Guild Wars 2

Edit Nov 14, 2014: See my later posts for round 2 – 950 bags.

http://s1307.photobucket.com/user/shtskate/media/champ%20bag%20drops/823totalchampbags-5knapsacks_zpsfbb1b801.jpg.html?sort=9&o=0 (R1 – 823 + 5)

http://s1307.photobucket.com/user/shtskate/media/part%202/950totalchampbags_zpsfed919fc.jpg.html?sort=9&o=0 (R2 – 950)

Rares:
18/823, 2.21% or 1:46
34/950, 3.58% or 1:28
52/1773, 2.93% or 1:34 bags

Exotics:
3/823, 0.365% or 1:274
3/950, 0.316% or 1:317
6/1773, 0.338% or 1:296 bags

Tier 6 materials:
74/823, 8.99% or 1:11
87/950, 9.16% or 1:11
161/1773, 9.08% or 1:11 bags

Scrolls of Knowledge:
135/823, 16.40% or 1:6
147/950, 15.47% or 1:6
282/1773, 15.91% or 1:6 bags

Cores:
58/823, 7.05% or 1:14
81/950, 8.53% or 1:12
139/1773, 7.84% or 1:13 bags

Lodestones:
6/823, 0.729% or 1:137
5/950, 0.526% or 1:190
11/1773, 0.620% or 1:161 bags

(Original Post dated Sept 28, 2014)

Just some drop rate research, none of these bags were farmed during the Blix exploit or the Coiled Watch event (or Silverwastes chest farm). I’ve never participated in either of those farms as I prefer small party/solo content.

I was actually pretty surprised at the lackluster results. I feel like champ bags were much more rewarding when they were first introduced (and not just by the amount of coin they dropped), but I never bothered to keep any data back then, so take that with a grain of salt.

Anyways, a quick breakdown of the drops so people can decide whether dedicated champion farming is actually worth the time/effort: (all bags were opened by a level 80 mesmer as I wanted to test for the possibility of biased drops via loot bags)

823 total champion bags:

135 total Scrolls of Knowledge

378 total weapons (197 one handed, 181 two handed)

428 total armor (156 light, 138 medium, 134 heavy)

17 trinkets (10 rings, 7 amulets)

995 total tier 5 mats (143 bone, 74 totem, 158 blood, 157 claw, 101 fang, 149 venom, 123 scale, 90 dust)

616 total refinement mats (125 t5 leather, 32 t6 leather, 240 silk, 27 gossamer, 322 mithril, 110 orichalcum)

74 total tier 6 mats (11 scale, 5 totem, 12 claw, 20 bone, 4 venom, 4 blood, 11 fang, 7 dust)

58 total cores (9 glacial, 8 crystal, 7 corrupted, 8 destroyer, 8 onyx, 8 charged, 10 molten)

10 total vile essences, 1 putrid essence

6 total lodestones (2 molten, 1 destroyer, 1 corrupted, 1 onyx, 1 crystal)

18 total rares (2 heavy chest, 1 heavy glove, 1 heavy helm, 1 heavy leg, 2 heavy shoulder, 2 light helm, 1 medium shoulder, 1 medium glove, 1 medium boot, 1 mace, 1 torch, 1 shield, 1 hammer, 1 greatsword, 1 longbow)

3 total exotics (1 medium shoulder, 1 light shoulder, 1 trident)

4 special exotics Twin Talons sword, Cobalt greatsword, Knowledge Is Power focus, Phoenix Reborn axe

178 of the 378 weapons can be considered “profession specific” for a mesmer. The other 200 are unusable by a mesmer. Interestingly, armor is favoring profession specific bias by roughly 11-14%, while weapons are favoring non profession specific bias by roughly 11%. Either this is too small a sample size to determine any conclusions, or could it be that a 10-12% profession specific bias is in effect, however, they flipped the operator for the weapon loot tables as they’ve been known to do in the past, i.e. the long standing slaying potion bug? Something to consider.

Amazingly, the drop rates for rare cores seem to be pretty even, despite the relatively small sample size.

Silk appears to be dropping at a nearly 2:1 ratio over thick leather.

