Anthem's currently experiencing a bit of a fiasco related to the game's loot and the drop rate of Masterwork and Legendary items. A brief window of "bugged loot" with increased drop rates that lasted about 10 hours before Anthem's most recent patch has led players to push BioWare towards making permanent improvements. This window of bugged loot or its differences to "normal" drop rates hasn't been properly explained. One Anthem player luckily managed to capture the difference and broke down their loot between the two timeframes on Reddit.

Redditor Kickassinc decided to conduct an experiment after reading a post about dungeon drop rates. They planned to collect 200 pieces of loot solely from dungeons and see the results. To their surprise, the patch released on Friday, which allowed them to do a second collection of 200 items and create a pre-patch bugged loot and post-patch current loot comparison.

Kickassinc's findings show the difference between the two windows of time and drop rates. Pre-patch, the Anthem player earned 21 Masterwork and 2 Legendary items. Post-patch, they picked up 7 Masterwork and 2 Legendary items, roughly a 66% drop in Masterwork items. And while Epic drops increased from 102 to 163, Epic items after level 30 are disposable due to their weak power and fewer attributes. It's also important to note that pre-patch uncommon and common items were still dropping for level 30 players but the most recent patched removed them from the loot pool.

The only real difference between the way Kickassinc ran his experiment pre and post-patch was that pre-patch took around 5 hours (24 dungeons) to collect 200 items, while post-patch took around 7 hours (33 dungeons). They otherwise spent the entire time fully completing dungeons at Grandmaster 1 difficulty.

anthem bugged loot comparison

While there are aspects of Kickassinc's experiment that may have introduced error, such as the randomness of the dungeons, it appears that players earned as much as 300% more meaningful loot during the bugged period of time and earned it faster as well. It's enough to understand just why Anthem players are so frustrated with the changes, even if the loot didn't actually change much from prior to the bugged loot window. Players want more Masterworks and Legendary items, and now that they've experienced it, they're less willing to go back to the way it was before.

Anthem is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

Source: Reddit