Worst. Loot. Ever.

Egregious The Guild references aside, there should be a special hell set aside for the designers of loot tables. How many times have you run an instance, cleared out trash mobs, wiped, paid several gold in repairs, spent hours of your life, and when you get to the big boss, the guaranteed drop doesn’t happen. Or worse yet, someone ganks your loot and binds it!

Asheron’s Call was especially evil for this. I played AC from Nov. 1999-Dec 2000 (damn grad school getting in the way). Anyhow, you would spend hours grinding in a sewer or something, trusting that the percentage drops were accurate but they never would. Since it was also one of the first three MMORPGs, the niceties and complex ideas about rolling for loot etc. weren’t worked out yet. You could kill something and the carcass would be open for anyone to dart in and gank the loot.

But the worst thing about AC was that there were involved quests that involved many hours of grinding to get mats and then you had to combine them together and hopefully get something good out of it.

One quest involved fashioning Atlan Weapons. Basically you had to spend a lot of time killing golems to get pyreal motes and nuggets which you then combined to form pyreal bars and ingots and finally you could use this material to make an Atlan Weapon by combining it with a glyph that you had to purchase from Silencia (as an aside, it’s bizarre that I remember how to get to a place to talk to an NPC in a world that doesn’t exist that I last visited 10 years ago!).

The annoying thing was that if you failed a skillcheck, you would only get a pyreal ingot instead of a quality pyreal ingot, and sometimes it would just randomly decide to make an example out of you and you would get the second grade weapon.

You are LAME if you are running around with a “Fair” Atlan weapon when your friends all made “Peerless” Atlan weapons.  And you then want to cry because it means killing another 100+ freaking golems that only spawn every 20 minutes or so.

This post brought to you by too much coffee and a heady wave of nostalgia. And a bit of chagrin…