Tier 5 materials seem to have a pretty wild variance, although that could be because certain materials are more likely to drop depending on the “monster type” of the champion, as I do tend to have a lot more bags of certain types due to the areas I frequent most. This could also explain the silk > leather discrepancy.

Something I learned that I hadn’t noticed before, “special/collectible” exotics that are exclusive to champ bags do not take the place of the 1 masterwork or better equipment slot, but are instead a rare additional drop. Also, I never noticed that wood does not drop from champ bags, only ore, and that the only trinkets that drop are amulets and rings.

I’m honestly pretty disappointed in the 18/823 rare drop rate, or roughly a 2% chance at a rare. Only a 3/823 exotic drop rate or roughly a 0.365% chance. But then again, I don’t pay much attention to how many trash mobs I kill between every rare/exotic drop, so I can’t say whether this is better/worse than general trash mob farming when taking high magic find into account. Maybe I’ll explore that more another day.

The 9% chance for a tier 6 material, or 1 out of every ~11 bags also seems a bit low, in my opinion.

Great effort you put in to collate the data. I enjoy reading such posts.

You’ve just scientifically confirmed what every player knows for a long time – champ bags have been nerfed so hard they’re worthless now.

Champion lootbags were nerfed because players were overfarming Champions… it was a really idiotic choice, instead of nerfing the ability to overfarm champs, they nerfed the bags themselves so in a sense they hurt players who are not overfarming Champions way more than champ farmers. Great Anet logic there

Also, 823 champion bags for 4 of the champ skins? Seriously?

Thumbs up for your efforts SKATE!
Would be interesting to compare your numbers to some raised shortly after champ bags were introduced.
Though I somehow do believe aswell that champ bag loot got nerfed hard in the past, I think it’s just Arena.Nets solution to those hardcore champ-train farmers (or even worse intentional event fail farmers). If so, it’s just sad that a few greedy people have such an impact on rewards for all players

€: maddoctor was faster :o

Hmmm. I’m sure I’ve done more than 823 events while playing GW2. I’d venture to say that the coin reward from your 823 bags is probably higher than I got in my 823 events, even with the bag coin reduction. I also got somewhere around 180-200K karma. I confess I don’t keep track of random drops from event mobs, but my (anecdotal) experience is that bags are a better source of mats, items and coin than mobs.

My complaint about bags is that the rewards should be from completing events, not from champ bags.

Yeah the rates do seem very low, I feel like I get way more rares and tier 6 materials just solo farming trash in the open world, but I do run 300% magic find. I was expecting at least 1 ascended weapon/armor chest. I remember getting at least a few of those in the early days of the Frostgorge Sound train, and I don’t believe I ever farmed 800+ bags back then.

I also feel like you have a much better chance at getting cores/lodestones out of dungeon chests than champion bags. But then again, I forgot they nerfed dungeons to limit you to 1 chest per day, so I’m surprised cores haven’t taken a pretty big jump in value. There’s probably a lot more loot/gold to be earned from parties just “zone clearing” through all the trash of level 80 zones.

I think unless you’re specifically after scrolls of knowledge, there’s not much reason to kill champions anymore. Even with the exclusive collectible exotics that drop, you’re better off just farming more gold/hour on trash mobs and buying what you need from the TP, letting a lucky player’s RNG benefit you from the random champ bags that people happen to accrue while just playing the game normally.

I may open my next 800 champ bags on a medium/heavy class to further test the possibility of profession specific drops. I may also farm 800 heavy moldy bags to see if I end up with better tier 6 material rates (wiki research seems to indicate so). And that would demonstrate that champ bags don’t serve their purpose of providing champion grade loot, compared to containers that drop from regular risen mobs.

SKATE.1394:

3 total exotics (1 medium shoulder, 1 light shoulder, 1 trident)

4 special exotics Twin Talons sword, Cobalt greatsword, Knowledge Is Power focus, Phoenix Reborn axe

I opened up 500 exotic champ bags (2 stacks) during the Scarlet event, and only got 3 exotics. Two generic, one special. A third stack I forgot I tucked away and opened a month later yielded 2 exotics. So I got one exotic per 150 bags vs. your one exotic per 118.

