Regarding the Loot Nerf

While most people have been happy with the Jovian Concord, Wisp and the Gas City rework, there was something deep within the patch notes that caused a small ruckus, one that hasn’t been discussed at all by the developers and discussed a lot by the community. Two lines in particular:

• Fixed Chesa Retrieve double dipping with Nekros’ Desecrate.
• Fixed Chesa/Desecrate double dipping with Hydroid/Khora.

To clarify what this means, it means that Nekros’s Desecrate and Chesa’s Retrieve no longer work alongside Hydroid and Khora’s Pilfering augments. All of these abilities have a chance to drop extra loot. Hydroid and Khora require enemies to be caught by their respective abilities (Tentacle Swarm and Strangle Dome) while Nekros just has a chance to Desecrate whatever enemies are killed within his ability range. Chesa is a Kubrow and does what it wants, occasionally ‘desecrating’ a body the way Nekros does.

Originally, this meant that you could use all these abilities together. Hydroid and Khora could use their abilities at the same time as Nekros and you could get multiple drops out of a single enemy. Key word being “could” because everyone had a different chance, no one was ever guaranteed a drop.

Normally this wouldn’t be too bad. You’d only ever get extra health and energy orbs from Nekros and maybe some additional resources and maybe you’d get a chance at a rare mod. For example, a popular farming spot was Uranus Survival, where you can farm Polymer Bundles (needed in literally everything and in huge amounts), Gallium and Tellurium (needed in Archwing gear and a pain to farm in Archwing missions) and also have a chance at the INSANELY rare mod Condition Overload. Having a Nekros, Khora and/or Hydroid (normally Nekros and Hydroid because they came first) on your team just sped things up a little. Instead of it taking about 10 minutes to get 2500 polymer, it would take about 6-8 minutes.

But these abilities no longer stack with each other. Any looting ability will only work once per enemy, meaning that if you have a Nekros and a Hydroid or a Khora in a squad, two of you are wasting a mod slot or an ability, and only one person can ‘loot’ a body at a time. Which means that everyone gets less loot.

The thing is, this nerf is unwarranted. The ONLY time it was an issue was with the Silver Grove Specters, which people used resource boosters, Nekros, Hydroid and a Chesa Kubrow each to get up to 32 copies of a random mod instead of 1. That’s clearly unintended you’re only supposed to get one reward from the Specters. But rather than make it so the Silver Grove is immune to loot abilities (because those aura mods aren’t supposed to be that common), they changed looting mechanics so they can no longer stack. Which affects almost every farm for resources in the game.

Heck, there’s loads of ways this could have been fixed without taking it all away. You could have made them only stack once or reduced the chances of the double-dipping loot or nerfed the percentage of extra loot on Hydroid and Khora’s augments or put a maximum on the number of times something can be ‘desecrated’. The exponential doubling of loot from Silver Grove Specters could easily be seen as a tad game-breaking but why not make it so the maximum loot you get is 4 or 8?

What makes it stranger though is that stacking Nekros still works. Multiple Nekroses work together, because each Nekros will desecrate a body that another Nekros missed. But you can’t use different Warframes and you can’t use your Chesa Kubrow. I mean, you can, nothing’s stopping you, but you get no benefit from it. So if you want extra loot, rather than working together and building a team, everyone can just go Nekros and not worry about it.

All this does is make farming even slower than it is, while reducing your options when it comes to farming. Most of the time you wouldn’t get 32 drops instead of 1. You’d get 2-4 extra drops, maybe more if you’re lucky. It’s made even worse with more recent farms, especially since the Hexenon farm is so slow and dependent on specific enemies.

I understand wanting to get rid of extreme scenarios like the Silver Grove, but why do you have to make everything else worse at the same time?