I'm crossposting this from another thread because I'm not getting any feedback about this:
I'm finding that level scaling clothing is kind of broken in 1.11. Can someone do me a favour and check I'm not going mad?
Go to Rancho Coronado North waypoint:
To the south of the waypoint (where the green arrow is), there is an NCPD assault in progress. Kill all of the security guards but don't loot anything. Make note of the armour rating on the clothing that drops from the guards and any clothing in the nearby static container. Save game state, reload and check the item levels again.
If you kill them all while stationary (i.e. use cripple movement + legendary contagion passive + Rippler to root them all in place before you engage), you should get the same loot as me. [edit: note for people in this thread: enemy corpse loot is procedurally generated using a random.seed whose input = xyz coordinates of the enemy at time of death. If you allow an enemy to move, their coordinates will change, the seed output will be different and you will get different items.]
Weapons are fine and remain level scaled through save state but only long as they drop directly on the ground. There is a static container with a white clothing item (Punk Boostweave Biker Jacket for me) that also remains level scaled.
Its any item on the security guard's corpses that are reverting to level 1, which also downgrades the rarity to common/uncommon. This applies to both weapons and clothing inside the corpse container. Thats the only reason I noticed it. The blue items turned permanently white or green after 1 reload.
My observations: Items generated in corpse containers are level scaling correctly on first drop. Once the container exists in the gameworld, if you save and reload the game state, the items inside the container revert to level 1.
On first kill:
On saving game state, then reloading:
The visible corpse model appears to have moved during save/load state but this may just be the visible model, not the invisible container (which contains the loot). Save/loading seems to lift ragdoll objects off the ground and drop them back to earth - something you have all probably observed in your own playthroughs. That or you may have seen character models stand up or t pose before reaching the starting point in their idle animation (after which the animation cycles properly). I don't think it displaces the container.
There are also some containers in the game, mainly NCPD assaults in progress or organized crime activities where the quest completion container will never level scale loot. There are also some items in the game like the Legendary Media Ocuset that never appear to level scale (but this is in 1.1. I still need to verify if this is the case in 1.11).
With few exceptions, the rarity of procedurally generated loot is subject to minimum level requirements so for example, procedurally generated clothing will never roll legendary rarity prior to level 40. You can see this on the netrunner suit in 8ug8ear's safe during the "Gig: Getting Warmer". At level 39 it will always roll epic rarity. At level 40 and above it can be either epic or legendary. The major exceptions to this rule are themed legendary items (always legendary) and boss drops from Sasquash and Oda who will always drop legendary quality items regardless of player level.
There are also some items that are always epic or legendary, even if you do not meet the minimum level requirement (such as the Overture revolver from an Maestrom/NCPD gun fight in Watson or the shotgun from the NCPD organized crime activity next to the warehouse where the main job: Disasterpiece takes place).
