Well, I have only been using Unreal for maybe 10 months now so not really sure what I don’t know. What ARE Data Only Bleprints? Is this what yiou are calling an Actor Component? I only use blueprints, so I dont know if this is a class only accessible through C++?
You could always run a loop test doing 10000 iterations one on DT and one on DataBP and see what the times are. If is negligible then it is up to what is the easiest to work with in the manor in which it is being used. Your Data Table Rows ID is a name, not an index, so you can literally write a name or a type of identifier for each item. E.g. Row Name = “Armor_Helmet_0001”. You can name it whatever so it’s for you to think outside the box and get clever in your naming scheme. And your not just limited to one data table. You could have a data table for Armor, Long Swords, Short Swords, Helmets etc. and then also have a Data Table which has all armor, all weapons all swords or whatever (it would be tricky to create this as I do not know of a way to automatically generate a new Data Table, but may be possible via C++ so that this task is automated. You could alsohave a seperate table for each seperate list of random item drops. Each of those Data Tables would have a listof items that can be randomly dropped from that list. As far as ease of creation, for me, I made a Data-Table for Projectiles, which contains a list of any and all data used by any projectile (Static Mesh, Particle System used, Speed, Damage, Colors Etc.) and this way I can easily create new projectiles just by adding them to the Data Table and selecting values for the options.