As of 9 PM Central, Bioware has pushed a hotfix to address some of the loot issues. It appears that Bioware is still working on fixing common/uncommon items dropping at the level cap, but the changes are below.

Items will no longer have inscriptions on them that are not appropriate for that specific item. NOTE: This only applies to items obtained after the patch. Items obtained prior to the hotfix will still have the same inscriptions they had before.
Masterwork crafting costs have been reduced from 25 -> 15 Masterwork Embers. The amount of plants, metal and parts required for crafting a Masterwork item have also been reduced. 

Another patch for Anthem, and another small batch of various fixes. You can find the official patch notes here: https://www.ea.com/games/anthem/news/patch-22819

-The tethering timer for missions has been increased. Players should now have more time to catch up to their Squad before seeing a countdown timer.

-The Swarm Tyrant encounter in the Tyrant Mine Stronghold can no longer be reset by the entire Squad exiting to the main menu and rejoining the session in progress.

-Players are no longer able to reopen chests that had already been looted in Strongholds.

I’m most excited to the the tethering timer being adjusted, as the notification that I was too far away often covers up my heat indicator while flying to another mission location. Wasn’t a huge deal, but being close to the overheat point while not being able to see when I need to drop out of flight for a few seconds was a pain in the ass.

After checking on the subreddit for Anthem, I came across a post from yesterday. It appears to address the loot concerns, which were lowered in a previous patch due to a patch before that unexpectedly granting too many drops. Apparently, this has been addressed, and is either going live today or tomorrow, March 1st.

Hey All,


First off, thank you for all the feedback around loot drops, this is what we have heard:


Many inscriptions are not useful to the item they are attached to
Due to this, players need to get many masterworks of the same item to find a “good one”
Players want the frequency of masterwork drops to increase to help with the above OR…
They want us to change how masterwork inscriptions work so that they are more “useful”


There is more feedback, the above is a summary.


This is our plan for changes to go live on February 28th or March 1st (central US time)


Inscriptions are now better for the items they are on
This applies to new items earned in Anthem (not existing ones in your Vault)
If an inscription applies only to the item it is on (gear icon), it will be useful to that item. Otherwise the inscription will provide a Javelin wide benefit
For example, an Assault Rifle will not have an item specific +pistol damage inscription. It may have a +electric damage suit wide inscription (cool for a lightning build)
Some more information below
Removed uncommon (white) and common (green) items from level 30 drop tables
This was a highly requested change and we agree, so that’s that.
We have reduced the crafting materials needed to craft a masterwork from 25 masterwork embers to 15 masterwork embers
As you salvage or harvest, you should be able to craft more masterwork items to get the inscriptions you are looking for
Now that inscriptions are more relevant to their item, this should yield better results for players


Additional inscription change details
Its hard to write a short version of this, but I’m going to try. If we need to add more information later we can do that…


Current: There are a large pool of inscription options available to roll on items, the inscription pools are generic (e.g. Weapons)
Every masterwork item has 4 inscriptions – Major Primary, Minor Primary, Major Secondary, Minor Secondary
Change: Each item type now has a specific set of inscription options for each of their inscription pools. The pools are smaller and are targeted to the specific item type
E.g. there used to be a Weapon pool, now there is an Assault Rifle pool and the assault rifle pool has 4 pools for each of the inscription types listed above
Primary inscriptions are focused on damage or survivability
Any item specific inscriptions (gear icon) will always benefit the item they are on
Javelin wide inscriptions (suit icon) will benefit damage or survivability across the whole Javelin
Secondary inscriptions focus on utility and can be targeted to the item (gear icon) or the entire javelin (suit icon)


There are likely a bunch of questions, we will read through the comments and if we need an additional post to clarify things, we can work on that.


Thanks again for all of your support


Ben

Reddit user u/BenIrvo, Anthem’s Lead Producer

While I’m only mid-levels, around 14-15, I haven’t encountered any Masterworks gear yet. It seems with the way they worked together with inscriptions caused several inscriptions to be useless until a proper Masterwork would drop. I haven’t progressed far enough to see any issues, but I can see the communities stance on the problem. No one wants to have to grind to get that perfect cohesive mesh that a Masterwork-level javelin will want.

The patch itself appears to be about 3 GBs total, though the way Origin handles updates is somewhat confusing. It appears to check file integrity before starting the download, and my update has yet to start downloading… It’s still in the “Preparing download” description, whatever that means. Anyway, according to another player on the Super Friends Discord, the update appears to be about 3 GB on Origin. Give us a shout in the comments about what it looks like on Xbox/PS4.