I haven’t seen any change in champ bags. I get an exotic from them about every 2-4 weeks. Which based on how frequently I do the world bosses works out to about once every 100-200 exotic champ bags. Which is exactly the same as what I saw during the Scarlet event.

I suspect nothing has been changed with champ bags. And everyone just thinks champ bags used to drop better loot because they used to open so many more champ bags before. The rate at which you can farm them has been severely nerfed, so even though the drop rate per bag is unchanged, the drop rate per time played has been reduced considerably.

Solandri.9640:

SKATE.1394:

3 total exotics (1 medium shoulder, 1 light shoulder, 1 trident)

4 special exotics Twin Talons sword, Cobalt greatsword, Knowledge Is Power focus, Phoenix Reborn axe

I opened up 500 exotic champ bags (2 stacks) during the Scarlet event, and only got 3 exotics. Two generic, one special. A third stack I forgot I tucked away and opened a month later yielded 2 exotics. So I got one exotic per 150 bags vs. your one exotic per 118.

I haven’t seen any change in champ bags. I get an exotic from them about every 2-4 weeks. Which based on how frequently I do the world bosses works out to about once every 100-200 exotic champ bags. Which is exactly the same as what I saw during the Scarlet event.

I suspect nothing has been changed with champ bags. And everyone just thinks champ bags used to drop better loot because they used to open so many more champ bags before. The rate at which you can farm them has been severely nerfed, so even though the drop rate per bag is unchanged, the drop rate per time played has been reduced considerably.

Special exotics have to be thrown out because as I noted they have completely separate loot tables. They drop as a rare chance, in addition to the 1 equipment slot that champion bags typically provide, whereas the 3 exotics I got take the place of the 1 equipment slot provided by the champion bag. This can be verified by my screenshots as all armor/equipment/trinkets add up to exactly 823 items, but I’ve already done all the sorting/counting for you. The addition of the 4 special exotics make 827.

And unless you have screens/some sort of recorded log you can’t really say that we’re only basing speculation off of placebo/memory while you aren’t. Also, I’m pretty sure the Scarlet event came well after the first nerf/reduction to the amount of silver dropped by champ bags, which could also have had a silent drop to equipment/materials as well. My earliest memories of champ bag farming are shortly after their introduction (FGS train) when they dropped 4-8 silver each. I doubt I farmed more than 50-75 bags a day back then for a week or two tops. I had quit the game shortly after the first stunbreaker shuffle balance patch, so I missed out on Queen’s Jubilee when people were farming several thousand champ bags in the Pavilion, I have no conclusions to draw from based on that time period.

And if you sift through the wiki drop research for heavy moldy bags, which are a common container, most users have reported better t6 drop rates out of heavy moldy bags than I’m experiencing with champion containers. Since t6 materials are the bulk of the money made at 50-60s a pop, the fact remains that champion bags still do not provide the same risk/effort/reward ratio that even common quality containers have, whether they’ve been silent nerfed since their inception or not, which was the whole point of their introduction.

Reading how many t6 mats you got made me real sad for you, friend. I dont have specific numbers but even from 30-40 heavy loot bags (wvw) I see a much higher t6 mat drop rate. if I had the patience to save up 823 of them I may even someday finish saving up for another legendary…

Agree that excessive farming should get nerfed, not the champ bags themselves since it impacts non-farming much harder.

Now I really wished I’d paid attention to the 4k bags I opened after champ farming became popular when they started with these bags. I do know one thing, of those bags I opened, only one had a Crystal Guardian in it.

Since that time, especially after doing events like the Karka Queen, I get bags which have a relatively good chance of getting something like Cobalt (had that drop 7 times so far). Conversely, strangely enough, the champs that drop white bags like Heirloom Seed Pouches (wurm @ Caledon) sometimes have the collectible exotics inside them.

Right now I have a lot of differing grades of champ bags stashed away for when/if they fix the Hero of the People achieve. I’m still trying to figure out where to get certain grades of champ boxes from…

I opened some 10,000+ Champion Bags in July from farming the Boss Blitz Event. It was relatively Profitable for me, I got many of the Named Exotics and so many crafting mats I still haven’t gone through them all. RNG does play a huge role in things such as this. I get very lucky with Dungeon Chests and Champ Bags, but I am very un lucky in almost everything else.

