My fleet mates and I waited until the final episode to complete the entire devidian series on our fed side. In doing so, we did every mission on elite mode, because for us normal is too easy and we, like everyone else, would like rare drops. Each episode gave us aprox. 10 - 15 drops...the combat ones that is. Multiply that by the combat episodes (4), thats 40 - 60 drops that were acquired by 3 playable characters. Out of that, ONE drop was not a common...and that was a green uncommon. We suffered through all 5 episodes on elite, taking much longer time than it would on normal, and getting one-shoted by tougher enemies. To top it all off...we get to the final episode...the final boss...where the best loot should be...and one of the devidians drops a common mk III. A mk III??? Was not happy.

This is just one example, for we have experienced this in a plethora of other missions. Just wondering if ne1 else has experienced the same thing.

Where is the loot?

That is why I don't usually play on elite for the drops. It's not worth the time and effort. Elite supposedly gives 30x the chance of a very rare drop, but it is still very low. I can't recall the exact numbers, but it's something like:

Chance of very rare drop on 'normal' = .0001 chance.

Chance of very rare drop on 'elite' = 30 x .0001 = .003 chance.

Basically, 30 times a very small number is still a small number.

And I understand that, and I may be just noticing it more cause I expect it more...kinda like how you always think you get stopped by every red light in town... but I still don't think what we get from it now is worth it. If, according to the math gods, that the increase in rare drops is in fact an acceptable increase...I can live with that, in that case, I would be willing to say it may be more worth it if we just got a grander drop rate of large hypos/batteries and components. I'd might stick around then, at least they are useful and i would feel rewarded. As it stands now, I haven't seen an increase in battery/component drops either.

Loot in this game really need some work... Not only is the loot of lower value (white,green,blue) then what i already have. It is also of lower rank than what i have! (getting Mk IX and X, when all my gear is already MkXI...)

I don't know, butt in the last 14 days, I've had 4 very rare drops on Elite. Two in space, two on ground. Additionally tons of Rare and Uncommon drops. Once I've had 3 rare loot balls on the same screen. Admittedly it happened only once though.

to date, ive only gotten 2 very rare drops, and they werent played on elite. they were played on normal.


however i find that on elite, the rare drops are plentiful on certain missions, and even when they are not rare drops, they tend to be high value

Then maybe this is just a featured episode thing?? cause we are not getting rare/very rare drops at all.

i do find that on featured episodes, the ratio of common drops is almost 3:1, which is extreme.

however if you hit up non story missions, such as the dailies that are assigned to you, the uncommons and very rares can drop quite frequently.

the exception i have found- is of course with science captains. all 3 of mine in the past have had a lot of troubles getting anything above uncommon.

While this can be true for story missions and the episodes the deferi, B-tran dilies do give some nice loot drops especially in space. I have easily made 50 million EC from those areas alone if not more. I have a MKXII tricobalt torpedo launcher Rare that I sue on one of my tunes which was a drop itself. Last night I had a MK X rare Phaser array drop. The place to farm is definitely one of those 2 areas on elite.

but to farm that place, you need to be in a cruiser.

theres no way to harden up escorts and science vessels enough to make them survive the harder enemies.

I prefer doing the slightly easier dailies, such as fleet actions, Ker'rat, and the Breen dailies.