DotMM: magic items per level
As a companion post to the last one, let’s have a quick look at magic items.
Reddit user u/JonTheBold has done the work for us and enumerated all of the magic items that are findable in the dungeon. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything tells us how many items a party should find:
Level | Common | Uncommon | Rare | Very Rare | Legendary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1-4 | 6 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
5-10 | 10 | 17 | 6 | 1 | 0 |
11-16 | 3 | 7 | 11 | 7 | 2 |
17+ | 0 | 0 | 5 | 11 | 9 |
Now, the first tier isn’t covered by Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage and the final tier (17+) is compressed into a single dungeon layer (as we saw with the gold distribution in the previous post). But up until the final layer of the dungeon we can compare our expected loot versus the actual loot:
Expected loot:
Character Level | Common | Uncommon | Rare | Very Rare | Legendary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
5-16 | 13 | 24 | 17 | 8 | 2 |
I’m not going to quote the entire Reddit post, but here’s the breakdown of items:
Loot in dungeon:
Dungeon Level | Common | Uncommon | Rare | Very Rare | Legendary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1-22 | 19 | 43 | 31 | 21 | 1 |
So hey! Looks like DotMM is actually pretty generous with its loot! What I haven’t analysed is the whole minor/major split that Xanathar’s Guide talks about, simply because that would be too much effort of looking up items in loot tables. It could be that the balance in the dungeon is shifted a lot more towards minor than it should be, but I doubt it.