Still no ascended equipment, which is pretty much the only thing I’m actually after. Less than a .05% chance so far, for me personally, not necessarily the game programmed rate.

Round 2 – 950 bags opened on my 80 engineer with extra inventory space so the screens are slightly more organized. I considered trying to keep everything 1:1 using the same quantities of the same types of champion bags, but I got kind of lazy/anxious and just decided to open what I had.

I should note that the 950 bags included 22 Large Candy Bags from Halloween champions, which also included 110 trick or treat bags and 73 pieces of candy corn. If you feel like these time limited bags may skew results slightly you can go through the screenshots and subtract the equipment/material totals yourself.

Another thing worth noting is, this batch includes “renamed” champion bags. For example, Singed Ritualist Bags (previously also known as Elaborate) or Icy Strongboxes (previously also known as Gilded Strongboxes) or Boxes of Lab Equipment (previously also known as Deluxe Gear Boxes). The paranoid side of me thinks, why would they go through the trouble of renaming these bags unless they’re also tweaking droprates? Especially if they haven’t released the corresponding Collections tab, and there are still multiple bags in the game that share the same name but different item ID’s. But what can you do?

http://s1307.photobucket.com/user/shtskate/media/part%202/950totalchampbags_zpsfed919fc.jpg.html?sort=9&o=0

The breakdown:

147 total scrolls of knowledge

448 total weapons (243 one handed, 205 two handed)

493 total armor (158 light, 180 medium, 155 heavy)

9 trinkets (6 rings, 3 amulets)

1265 total tier 5 mats (145 bone, 180 totem, 200 blood, 178 claw, 132 fang, 185 venom, 157 scale, 88 dust)

872 total refinement mats (116 t5 leather, 23 t6 leather, 252 silk, 42 gossamer, 307 mithril, 132 orichalcum)

87 total tier 6 mats (11 bone, 8 totem, 13 blood, 16 claw, 4 fang, 16 venom, 12 scale, 7 dust)

81 total cores (7 glacial, 15 crystal, 11 corrupted, 11 destroyer, 11 onyx, 12 charged, 14 molten)

15 total vial essences

5 total lodestones (1 charged, 2 molten, 1 glacial, 1 crystal)

34 total rares (1 staff, 1 medium boot, 3 medium helm, 1 medium glove, 1 medium shoulder, 3 mace, 2 scepter, 1 focus, 1 trident, 1 longbow, 3 shortbow, 1 greatsword, 1 axe, 1 warhorn, 4 harpoon gun, 2 hammer, 2 light legging, 1 light helm, 1 heavy glove, 1 heavy helm, 1 heavy chest, 1 heavy shoulder)

3 total exotics (1 light boots, 1 dagger, 1 medium helm)

8 special exotics Razah’s Nightmare torch, Monsoon staff, Scepter of the Highborn scepter, Cobalt greatsword, Levvi’s Detector rifle, Guild Defender shield, Mecha Anchor hammer, Rockweed Spire trident

96 of the 448 weapons can be considered profession specific for an engineer, but this is more or less meaningless as only 4 weapon types are usable by this class.

Interestingly, we see almost the exact same slight bias towards medium armor this round as we did towards light armor during the previous batch. 180/493 is roughly 36.5% medium armor for the engineer, while 156/428 is roughly 36.45% light armor for the mesmer. Very consistent numbers, but possibly coincidental? Either way, if you open your loot containers on a light armor class (with the possible exception of bugged necromancers) you lose nothing assuming it’s just coincidence. But if the numbers don’t lie, you could gain about a 12% increased chance for light materials. So it’s a case of, it doesn’t hurt but it could benefit to just use a mesmer/elementalist.

And if you only own medium/heavy classes it’s nothing to be majorly upset over, as ~12% is a pretty small theoretical shift towards profession specific armor drops, nothing like the insane disparity I’ve seen in open world drops (see my post history to find my thread on profession specific bias in the open world, the results may surprise you).

Silk continues to drop 2:1 to leather and I still saw a rather high rate of orichalcum. What’s funny is after salvaging all of the light armor that dropped I had 266 silk scraps and 33 gossamer scraps for a grand total of 518 silk scraps, which isn’t even enough for 2 Bolts of Damask lol.

