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Hey everyone – Chris King (Gameplay Design Director) and Darrin McPherson (Lead Gameplay Producer) here. First off, thanks to everyone for your continued support and feedback regarding Anthem. We hope you are enjoying the recent updates to the loot system.
With our first batch of loot updates wrapped up, we thought it a good opportunity to dig into some details and talk about what we are working on next.
First off, let’s walk through how inscriptions work. Inscriptions are random modifiers that are applied to each loot item upon creation. Here is an example of some inscriptions on an Avenging Herald –a Masterwork Heavy Pistol (and a really good one at that)!
A couple things to note with inscriptions:
- If there is a Gear icon (
) in front of the inscription, that means it applies only to the item itself. - If it has a Suit icon (
), that means it applies to everything on the javelin.
So in the Avenging Herald example above, the following inscriptions were rolled:
- +15% Weapon Damage. This increases the damage dealt from the Avenging Herald by an additional 15%. In this case, the inscription has a Gear icon so the damage boost *ONLY* applies to this weapon and wouldn’t apply to your secondary weapon.
- +4% Repair Amount. All health drops that are picked up will replenish an additional 4% health.
- +30% Ammo Drop Rate. Increases the chance of a defeated enemy dropping weapon ammo by 30%.
- +15% Heavy Pistol Damage. Since this has a Suit icon, any Heavy Pistol the player is carrying (including this Avenging Herald) will do an additional 15% damage. So if you had two Heavy Pistols equipped, both weapons would get the 15% increase.
One other callout here is that the Damage Number shown (in this case 1044) doesn’t include the damage bonuses that came from the inscription rolls. This is an important consideration – inscriptions aren’t reflected in the stat block (currently at least) so make sure you are comparing apples to apples here. As an example, check out these two Avenging Heralds – they both show identical Power values of 45 and Damage as 1044. But the one on the right will do more damage because of the two Damage inscriptions it has.
How are inscriptions applied? We have the following buckets of inscriptions:
- Minor Primary
- Minor Secondary
- Major Secondary
- Major Primary
- Epic Secondary
- Epic Primary
The lower the tier, the less impact the inscription will have. The higher the tier, the higher the impact.
As an example, Minor Primary can modify weapon damage from +5-25%. But adding a Major Secondary inscription to weapon damage will modify it from +25%-175%.
Ultimately, the rarity of an item dictates which inscriptions it gets. Here is a table that visualizes how this works on weapons and gear:
Here is a list of our inscriptions with descriptions of what they do:
There is a lot to digest here so we will leave it at that for now. In the next week or so, we will follow-up with another post that digs into some of the details even further but hopefully this post has been a good start.
As for what is next up for in-game updates, we are planning on the following:
- Bumping the ranges of some inscription rolls so that players don’t get things like “+1% Dmg”.
- Increasing the inscription pools on a per item basis. Right now we have large pools that are shared, but that means they need to be a tad more generic than we would like.
Not sure yet when we will get these out, but we will follow-up when they are ready.
Thanks for reading!
Chris & Darrin
