Players report that general item drops feel a lot lower in this expansion. There are two changes we made in 3.19. The first is that the rate of encountering rare monsters from certain league content has been reduced, so you are fighting, killing, and receiving rewards from fewer monsters than before. This is partially offset by rare monsters in 3.19 now being more rewarding than they were before (the mods add more item quantity/rarity than before and there’s the reward conversion system used for the more dangerous mods).
The second reason is that we removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters. We replaced it with a moderate (2-3x) increase to item quantity, to offset the fact that they often have more life than regular monsters and some cannot drop maps.
There have been no other reward-affecting changes that we are aware of, but we will investigate to see if there are any unanticipated consequences of some other change.
Our intention with these changes is to modify certain league content that was out-of-line with other content so that it has a similar reward profile. These changes are important, but we understand they have reduced overall rewards that players receive.
We are going to compensate elsewhere, but we don’t want to just increase the raw number of items that are dropped. Most items are immediately filtered out. We want to increase the number of relevant items that drop.
Firstly, we are going to adjust the system that skews weapon/armour base types towards higher-level ones, so that players find items that are relevant for their level more often. This isn’t an increase to overall item drops, it just means that you will find more appropriate rare items more often. Secondly, we are going to apply the same item consolidation approach we did to Act Bosses a few leagues ago to Map Bosses also. They will now drop fewer items, but of substantially better rarity. This will result in you finding more unique items from Map Bosses.
It’s worth noting here that a widely-shared clip of a player opening an Arcanist’s Strongbox and receiving no items has caused some of the concern about potentially bugged item drops. We believe this was caused by the change where common currency drop less frequently, but in larger stacks, which we made a number of leagues ago. We will fix this specific Arcanist’s Strongbox issue.
These changes are not final, but we wanted to communicate our current thoughts immediately rather than wait until patch notes are ready later. The changes will be deployed separately, as they’re ready, over the next few days. We will continue to monitor feedback and will investigate more areas for adjustment.