I saw a much better rate of rares this time around (over 50% increase):
18/823, 2.21% or 1:46
34/950, 3.58% or 1:28
52/1773, 2.93% or 1:34 bags

Consistency continues with the exotic drop rate:
3/950, 0.316% or 1:317
3/823, 0.365% or 1:274
6/1773, 0.338% or 1:296 bags

Tier 6 material rates are similarly disappointing:
74/823, 8.99% or 1:11
87/950, 9.16% or 1:11
161/1773, 9.08% or 1:11 bags

Scrolls of Knowledge:
135/823, 16.40% or 1:6
147/950, 15.47% or 1:6
282/1773, 15.91% or 1:6 bags

Cores:
58/823, 7.05% or 1:14
81/950, 8.53% or 1:12
139/1773, 7.84% or 1:13 bags

Lodestones:
6/823, 0.729% or 1:137
5/950, 0.526% or 1:190
11/1773, 0.620% or 1:161 bags

SKATE.1394:

Yeah the rates do seem very low, I feel like I get way more rares and tier 6 materials just solo farming trash in the open world, but I do run 300% magic find. I was expecting at least 1 ascended weapon/armor chest. I remember getting at least a few of those in the early days of the Frostgorge Sound train, and I don’t believe I ever farmed 800+ bags back then.

I also feel like you have a much better chance at getting cores/lodestones out of dungeon chests than champion bags. But then again, I forgot they nerfed dungeons to limit you to 1 chest per day, so I’m surprised cores haven’t taken a pretty big jump in value. There’s probably a lot more loot/gold to be earned from parties just “zone clearing” through all the trash of level 80 zones.

I think unless you’re specifically after scrolls of knowledge, there’s not much reason to kill champions anymore. Even with the exclusive collectible exotics that drop, you’re better off just farming more gold/hour on trash mobs and buying what you need from the TP, letting a lucky player’s RNG benefit you from the random champ bags that people happen to accrue while just playing the game normally.

I may open my next 800 champ bags on a medium/heavy class to further test the possibility of profession specific drops. I may also farm 800 heavy moldy bags to see if I end up with better tier 6 material rates (wiki research seems to indicate so). And that would demonstrate that champ bags don’t serve their purpose of providing champion grade loot, compared to containers that drop from regular risen mobs.

I have been skeptical for along time now about the roll magic find plays in this game. For example: running silverwastes for 4 hours with 522% magic find from base magic find, the birthday magic find, pumpkin oil etc. 2 rare items in that space of time.
As for the champ bags & chests, yeah they are poor as far as loot goes. Unless you need tons of dust.
Also found the chance of getting T6 mats are better from the moldy bags. Then again you need to obtain a fair amount.

Ha, really looking forward to opening mine now. It’s around 4k bandit bags, 500 mordrem bags, 1k bags of gear, 1k bags of stolen goods and around 80 bags of rare gear.
If people want, I’ll post results for the champ bags on reddit when I’m done.

Crovax.7854:

Ha, really looking forward to opening mine now. It’s around 4k bandit bags, 500 mordrem bags, 1k bags of gear, 1k bags of stolen goods and around 80 bags of rare gear.
If people want, I’ll post results for the champ bags on reddit when I’m done.

Go for it!

johnnymiller.5968:

SKATE.1394:

Yeah the rates do seem very low, I feel like I get way more rares and tier 6 materials just solo farming trash in the open world, but I do run 300% magic find. I was expecting at least 1 ascended weapon/armor chest. I remember getting at least a few of those in the early days of the Frostgorge Sound train, and I don’t believe I ever farmed 800+ bags back then.

I also feel like you have a much better chance at getting cores/lodestones out of dungeon chests than champion bags. But then again, I forgot they nerfed dungeons to limit you to 1 chest per day, so I’m surprised cores haven’t taken a pretty big jump in value. There’s probably a lot more loot/gold to be earned from parties just “zone clearing” through all the trash of level 80 zones.

I think unless you’re specifically after scrolls of knowledge, there’s not much reason to kill champions anymore. Even with the exclusive collectible exotics that drop, you’re better off just farming more gold/hour on trash mobs and buying what you need from the TP, letting a lucky player’s RNG benefit you from the random champ bags that people happen to accrue while just playing the game normally.

