Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening use a unique system for distributing loot and balancing gameplay. Creatures maintain two potential inventory systems, an equipped inventory, and a dropped inventory. The former controls the appearance of the NPC's model (for example armor, weapons, etc.) whereas the latter controls the loot yielded and available to the player upon looting the NPC's corpse.
Rare Loot Explained
In both games there appears to be a small, unparsed % chance of a creature/npc to drop one of more items in his equipped inventory when killed. Causing the generic dropped loot table to be dropped, along with x-item from his/her person. In many cases this results in a piece of generic armor, or a generic weapon. However, occasionally this can result in rare magic items, or even unique magic items not found anywhere else.
Notable Drops in Origins
Notable Unique Items
- Sophia Dryden - Warden Tower Shield
- Adventuring Mage - Robes of the Gifted
- Gaxkang the Unbound - Fade Wall
Notable Rare Magic Items
- Lightning Rod - Dropped by casters
- Executioner's Helm - Dropped by melee fighters
- Chasind Crusher - Dropped by Qunari Mercenary in Deserted Building (possibly any Qunari wielding a hammer)
Notable Drops in Awakening
Notable Unique Items
- Smuggler Leader - The Felon's Coat / The Rose's Thorn / Spear-Thrower / Gloves of Guile
- Crow Assassin (Burning Bridge) - Wolf Treads / Backhands / Blackblade Tunic / Fang / Dumat's Claw
- Crow Assassin (Vigil's Keep - Throne Room / Old Stark's Farm) - Vest of the Nimble / Imperial Edge / Antivan Leather Boots / Wade's Drakeskin Gloves / Crow Dagger
- Apostate mage - Vestments of Urthemiel / Enchanter's Cowl / Elementalist's Grasp
- Adria - Noble Clothing - female only - blue and purple gown with red trimming. There are many different types of noble clothing in Dragon age, this is the only one Adria drops.
- Rylock - Landsmeet Shield / Knight Commander's Plate / Templar Gauntlets
- Utha - The Winter Blade / Dwarven Massive Armor
- Avvar Lord - Ser Alvard's Sword / Dwarven Massive Armor / Greaves of the Sentinel / Duty
- Third Disciple General - Sage's Fuzzy Head-Sweater
Notable Rare Magic Items
- Various "Blood Mage"s - Skins of the Keeper
- Various casters, including Hired Goon Leader - Lorekeeper's Robe
- Lieutenant - Ceremonial Armored Boots / Helm of the Red / Maul / Ceremonial Armored Gloves / Ceremonial Armor
Notes
- The % chance of possible equipped item drops is small (<10% parsed)
- The chance the item from the inventory that you get is in fact the unique item is also low : 1/8 (8 possible inventory slots)
- It appears as though magic inventory items will only drop from creatures of lieutenant level or above.
- If the above system is in fact correct, then the previously accepted theory of increased drop rate in Nightmare mode (due to reduced drop rate of potions) is incorrect.
- Drop rate across all difficulties is scarce; it is still unknown whether there is a difference between them.