Tuning Non-Elite Mob Availability and Drop Rates

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Solo stuff is garbage, it seems everyone in here knows it.

I've found that you can gather crafting and quest resources pretty effectively solo, even as a mid-power character, but yes, the solo gear drops are so poor as to be irrelevant to any reasonable progression.

Gota get 25 skill in 5 skills to be able to augment - distill/phlog the gear to tweak the armor, so eventually you are doing crafting for gear anyway, that's forgetting you have to skill up those augment skills to be able to do that and jump through a quest to unlock it in a zone that will literally kill you for being there.
I hate crafting in games...

Project Gorgon is definitely a treadmill-heavy game where you have to do lots of different activities to reach a goal, but that's a big part of its appeal. Don't give up! A lot of us find that to be a fun part, where everything from gardening to nature appreciation has some absolutely essential role in the web of skills that support putting your character together.

Augments dropping is great. I think I overall agree with less elite drops, but you don't want to make grouping pointless compared to crafting. You also need more types of mobs, so that players focused on 1 slot, like a lute, and can farm it in a reasonable amount of time. Also, you'll probably want more named solo monsters in the open world with the higher loot chances.

Hahaha, I remember choosing Unarmed as a noob thinking "oh, that'll probably be more flexible" and now needing two rare drop items, one for each hand slot, for many builds. Lutes might be even worse than katar/claw, but I cry a little every time a mob drops a nice sword, bow, or crossbow, when I'm still equipping the (admittedly, gold) katar/claw from GK charity runs in 2018.

One of the changes in the next update is relevant here: random augments will drop in loot.

That does sound great! I found the 0-65 gear drops pretty okay overall, but I did also start hoarding run speed augments to give to low-level players needing their first speed boost. That'll add a nice incentive to keep people thinking about augmenting to attach them as they level, too.

It's not intentional that solo loot is "pointless" compared to group loot

That's encouraging to hear! I think it's more fair to say that solo loot just isn't relevant to the max level, gear-driven advancement process, on any time scale that a human being can experience. Even playing 40+ hours a week, (which really isn't healthy and makes me worry about my PG friends and myself when it happens), won't give you a sense of advancement on that particular treadmill.

Solo monsters also need a bit more oomph, too, but not all monsters need the same thing. Loot is very personalized, and VERY complex. Every monster has its own loot profile, and many solo monsters just need some general tuning up

Sounds encouraging, too. I was never aiming for one of the 6-7 augments-per-slot max-enchanted builds that the uber-players settle on. I was just hoping for some way of trying ANY build in a way that had beating up mobs as a fun part of the mix.

It's the rate of purple/gold gear drops that's the sole obstacle that I ran into. Those critical gear pieces simply don't drop at any appreciable rate from solo combat.

A modest goal, relative to other players you usually interact with and are sharing their builds, is to get something (not Zuke's ring or anything special), with base stats that don't conflict with the build in each slot, and have most of them be at least purple, with a fair chance of a couple gold rarity pieces in there.

Once you have those pieces, you're going to join the club of spending weeks or months augmenting, rerolling, repairing, and sharing the pain of the RNG results in chat.

And thinking ahead just a little bit, you're going to feel like an idiot if you spent months rerolling a red piece of gear to have a useful purple or gold drop soon after, in a group.

But! That will consume dozens or hundreds of Large Prisms, and thousands of phlog, and where do those, the prisms especially, come from? Rare gear drops. Again, something that solo combat rewards too poorly (without even comparing to any other option), to even feel like you're on a treadmill at all.

Anyway, figuring out how to improve solo loot will take time, and I'll do it in steps. The next steps are in the next update!

Sounds good! Thanks for all the hard work! I understand that might put this particular issue more in the 2021 time frame, but it's always good to have some hope.