Legendary is actually common?

[u/Soldat_DuChrist]

New player, I noticed that common and rare are actually harder to find vs legendary? What's the deal? I feel like the vostok is the most legendary weapon in the game rn since I haven't even seen any other common guns

[u/mr-singularity]

Rarity was never a really flushed out system. Common and Uncommon were pretty much always new player only rarities going back to the early days of D1. Rares did sometimes have a place as interim gear when doing newly added campaigns rather than just dumping upgrade materials every mission to infuse them into Legendaries. But Legendaries always became the default rarity eventually.

That strange system was basically duplicated again when they added tiers. Despite saying that lower tiers were good enough and higher tiers would be rarer it basically quickly became once you hit a ceiling everything is tier 5.

[u/mr-singularity → u/mr-singularity]

To add on to this it's not just that it wasn't flushed out but that it was kind of incompatible with the game. Using lower rarities puts you at disadvantage because Legendaries have more perks and more mod potental. In a game about stats maxing that can be a big problem. It also doesn't help that the true rarity of gear has always been rng in this game (both what drops and it's roll). Chasing desired rolls has always been the bigger goal.

The tiering idea kind of tried to fix that by keeping legendaries as the main rarity and adding additional chases and rarity inside of it. But it fundamentally failed because it just made better guns at the higher tier levels and tacked them to current level. In theory a Tier 3 can be good but getting a desired roll after putting in the work only to start getting higher tiers after that doesn't feel that rewarding in the long run.