I may open my next 800 champ bags on a medium/heavy class to further test the possibility of profession specific drops. I may also farm 800 heavy moldy bags to see if I end up with better tier 6 material rates (wiki research seems to indicate so). And that would demonstrate that champ bags don’t serve their purpose of providing champion grade loot, compared to containers that drop from regular risen mobs.

I have been skeptical for along time now about the roll magic find plays in this game. For example: running silverwastes for 4 hours with 522% magic find from base magic find, the birthday magic find, pumpkin oil etc. 2 rare items in that space of time.
As for the champ bags & chests, yeah they are poor as far as loot goes. Unless you need tons of dust.
Also found the chance of getting T6 mats are better from the moldy bags. Then again you need to obtain a fair amount.

Magic find only affects DIRECT drops from mobs, not containers or chests, with the exception of pvp reward track chests.
Silverwastes doesnt have alot of mobs that drop loot, basically only dust mites, drakes etc, no mordrem.

RNGeezus was not with you. I hope that it grants you good fortune in the future for your efforts.

But seriously, yeah.. I don’t play games for loot, I play them for the experience. But as I’ve said in the past, giving crappy loot is like giving a kid a stick of gum for winning a Spelling B. It feels more like an insult than a reward. I don’t expect amazing loot for karma training and pressing 1 a bunch but I’d rather get no loot at all and maybe some gold for my time spent than a bunch of garbage that just leaves me feeling unfulfilled. They should really increase the drop rate for valuable items a bit… I’ve done so, so much WvW in my time with this game and through 2k+ ranks I have gotten maybe 5 – 6 exotics, a heap of rares, 1 ascended chest and a few ascended rings. In all my champ bags? One precursor way back when I started playing and since then only a handfull of exotics (not including the 23749382472 Truth, Exterminator and Phoenix Reborn’s I’ve gotten because they’re worth nothing and drop like crazy).

tldr; I don’t expect amazing loot for doing simple tasks. I either expect less but more valuable loot or no loot at all only a bit of silver/gold. They throw loot at us in GW2 but it’s the same as having someone throw plastic toy soldiers at you. It’s value is next to nothing and instead of going yay! toys! You go oh, garbage, thanks.

Very nice post, OP. Just another high point for Greed Wars 2.

You HAVE to realize that this is a norm for everyone, except for the very few and fortunate. The reasoning behind the low drop rates is that if more exotics and t6 mats dropped, the more people would sell those on the TP, and the more gold they would make. The more gold they make, the easier it becomes to purchase gems without RL money. This is a REAL big no-no in Greed Wars 2, as it takes money away from ANet.

Not very surpising, your results are. Nice though, are your efforts to track such things.

But, in the grand scheme of things, the fans will rage on and make the findings a part of elaborate feature or some such thing, that makes the game all that more exciting to play, so the findings may be for naught.

slamfunction.7462:

The reasoning behind the low drop rates is that if more exotics and t6 mats dropped, the more people would sell those on the TP, and the more gold they would make. The more gold they make, the easier it becomes to purchase gems without RL money. This is a REAL big no-no in Greed Wars 2, as it takes money away from ANet.

You do realize, that all those gems do need to be bought first, for real money, right? And that more gold used to buy gems only means that price of gems goes up.

Astralporing.1957:

You do realize, that all those gems do need to be bought first, for real money, right? And that more gold used to buy gems only means that price of gems goes up.

Except for every 5k AP’s you earn where you’re given 400 gems (and 30g and a massive chest).

slamfunction.7462:

Very nice post, OP. Just another high point for Greed Wars 2.

You HAVE to realize that this is a norm for everyone, except for the very few and fortunate. The reasoning behind the low drop rates is that if more exotics and t6 mats dropped, the more people would sell those on the TP, and the more gold they would make. The more gold they make, the easier it becomes to purchase gems without RL money. This is a REAL big no-no in Greed Wars 2, as it takes money away from ANet.

Not very surpising, your results are. Nice though, are your efforts to track such things.

But, in the grand scheme of things, the fans will rage on and make the findings a part of elaborate feature or some such thing, that makes the game all that more exciting to play, so the findings may be for naught.

