gun and slap all 100% on it. But if you find a gun with all 90%+, and one thing that’s at 25%, you can make that into all 90%+ and one 100%. Making it near-godroll. And then you hunt for a godroll. And you also often got a godroll for a gun you don’t use, which forced you to change specs and learn a new gun, which was fun too.
Another thing I liked was targeted farming. If you looked at the game’s map, it showed you an overlay. And some areas and dungeons would be marked with Badger, or 5.11, or some other gear brand. Another area would be marked with a pistol or a rifle. Third area would be marked with chest or backpack. That marked what has a higher chance of dropping, in that area. And these areas shifted every day/week (I forget). So let’s say you want a 5.11 brand backpack, and a shotgun. So you look at the map and you can see where any king of 5.11 gear drops, so if you need a backpack and something else 5.11, that’s the place to farm and do events and dungeons in. If your gear is great, and only your backpack is shit, you want 5.11 but others would work, you go to backpacks area. And same for shotgun, you just go to an area and farm where shotguns drop. And these shift around the map fast enough, and map is big enough, so you don’t get bored.
I really liked that system. You never felt like you wasted your time, looking at loot was always exciting, the AI had these power bars so you could tell at a glance if the item was good, and the little indicator in the corner showed if you should scrap it for stats. Guns were also customizable (scopes, silencers, etc), which also helped.
The combat system was very fun, it’s a tactical cover-based shooter, not your usual run-and-gun and catch bullets with your face. It was about precision, cover, fire angles, flanking, elevated positions. It was also very heavily co-op. Fully soloable except for raids, but it was way more fun in co-op. So I had an absolute blast. It had large PvPvE extraction gameplay zones too, and small battlegrounds for PvP, but the focus was on co-op. You just had fun with friends. And since gear had stats and perks, and could be further modified with different augments, there were TONS of possible builds. Sniper, pistol and shield, drone operator, grenadier, heavy gunner, smg rusher, shotgun breacher, etc. And tons of flavours of these. Plus some unique guns with unique perks that supported a variety of builds.
Honorable mention also goes to Elder Scrolls Online. Similar system, but more static. Gear sets drop based on dungeons, so set A only drops in dungeon A, and set B only drops in zone B. But these never moved, so sometimes you’d be farming for weeks and you definitely burned out. The game did have an auction house system, so you can often buy what you need, but the system was very awkward and prices often barking mad, so it didn’t help much. Still really, really good though.
Where this game shined was the sheer AMOUNT of perks on gear, and gear sets had bonuses too. So having 2, 3 and 5 pieces of the same set equipped gave you a stronger bonus. And you had I think 12 slots in total? So you could equip two full 5-piece bonuses and one 3-piece. Or you could have three 3-piece bonuses. This gave you a HUGE variety of possible builds, practically unlimited. There was a theoretical limit, of course, but an average player would die of old age before trying them all. And since there’s such variety, the game wasn’t too stingy with loot. If you decided on a new build, you could reasonably have it up and running withing days/weeks, with room for improvement over many months if you wanted to refine it.
Really liked these two, they really stood out.
Any game where I collect the loot by just walking over it.
Warframe.
I’m torn between Division 2 and Destiny 2
– Division 2 has its ability to level its weapons in multiple ways and to pull lines of text and build a library to upgrade your weapons with. It’s load out system is quick to accesse. It has lots of sort options for your gear. It has a spot where you can view all your gear and sort it by brand. Great for piecing together sets. It has the ability to use trashed weapons to level weapons of the same name so it’s still special when you find them. The system can be a bit convoluted but I actually just appreciated that depth because it gave me lots to sink my teeth into and lots of materials to collect and spend in various ways. (Yes the systems in the game aren’t completely unique to Div2 but I really like their way they present them)
– Destiny 2 has one specific feature that I really like. You can break down gear and use that gear to level up your other gear. Taking the broken gears power level and copying it to the other piece. This means gear never gets too weak. You’re never trading off a piece because your characters level is to high by comparison. Plus if you pick up or buy a piece you can always upgrade it to being current. I also like the simplicity of their menu. You get 9 slots per gear and that’s it. Not a 300 piece bag to sort through. All extra gear is always waiting for you at the post office if you didn’t have room or forgot to pick it up. The latter means there’s never any stress about missed items. The only trade off to leveling your gear the way they do is you can get set on a group of items that you never change. You just keep levelling them. You’re never really pushed to upgrade because gear gets old. (Also yes I realize all the controversy about their pay model but personally I love the game anyway, bought one season bundle ages ago and I’ve had plenty of content to enjoy and never felt pushed to buy another)
Lastly both games support my favourite must have feature of any RPG collecting gear style game, transmogrification. I love being able to make my character look the way I want. Matching gear to the same family of pieces or just ones that compliment it. Changing skins on each piece to get the colouring I enjoy. Then altering both as I unlock more options. Having a character with cohesive gear in a colour pallet I enjoy makes me feel so much more connected to the character and into the game.
I remember having a love/hate relationship with Destiny’s loot system.
Diablo II, sans contredit.
The Surge games.
You had to collect your armor in pieces, but it was easy to target the pieces you wanted. If you needed the helmet, cut the guys head off. The left or right arm, cut the corresponding limb off. The guys weapon, take the arm he’s weilding g it in.
Remnant 2
Horizontal progression game like Monster Hunter. (Not destiny or Diablo style but still a shooter)
Ton of loot sometime look useless but perfect fit for some crazy build
Remnant 2 Dev’s are master of hidden loot.
I really like how nioh 2 have it’s loot, it gets especially good in the endgame with the graces system.
Also really like gear in outrider, simple, powerful system.
I still think the best for me is the true madness of the labyrinth of chaos gear in Mgq paradox’s endgame.
Interesting gem system that let you destroy unique equipment for it’s strength as a gem
The nioh graces system, rare affixes, unique power on gear, random stats and affixes.
It’s the kind of game where getting everything you want is near impossible, but you can get pretty close to that and getting any closer is huge. Love the gear gameplay.
Skyrim/Fallout 4. You get what your enemies are wielding/wearing, you can pick up everything from the ground. In my opinion it’s still to this day one of the few actually outstanding aspects of Bethesda games.
I have good news for you.
All monster hunter games have the same loot system.
Ghost of Tsushima. You get enough loot to do decent upgrades just by doing the story and grabbing everything as you go along, so you don’t have to clear out a whole region before moving to the next just to be on par with the enemies there (looking at you AC origins), and if you do, you’ll be appropriately overpowered. Like all the gear and charms just widen the play styles you can use, and if you’ve settled on one play style you can be targeted in your side quests.
The ones that dont have inventory weight.
Lots of games have good loot systems with different strengths.
Borderlands for satisfying loot explosions. The weapon parts itemization system is really interesting, but you only really notice it if you have 1000s of hours in the game.
Diablo 2 and PoE for itemization.
Diablo 2 for its loot systems. Loot tables, magic find, champ/rare mobs, bosses.
Morrowind for its static loot placed throughout the world.
Fallout 4 for its scavenging & junk crafting.
Terraria for its loot progression.
Warframe for their “group” loot system with relics. Its one of the few systems ive seen that actually encourage casual grouping rather than selfishness or pure solo play.
Path of Exile. Diablo 2 isn’t even close