1% drop rates... a thought expriment.

[Giantbane]

The weathered weapon is intended to be used though... it's not a side upgrade or anything. It changes it A LOT because it no longer becomes worth acquiring besides something to use up an inventory space until you upgrade it. They might as well just get rid of the Weathered weapon entirely and only have the upgraded i110 weapon for the t8/9 reward. Why bother with the Weathered coil weapons, which have a lockout to it, when you can just spam the hell out of Levi Ex... This would make the Tidal weapons essentially mandatory to acquire for most endgame FC. How is that not changing anything?

It's a matter of time. Most statics are smart enough to know that they'll get to tier 8 faster if they spam the hell out of trying to kill t6 & t7 than spamming the hell out of levi X to upgrade their weapons from i95 to i100. So why make a major detour to spam the hell out of LeviX to acquire a weapon you're just going to ditch before you get to the point where weapon really matters? (tier 9)

RNG is an RPGs bread and butter when it comes to system. If you don't like the system, or find it detrimental enough to hate the game (especially when it's not even very prevalent in this one), you're not exactly a valid source of criticism when a game dev decides to put it in. You may not like it, but that kinda points out that you're not an intended audience/target for the game (in the long term). Using comments like "lazy design" only points out that you just don't know much about what to expect from the genre. From tradition, it's like going into an FPS game and complaining that you die too quickly to headshots. It's an element that the genre tends to follow. Not understanding design choice also reduces the validity of negative comments. You're more than welcome to share them, but unless you understand things well, you're more than likely in-the-wrong to think the way you do. Of course, you could still be right about things, but unless you provide a solid argument for it, no one has a reason to truly believe it.

You remember when RPGs used to give you random amounts of stats when you leveled up? That was stupid, most RPGs have removed that random element because there was nothing particularly fun about saving before you leveled up and reloading until you got a "good" stat level up.

You ever hear Yoshi talk about why the bosses tend to do more scripted moves than random ones? It's because he wanted the players to win or lose fights based primarily on their skill. If the fights were too random, you'd end up with easier or harder versions of the fights depending on which skills got used and in which order. So a player might win a fight once because it did the moves in an "easy" sequence and then lose a fight because they got a "hard" sequence. Players do not want to lose fights "just because", they want them to feel fair and that they lost them because they made a mistake. So, while there are some random elements to the fights, most of it is pretty scripted so you get a reasonably consistent experience from one attempt to the next.

Advancement and gear is also important to RPGs. People may kill stuff a few times just because it's fun, but you'll need to have that carrot on this stick (loot) to get them to keep killing it. This way content doesn't get outdated too quickly. By the same token I think having massive RNG is a lazy way to set up the carrot and the stick. When you base advancement (loot) on RNG, and then make that RNG very low, then by the same token, a player's ability to progress is going to vary wildly depending on how RNG treats them. Some RNG is good so that people don't necessarily know exactly what to expect each time. However, too much and you're going to end up with too many players that chase that carrot, never get the stick, and are going to be put off by the process. Which is why I feel it's bad, and really lazy.