Queen Michael said:
Could somebody explain what the loot system is like?
Upon killing any enemy there is a slight chance that an item called an engram will drop in the form of a colored orb. Standard MMO colors apply, green common, blue rare, purple legendary. The engram in your inventory has an indicator as to which item slot the result will fit into. Picture of a gun, glove, boot etc.
The engram is taken back to the central hub of the game called the tower and turned in to an NPC called The Cryptarch. He takes the engram and wipes his... I mean, hands you the resulting randomly generated loot. The trouble is, after hours of tedious grind when you finally get a purple drop, the purple drop has a bout a 60% chance of not being purple at all, but blue. On the rare chance that the drop is, praise the random number generator Jesus, a purple; one of a couple things happen.
One, the item was a weapon of one of the three types ( Primary, Secondary, Heavy) and is then converted into a random weapon type within those categories. For example, a primary weapon randomly generates as either an auto rifle, pulse rifle, scout rifle, or hand cannon.
Two, the item was a piece of armor. In which case you are handed a purple piece of armor that can be for any class in the game, not just yours. So you got lucky enough for a drop, got extremely lucky enough for that drop to be purple, turned it in and hit the roughly 37% chance that the purple stays purple when turned in, then get handed the result with only a 33% chance that it is actually something for the class you play. P.S. the game has no mechanic to trade items between players, so you are stuck with it.
According to Bungie's ass brained devs, this was because it gave the Cryptarch NPC "a personality" during playtesting.
Edit: oh, and one more thing! The items, when awarded, are just a shell of what they are capable of ntil you wear them and earn metric assloads of experience, thus progressively unlocking abilities for the gear (better defense value/increased light, a stat that determines your character level over 20, special abilities, etc.
Trouble is the last 3 upgrades on the item take 6 of an item called an ascendant shard (for armor) or ascendant energy (for weapons) which are rare to the point of unattainable for 99% of the game's population and the only way to reliably attain them is to destroy purple gear, which might give you two.
I feel I should also point out that to bring a set of armor to full upgraded status requires 72 of these.