@Zagorath I look for items the players need and for items that are thematic! Anything else matters very little! Certain mundane things could be useful, but magical items are generally more fun! Oh, and if you're willing to balance your encounters for things like "the party refuses to get any kind of armour rune because there are cooler magical items in the magical shop", then it really shouldn't matter too much!
Adding onto this: do you hand out the loot in the adventure or adapt it with new stuff?
I use ABP so that we can skip the less interesting +X stuff.
One of my players is very into crafting, and they work as a group to be able to afford things, so one of the best treasures I can give are uncommon or rare items, or even just the formulas.
I tend to focus more on fun than utility items, though this varies. And I like to give out thematic stuff. Recently they fought a Skuln, which is described as having adamant claws and teeth. But it has no listed treasure, so I gave them adamantium chunks as treasure from scavenging the body.
Yeah ABP kind of appeals to me. I'm not using it for two main reasons. First and foremost, I really wanted to see how Pathfinder plays with all the default rules. For now, I'm even tracking XP and encumbrance, which I wouldn't normally do. (Though I'm already thinking about ditching XP, at least for the low levels. In D&D I usually wanted to get through levels 1 and 2 and get up to 3 after 3–5 sessions at most, before slowing down after that.) I wanted to see how things go in vanilla and adapt when I see what is and is not working.
The second is Pathbuilder. It's an incredible tool and I've already bought it, as has at least one of my players. And at least one more player is seriously considering it. But the free version doesn't support ABP and I didn't want to force the players to purchase it to play.
My group just uses a table where a d100 decides.
Interesting! How does that go with balance and with giving out the basic runes the game seems to expect as part of its progression?
Pathfinder 2e General Discussion