Where is the gear

[DWPerk]

Did I screw up and should have changed one of the optional settings?

1 in 20 chests has a piece of basic gear that you can find in Boltacs. I have found one chest with treasure, it contained the ring of death that was cursed and sold for 250,000. Great I can buy anything now. Wait, I have everything. It also contained a rod of fire that broke the 1st time I used it.

To give you an idea of how much I have played, my priest was class changed at 13 and is now a level 12 Samurai and the same for the Mage to lord and have been down to level 7 a few times

[Wizardsmana]

Farm levels 9 & 10 for the better stuff. In the 80's I pretty much did level 1 maze to build up levels, then farmed level 4 with the alarms, then used the elevator to level 9, then chute to level 10 to farm. Turning right instead of left (contra dextra avenue) was a quick teleport out to town making level 10 great for farming.

[Abscondrel]

5,6,7,8,9,10 all have gear. 5 and 6 are not loaded with great stuff but better stuff starts there. 7 has a dragon every time. 8 and 9 have mobs that kill you so the drops can be nice. 10 produces something on every run, usually.

[Olinser]

How can you be that high level, played that much, and not even have been below level 7 or even understand how the game's loot system works?!?! The maps are only 20x20 and most of them only use a fraction of that space, with auto-mapping its hilariously easy to fully map every level in a short period of time.

Gear drops are based on the monsters you are killing. Once you have fully identified monsters, you can look up exactly what they drop in the Beastiary and you can see their exact pools of drops (???? items are ones that you haven't seen drop yet, so those are presumably the good ones). Obviously, if you're killing lower-level monsters and not finding good stuff, then you have to go deeper and kill tougher monsters.

And yes, outside small +1 stuff like longswords and shields, you won't find items better than in the shop until you get around level 7-8 or lower, and you don't get the top-tier stuff anywhere but level 10 (or the set encounter Red Dragon on level 7, but that's because it's a set encounter of a level 10 monster, with that level 10 monster's drop pool).

The ring you found was a one-time drop from a set encounter on level 4.

Rule of thumb is that you can get get +1 stuff from level 4+, +2 stuff from 7+, and the top tier stuff on level 10 (or level 7 Red Dragon). As you go deeper and fight tougher monsters, the drop rate will get significantly better for more powerful stuff.

[rn_archl0rd]

the dragon has a 5% chance of dropping the same ring you find on level 4 worth 250K. I got 3 of them from him.

[gamer1]

Grinding for gear would be helped a lot if the mark of chevron your characters get for killing Werdna actually worked like before. Used to be if you hit that last room and even one character had previously beat Werdna, you'd only get the Vampire Lord and some vampires BUT you also get a chest to open, and the Vampire Lord has a 10% chance of dropping the Muramasa, Lord's Robes, and other nice gear (like the Cusinart/Vorpal blade and silver gloves)