Generated Equipment

Besides the unique items, with their names and history, you’ll also find plenty of ordinary equipment with useful but unexceptional attributes. Such items are randomly generated, from their names to their bonuses, by intelligent selection from predetermined loot categories. They can be found as enemy drops, in most containers throughout Kirkwall and the Free Marches, and even in shops where they represent the bulk of merchant inventories. These items are generated upon entering the map in which they are situated.

You’ll quickly learn to spot such items by their use of adjectives rather than individually imagined names. While “The Bann’s Backhouse Door” is a fairly memorable title that marks out an early unique shield, the “Superior Shield” and “Heavy Shield” are examples of many generic items that will come your way.

Perhaps the most relevant factor in the generation of items is Hawke’s level. Weapons and armor will scale accordingly, keeping pace with the party’s need for increasingly powerful gear. Older items can be confidently traded away for silvers and bits.

The most useful items endow the user with multiple bonuses, but costs rise exponentially with each additional bonus. Furthermore, generated items never feature Rune slots and their bonuses cannot match the power or specialization of unique items. But when you are trying to be frugal in your expenditure, such finds can usefully fill gaps in your party’s inventory. Mages will want to collect staves of every element, while accessories with the same bonus can be equipped on one character for a dedicated, stacked advantage to a specific attribute.

Loot Drops

Enemies are sometimes scripted to drop specific items as the fixed rewards for quests. They may also leave coins or Potions as plunder to be claimed for defeating them in battle. Most of the time, though, the treasure dropped by enemies consists of generated items. These are randomly selected from within a range of objects that belong to the loot category associated with the creature group (as revealed in the Bestiary chapter of this guide). The following table of loot categories shows the useful types of reward for each group.

Potions work slightly differently, as the game assists players who are short on supplies. The chance of a Potion drop is greatest when your inventory is empty, the probability decreasing until you hit the limit for the current difficulty level. If the number of Potions in your inventory matches or exceeds the limit, they will stop appearing as loot. This limit applies to each type of basic Potion individually. As soon as the number of Potions in your inventory falls below the limit, you will be getting some as loot drops again.

Although they are cheap goods, you can always exploit the game’s generosity in the early stages by forcing the drops. For example, try placing all of your Lyrium Potions in storage at Gamlen’s House so that your inventory is empty of them before opening some of the containers around Kirkwall.