Guild Wars 2

I doubled my usual stockpile of these during the MK events and decided it’s time to stop being stingy and get some use out of them. Thing is, I used up 2 whole sets (sickle on omnomberries, pick on mithril) without anything but 3 ore/1 fruit (and with “normal” quality tools I never have that bad of a “bonus” rate). So it’s essentially a “free poor quality” tool in my experience. Anyone have better results? Is there a trick to it?

It’s called probability.

A tool could have a 99% probability of giving you double drop rate, and you could still get none in 10 tries in a row.

I’m concerned it isn’t a coincidence. Such as, would these tools actually work better with a 0% Gatherer realm bonus maybe? Regular tools add that bonus, but these have a “set” bonus that can be surpassed? I’m thinking after 40 “rolls” I wouldn’t regret essentially wasting the resource nodes using inferior tools, if they were in fact superior.

It’s probably just chance, but I note from personal experience that the black lion sickle is merely extremely efficient at generating dandelion blossoms. I’ve gone through 8 full stacks (80 harvests) and I’ve never gotten what I assume would be a dye as the ‘rare’ drop.

Otherwise, I notice slightly better rates with the axe (hidden troves) and pick (orbs).

LFk provided some useful insight, but still looking to demystify this one before I make up my mind about them.

Maybe wvw reset?

Perhaps the lack of answers / interest in this topic is the best answer itself. No one really knows because these “commodities” are not frequently used.

With that said, I would warn Anet that allowing RNG to get out of hand on items labelled “Black Lion” anything undermines confidence in the “brand label” itself (although once the tooltip was corrected on BLSKs they seem to have avoided this reputation rather nicely). That’s not something to take lightly…

I acquired quite a few Black Lion Tools early in the game and I can confirm that they didn’t seem any better than your regular mining tools.

Just a waste of space imo.

Anet, how about an official, “The Black Lion tools work as intended, as a superior tool to the regular items.” ??

The worst part is they don’t stack. 25 sized stack is dumb, and the increased chance for stuff like gems is trivial/unnoticable. I just burned through all of mine asap once i got them to save space. Its not worth saving them to say…. specifically use on a ori node or something.

Frederick Vael : I know what you mean. But keep in minds that each stack has 25 tools. So it means OP didn’t get anything after 50 unique gathering.

On a side note, I recently used black lion’ kitten axe and sickle too. Lots of dandelion with the sickle, and not a single rare material with the pick axe. And I know this is about streak of bad luck, but even with the orichalcum pick axe, I still get between 5 and 10 orbs each time I gather all nodes from Orr. Not a single one with the black lion’ kitten axe.