Selling on the tp removes gold from the economy. So, the more stuff sold on the tp, the less gold that can be converted into gems.

If there were a high drop rate of (currently expensive) exotics, they would be worth a lot less than they are now. The people selling them on the tp wouldn’t make as much gold for themselves as you think.

maddoctor.2738:

Champion lootbags were nerfed because players were overfarming Champions… it was a really idiotic choice, instead of nerfing the ability to overfarm champs, they nerfed the bags themselves so in a sense they hurt players who are not overfarming Champions way more than champ farmers. Great Anet logic there

Also, 823 champion bags for 4 of the champ skins? Seriously?

Champ farming, judging from recent examples, seems to be an issue that needs individual fixes. There’s no universal fix that neatly fixes all champ events. So the champ bag nerf is probably the most wide reaching fix (although in some regards perhaps a bit extreme) that prevents players from simply finding another way around the small fix.
For example, in Silverwastes we had the farm near the amber base. ANet reduced the chest and respawn time, but now we have conga-lines running through the entire zone doing the same thing. Fixing the problem at amber just meant players found a way around it. So it’s a hard problem to address without over addressing it.

You didnt record the amount of gold you got from the bags?

reading stuff like this, I always ask myself why I still play this game…

Varrg.2704:

reading stuff like this, I always ask myself why I still play this game…

If you play a video game for the material rewards then you should ask yourself why you play ANY video game. If the process of playing the thing doesn’t give you enjoyment, then why continue play?

Wanze.8410:

You didnt record the amount of gold you got from the bags?

Nah, sorry, it’s kind of a paltry amount in my opinion so I didn’t think it was worth tracking, but I have seen a spreadsheet on youtube that suggested ~1.75 silver average. There are actually quite a lot of videos of people opening champ bags in bulk, but most of them just deposit their collectibles and salvage the equipment as they go so they aren’t very good for research purposes.

It takes me something like 6 hours plus to do these sessions after months of hoarding bags cause I mostly solo roam and don’t ever follow the latest zerg farm, and there are still a lot of things I don’t keep track of. If I wanted to get really crazy with it I could track every prefix/suffix, check the max buy/min sell value of every item on the TP, and come up with the average amount of coin earned per bag. Something I could still do using the screenshots, but probably won’t, is track how often each specific weapon/armor type drops in relation to one another, like torches to greatswords, offhanders to mainhanders, gloves to chestpieces, etc.

maddoctor.2738:

Varrg.2704:

reading stuff like this, I always ask myself why I still play this game…

If you play a video game for the material rewards then you should ask yourself why you play ANY video game. If the process of playing the thing doesn’t give you enjoyment, then why continue play?

While I don’t exactly share his sentiment, I can kind of see where he’s coming from. Some people actually receive their enjoyment out of the loot more so than the gameplay. Especially if you come from a heavy Diablo-esque background, where loot is the driving force behind the game, as the content itself can be maybe 10 hours long, and then simply repeated on higher “difficulties”.

I’d say it’s kind of a by-product of the fluid combat system in Guild Wars 2 (by MMO standards), where it plays a bit more like an action RPG in the vein of Diablo than your typical high latency, low character control, point-click-wait MMO, where the focus might be more on things like, furnishing a house or keeping a pet. It attracts players of an ARPG background that are used to loot, rinse, repeat, but still like the larger community aspect of a pseudo MMO.

That’s the only thing that’s kept me going for the 5,000+ hours I’ve logged. I can count the number of times I’ve completed an event or a dungeon and thought ‘wow that was actually pretty fun’ on one hand. It’s the loot/gold that drives me, and while I’d probably get more enjoyment out of the game if it were a little less restrictive, it’s not so bad that it makes me wanna quit.

Hell, I once spent like a week playing Animal Crossing on NDS and all I did was run around digging up junk to sell and fishing/gathering fruit for money. I still had the starter size house and not a single piece of furniture, I just wanted to see how much wealth I could acquire. I also remember hitting the million neopoint milestone (which probably isn’t a lot nowadays) on Neopets lol. It’s a weird way to play, but some of us are into that.

Thanks SKATE, this is some well done work.

