Loot
What a corpse or a chest gives up is decided twice: whether anything drops at all, and then who gets it. The first is a roll against the loot tables that object carries. The second depends entirely on where you are standing.
What drops
Every creature and every container carries its own loot tables - it can have several - and a dungeon or an area can override them wholesale. Without a table nothing drops: there is no automatic fallback by challenge rating, whatever older guides say.
Any wearable that drops can come out vengeful. The base chance is 1%, and two things raise it:
- Hardcore characters in the party. One or more HC members adds 10% per member, to a maximum of +60% - and if every member of the run is hardcore the chance is doubled instead.
- Happy Hour, which adds four points to the base rate for as long as it runs.
Who gets it: the four modes
| Mode | Where |
|---|---|
| On the corpse | the open world - anything outside a dungeon or a world boss |
| Personal | world boss events |
| Need / Greed / Discard | inside dungeons and raids, normally |
| Master loot | a dungeon, when the party leader switches to it |
A dungeon's mode is set per dungeon, and the party leader can force master loot from the dungeon options in the Player Menu. An ordinary area can also be flagged for a mode of its own.
On the corpse is what it sounds like: the loot is in the container and whoever opens it takes it.
Personal means the boss drops for each player separately - you loot the corpse yourself, you get your own roll from the boss's tables, and once per account.
Need, Greed and Discard
When something drops in a dungeon with more than one person in it, a window offers everyone the same three choices for each item.
Need beats Greed outright. If a single person needs an item, the greed rolls are never made - they only decide the item when nobody needed it at all. Discard takes you out of both.
The roll is not a d100
A Greed roll is a straight d100. A Need roll is 1 to your Need Power, and your Need Power falls as the run goes on:
| Choosing Need on an item | -5, whether you win it or not |
| Winning it | a further -5 to -40, by how rare the item was - 40 for a legendary, 30 for a purple |
| The floor | 20 - it never drops below that |
So a need power of 100 rolls 1-100 and a need power of 60 rolls 1-60. The window shows you the figure, and colours it: green from 80, yellow from 50, orange from 30, red below.
The effect is that the more you take, and the better it was, the worse your next roll - and someone who has taken nothing all run outrolls someone who has taken two purples, most of the time.
Joining late costs you
Your Need Power is set when you enter the instance, and it is reduced by how far the run has already got: each stage the party has cleared before you arrive takes 5 points off what you start with, up to four stages. Walking in at the last boss is not the same as clearing the dungeon.
Bad luck is tracked
On a purple legendary item, a hidden balancer is added to your roll. It lives on your account, it grows the longer you go without one, and it cannot push a roll past 100.
Ties
Two identical top rolls are settled by a coin flip between them, and the winner is announced with everyone's roll.