Anthem's recent loot update accidentally made loot worse

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Elysian Caches are bugged, and Masterworks became rarer

From the support forum to the official subreddit, Anthem's community is once again in an uproar over a well-meaning but ill-fated loot update. Yesterday's patch made Masterwork gear more interesting and accessing the Forge less tedious, and it also made some significant changes to loot. However, as countless players have pointed out, many of those changes backfired and further crippled Anthem's already hobbling loot system.

For starters, while update 1.0.4 was intended to make Grandmaster Stronghold bosses "drop more loot with a chance at additional Masterwork and Legendary items," many players reported receiving fewer Masterworks from Grandmaster bosses. And by fewer, I mean none. A previous update made it so that every Grandmaster Stronghold yields at least one Masterwork item, but following the latest patch, players said they often received nothing but Rare and Epic items from Strongholds. 

As if that weren't enough, a bug in update 1.0.4 allowed other players to inadvertently pick up other people's drops. You'd still receive items other players picked up, so they weren't unwittingly stealing drops from you, but this did mean that all the worthless items now dropping in Grandmaster activities ate up a lot of inventory space. Most people don't bother taking Epic or Rare items, let alone Uncommon ones, so you can see how this would get annoying. 

To top it all off, the newly added Elysian Caches are also bugged. Many players have reported receiving nothing when opening Elysian Caches even after spending an Elysian Key. This is especially painful - and a touch ironic - since a selling point for these caches was that they would never give you duplicate items. According to the EA Help Twitter, resetting your game can send missing Elysian drops to your inventory, but players have had mixed results with this method. Many say they only received half of their missing drops after resetting their game, while others never saw any at all. 

Update: Per BioWare community manager Jesse Anderson, resetting your game should properly display any Elysian drops you may be missing. However, you'll likely only notice their reappearance if they're cosmetics; it's also possible to receive materials from Elysian Caches which aren't easy to find in your inventory. So if you absolutely cannot find your Elysian rewards, it may just be that they were materials that went under the radar.

There is at least some good news. As BioWare community lead Andrew Johnson said earlier today, BioWare just recently pushed a fix for a few of these issues. Johnson said Strongholds should once again guarantee Masterworks and players should no longer be able to pick up your loot. However, fixes for the Ember invasion and the Elysian Cache bug are still up in the air. For everyone's sake, I hope the remaining issues are sorted out soon. 

Relatedly, here are all the Anthem problems we'd love to see fixed. 

Austin Wood
Austin Wood
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.