Yes, this is another post about the darn RNG loot system.

I was a player since beta, I stopped when IC dropped and came back just after One Tamriel. Overall the changes have been very positive, and I have been playing quite heavily. I'm PvE focused, I only PvP for vigor and caltrops.

The last weeks however, I have been considering taking another break, and the reason is the damn weapon grind.

I like to try different things, like most people, so have don't a huge pile of dungeons, and a fair number of trials. With some reasonable dedication, it's entirely valid to expect to be able to assemble weapons and jewelry from any set you want. Jewels may not be purple or gold (for example stuff from Maw unless you are in a very good guild group), and maybe you are still using an infused belt instead of divine here or there. As long as you are using crafted weapons, you can try whatever set you want. Even monster helms aren't to hard now they always drop in vet and you have 4 chances since you can trade.

The issue is, as soon as you want to try running 2 dropped sets you need weapons. Weapons from anywhere are a nightmare to get a specific trait on, and as has been covered many times, there is only 1 option with traits. Sharpened. If you are a healer you have 3 options (defending, precise or powered) because it doesn't matter much. Tank is basically only defending. I suppose if you have extra mitigation from other sources you could use decisive, but it's definitely sub par.

So of 3 roles, 1 has only one possible choice (and not in a tiny way either, you are better off running crafted gear with trash traits and a sharpened weapon than gold BiS gear with any other trait weapon), 1 has a good choice and dubious circumstantial one (tank) and one has 3 (healer), but only because it matters very little.

Because of the drop chances on weapons, combined with the fact you still get lovely comboes like Powered Resto staff of the Dreugh King Slayer, grinding weapons from anywhere is likely to take hundreds of hours unless you are extremely lucky.

This becomes a big issue for progression and variety. With non-weapon sets, I could feel like I was progressing towards an achievable goal. I might not get a divine BSW piece on every run, but it wouldn't be 50 runs with nothing either.

So my gear progression is effectively halted. I might get lucky and get a sharpened IA staff tomorrow, but there is a decent chance 6 months from now I won't have one even if I do a trial a day. vMA is even worse, dozens or hundreds of hours mastering the place, then hundreds of hours of runs, and still may not get anything usable. No thanks. It also means my ability to try new combos is greatly reduced, since weapons basically must be crafted.

People get their sense of progression from different places. If you want to chase leaderboards (which isn't my thing) then you will get very frustrated by the weapon limitations, since BiS is very important. If you enjoy experimenting with builds, you will also find this very frustrating. Probably PvPers also find this very annoying, especially since many don't like PvE at all. Basically the only people who aren't going to be constantly burned by this are very new people and more casual / social players. Nothing wrong with that btw.

Why is this a bad thing? Well it's extremely difficult to attract people back to a game once they leave from frustrating. I personally only came back because the huge One Tamriel overhaul happened to coincide with a slow period at work and a lack of fall game release that interested me. If we lose lots of dedicated players, many of them will never return.

To be clear, I'm not asking for any content to be easier. vMA, for example, should be super hard. What I'm suggesting is that there is a huge difference between know you will need to run a dungeon or trial at least 100 (or whatever) number of time to get something you want to progress your character is very different from it being 1-N runs, where N is infinity. If you can work towards something it's a very different feel than hoping to get lucky.

I know this post will change nothing. Either ZOS already know this and aren't doing anything about it out to extend gameplay, or other misguided design decisions, or they think it's fine, or they just won't prioritize it. Still I feel compelled to add my voice to the legion, asking / begging / demanding / hoping for some glimmer of hope that the horrible random weapon / trait drop system will be improved someday.