I can relate to your farming OCD I spent countless hours in pre-searing Ascalon, and even this game, where I try to get all the achievements done and have no expectations for getting great loot from the bags.. I do it, just because I know that over time, it will accumulate to enable me to get something big.

It is curious that magic find remains on of the most misunderstood parts of the game, from what I read and see (MF banners at world bosses, for example).

Even the latest introduction of MF affecting pirate chests… It’s affecting when you open a chest on the ground, not the content of the bags that are inside the chest. So, especially with the Amber farm adjusted to its current state, returns from MF on the pirate chest are potentially much lower than straight up mob farming.

It’s all kills per minute.. and since DR is drop/kill count based, the ideal farm is one which cycles through four level 80 maps with good scaled mob events, with a complete cycle taking about 25 minutes.

Champ bags slow down the kills per minute.. Our original introduction to these: The Krait Lab (Sparkfly Fen) and Penitent Camp (Cursed Shore).

Curse you, champion bags!

I actually haven’t even stepped foot in the Silverwastes yet, so I’m not sure how the mechanics work there, but I’m guessing the magic find bonus you get is exclusive to opening bandit chests, and not stacked with your own account wide MF. So I’m assuming there’s probably no more than a 200% increased chance? And given chests tend to drop blues/greens like 95% of the time I can imagine trash clearing zones would be superior.

It’s unfortunate that the only way to get a decent density of mobs is to have a group scale up certain wave events. That’s why I really liked the Mad King’s Labyrinth from its initial introduction, aside from the scaled up ‘Foe’ doors, there’s still a very high density of mobs throughout the zone that a party of 3-5 people can farm very efficiently even if there aren’t enough players to scale the events up. I’ve suggested a few times that a similar zone should be added permanently. The sparseness of random mobs in the open world can be a little frustrating if you prefer to solo farm, or run with a few friends.

I tend to avoid any content that relies on other people for maximum efficiency, which is why I haven’t bothered with Dry Top or the Silverwastes much. It is a little disheartening to see people getting thousands of champ bags from these kinds of temporary oversights, but I choose not to participate in Blix/Coiled Watch/Amber chest type exploits because I like consistency in my farming that I can rely on even if nobody else is around (or it gets patched).

Most of my champ bags actually come from Fractals cause I need tons of relics to buy the 20 slot equipment boxes. I have 37 character slots, so that’s something like… 22,000 relics needed. Even though it’s relatively inefficient, it’s stable and I get to accrue a decent amount of bags while also getting the relics I need. And a year from now I know I can probably maintain the same rate of bags since FotM is a permanent instance.

When I opened 10,000+ bags I got 69 exotics. Man, they really did nerf the bags.

I can’t say how the pirate chests work beyond the perseverance buff’s tool tip stating it affects them. I expect it impacts non-box rolls, like the exotic “add ons” you describe with champ boxes.

20 slot boxes… yes.. I put most of my returns from the Maize farm into the beautiful 20-slot Halloween pails. Fractal boxes are nice, but the sorting gets on my nerves a bit I’ve only got about 20 or so characters on my main account, so I empathize with your bagging requirements.

I don’t think consistency of loot is a problem you need to worry about.. there is always some sort of farm running in Tyria.

Also, if one wants to stay above the median wealth line, optimizing loot generation, whether through farming or the trading post, is a must. I have enough “end-game” rewards and gold that it doesn’t matter so much if I am horribly inefficient in my choice of farm locations.

But, it is because I do look for best return that I’m in this position!

Finally: I agree that, negative farm events are to be avoided. Amber was a co-operative and positive experience in my experience. Blix was definitely not.. and I just avoided Coil because of the vitriol posted in the forums. Ouch.

See you in game!

maddoctor.2738:

Varrg.2704:

reading stuff like this, I always ask myself why I still play this game…

If you play a video game for the material rewards then you should ask yourself why you play ANY video game. If the process of playing the thing doesn’t give you enjoyment, then why continue play?

…on the contrary, reading stuff like this makes it pretty obvious why is the game in such state as it is. You know, some players find enjoyment in being actually rewarded once in a while. But if you are okay with doing the same thing over and over again for basically nothing, you’re welcome.