Starfield pioneer murders the same elite enemy 100 times to reach a damning scientific verdict: The loot is bad

pcgamer.com:

You ever feel like Starfield's best drops are a bit thin on the ground? Specifically, that its toughest elite enemies seem only ever to drop fairly naff rare and epic weapons instead of the legendary drops that come with three gameplay-altering modifiers? You're not alone, but now, as spotted by GamesRadar, one enterprising player has applied the scientific method to the conundrum.

The scientific method, of course, was invented by Aristotle back in the 4th century BC, and means killing one guy a hundred times in a row to see what happens. That's what Reddit user and Starfield player Endecc did to give a rough estimate of the odds of getting worthwhile legendary drops from high-level elite enemies. Friends, the odds aren't good.

Playing on Very Hard difficulty on NG+2, the level 82 Endecc murdered a level 98 Pirate Legend a hundred times in a row with a crafty quicksave and an utter dispassion for the suffering of their fellow spaceman, recording the drops they acquired from the slain astronaut in a handy spreadsheet. Over the course of a hundred kills, the Pirate Legend dropped 66 rares (the lowest tier of elite gear with only one modifier), 24 epics (two modifiers) and 10 legendaries (three modifiers).

Our scientist was not thrilled by their results. It wasn't so much the frequency of legendary drops that bothered them—I suppose a 10% chance of obtaining the notionally best, yellowest gear in the game isn't too bad—but that even that gear could be «totally unscaled». Nine of the drops Endecc picked up (two epics and seven rares) were practically worthless, puny items valued at under 1000 credits, and even the legendaries featured such almost spitefully underwhelming entries as a plain-jane combat knife worth 1400 creds.