another post 265 leveling guide, except this one makes more sense.
Wrote this for my clan. Thought you guys might be interested as there are a few posts up that have it wrong.
Understanding Leveling, loot drops, Exotics and Mods post Power 265.
Hey guys, now that the spoiler ban is listed, I tought I'd share this I wrote for a mate the other day. There's a lot of misinformation out there surrounding how loot drops work in D2 once you hit 265. I'll attempt to share with you what I've learned and it might help you level smarter.
The confusion stems from Bungie's awesome smart tech that determines what your base Power level taking into account all your gear. This is great in that you don't burn an exotic because you've got blue pants on, but it also makes things a lot less transparent. I'll try and explain how I think it works.
So from now on I'm going to talk about Base Power level. We'll call that the BPL. Now this is absolutely crucial and everything drop level wise comes from this. In old speak this is your max light level with all your best gear on. Now, it's not clear at the moment how the different armour and weapon slots affect light level or exactly how Bungie calculates this with not equipped gear. It looks to be similar to D1 in that the Kinetic weapon has most affect (maybe 1.25x) and the class item least (maybe 0.75x) but I do not have specifics right now.
So, once you go over Power 265, your BPL will be the number that all your drops are based on. So blues will drop at your BPL, Legendary engrams will drop at this and rank ups from all planets and tower NPC's will drop at this too. Exotic engrams will drop 5 higher. Powerful engrams drop about 7 higher I think. Exotic quest items and Night fall rewards etc also drop at 7 higher, but the Exotics will have a built in mod so this might look like being 12 higher.
So what does this mean?
You will defintely hit times when you seem stuck in quicksand, not being able to increase your Power level. You'll definitely get this feeling about 265 ish, whne the blues stop dropping higher than your BPL and then once you've exhausted all the high level rewards each week, and to be honest, there are not many high level activities in the game. To maximise the potential of your Powerful and Quest rewards it's best to space them out, and grind out (yes, D2 has grindig too!) your BPS, between drops.
So to illustrate this, we'll assume you have 1 character and nothing in the vault. You have your highest Power items equipped. Imagine all your gear is BPL 275. Not Power 275, BPL 275. You have 2 exotics (1 weapon, 1 armour) and a mod on each piece of armour and weapon as well. All mods are worth an extra 5 power, so everything will read as 280 and your Power level will show as 280. You get a 291 Mida drop (Yay!) and this pushes your Power to 283. This will likely also have pushed your BPL to 276 (Remember Kinectic has a high weighting). Once you hit 280 and start adding mods, keeping track of your BPL becomes trickier. Personally I use blues as a marker. Whenever I get to make an improvement to my gear, I'll hit a public event to see what the next blue I have drops at. So equip the new Mida, head off, do Public Event, and see what drops. The next blue drops should drop at 276, so infuse that. Then go through the same process and infuse every weapon and armour slot with a 276 blue, or at least until a blue drops at 1 light higher, so in this case 277. At this point you should then turn in your next Powerful or Quest reward, and rinse and repeat. It's very important to use the blues to the rest of your armour at BPL + 5 when you get a good drop. This is the only way to avoid the stuck in quicksand feeling without just burning through your Powerful rewards. This also lessens the negative effect of getting a second Powerful drop in the same slot as the last.
So then there are Mods. Mods affect your Power level you see on screen, but do NOT affect your BPL. You can only make your own mods when you get to 280 light. As soon as you do reach Power 280, then you need to determine your favourite legendary armour set, and to mod every single piece. You'll be infusing everything into this set for the forseeable future. Make sure you're happy because after this point, changing a piece means adding a new mod, which is expensive and sometimes tricky, especially for class items. Adding mods to ALL slots, armour and weapon, should absolutely be your top priority as soon as you hit 280.
So finally, I'll this wall of text with a quick word about grinding. Personally, I've found the best way to grind (because it's more interesting that doing the same thing over and over again like Public Events or Lost Sectors) is to go to one of the planets and stay in the area that the Vendor is in. Nessus and Titan are my favourites. Make sure you ALWAYS have a fireteam XP boost running and a loot box map. Stay in this area, pick up planetary materials, open boxes, kill high value targets and do the public events. You will find you get blues often, and a Vendor rank up about every 20 minutes. This makes the Grind for the 1 extra Power blues and purples quite enjoyable and offers a good chance at exotics too.
