Coral and Vial of Manganese Dioxide
Took years, but yes, I got mine just some days after release.
Have fun!
well…. not all of us have that much time, was fun at first but it can quickly turn into frustration.
anybody else having a hard time getting this Vial of Manganese Dioxide?
I got mine after about 2-3 hours of farming. I started with farming on my main only and going to all lakes in 50+ zones, but as you know this is pretty slow. Then I found 2 areas where there always seemed to be more coral spawning than in the other areas. One is Stygian Deeps (vista in the middle of the ocean) in Straits of Devastation and south east part of the ocean in Mount Maelstrom. Get all your lvl 80 characters (or any character that can go and survive there) and switch between these 2 places. If the coral hasn’t respawned, try guesting or switching map. I also used an item booster on my main only (33% of having an extra gathering strike).
Good luck.
Thanks very much for the advice I will try that
I’ve been farming coral for 6 hours, 2 hours with gathering booster – so far got 3 vials. Pretty much in a row. The drop rate is abysmal compared to other things in the collection. And considering corals are so rare the whole process turned into the torture.
None of the guides are very helpful, since the Coral Nodes seem to randomly spawn at different locations. Pretty much makes me want to stick to Diablo 3. I don’t have the time or the patience to farm Coral nodes all kitten day and still not get any manganese Dioxide. Thanks a lot Arene.net for taking the fun out of this.
Ok, so after calming down yesterday, I decided to just take my time with this, and hope for 1 a day. Low and behold, after about 1.5 hrs of farming today I managed to get 8. The funny thing was that the characters that got them were characters w/o all the buffs. My character with all the gathering buffs managed only one. Anyway, they seem to come in bunches, so persevere. I recommend farming coral in 3 areas. Malchor’s Leap, Straits of devastation, and Mount Maelstrom. West and north sea areas in Malchor’s, southeast area south of the volcano in Maelstron, and anywhere outside of Fort Trinity in Strait’s. Don’t bother with any location guides as the coral node locations change daily. My apologies to Arena.net for my outburst yesterday
Ok, so after calming down yesterday, I decided to just take my time with this, and hope for 1 a day. Low and behold, after about 1.5 hrs of farming today I managed to get 8. The funny thing was that the characters that got them were characters w/o all the buffs. My character with all the gathering buffs managed only one. Anyway, they seem to come in bunches, so persevere. I recommend farming coral in 3 areas. Malchor’s Leap, Straits of devastation, and Mount Maelstrom. West and north sea areas in Malchor’s, southeast area south of the volcano in Maelstron, and anywhere outside of Fort Trinity in Strait’s. Don’t bother with any location guides as the coral node locations change daily. My apologies to Arena.net for my outburst yesterday
They do not change daily. They simply change with each instance of the map. The Aquabase Terror Seven area in Mount Maelstrom is the most reliable since there are always 4+ corals there. It is easiest with multiple characters otherwise go there 15 minutes before Megadestroyer or Golem MkII spawns and then try to bounce through multiple instances by going to character select after gathering what you can in the instance. You can check if it is the same instance by the /ip command(not 100% reliable but close enough).
I just need 2 of these, but it’s taking bloody forever. I’ve lost count of the amount of coral I’ve farmed, so much so that at the moment I’m hating underwater combat. This farming is painful and annoying honestly. The only good thing about it is that I got almost 100 Coral Orbs and those sell at 30s a piece. But other than that it’s a pain.
However, it would have been even worse without the help of this forum and gw2nodes.com so thank you very much!
The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.
The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.
No one forced them to use alts. They OPTED to use alts in order to speed up a process that is INTENDED to be long.
You have the option to pay for convenience. No one is forcing you to do it.
The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.
No one forced them to use alts. They OPTED to use alts in order to speed up a process that is INTENDED to be long.
You have the option to pay for convenience. No one is forcing you to do it.
Keep making excuses for them. You have no proof that this specific item was intended to be some convoluted stupidly long process. Stop making things up.
The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.
No one forced them to use alts. They OPTED to use alts in order to speed up a process that is INTENDED to be long.
You have the option to pay for convenience. No one is forcing you to do it.
Keep making excuses for them. You have no proof that this specific item was intended to be some convoluted stupidly long process. Stop making things up.
You actually think they intended precursor crafting to be fast?
This is getting ridiculous! It is totally against the whole idea of a non RNG way to acquiring a precursor. I’ve spent like 10 hours with my TEN characters farming effing corals!! Get your kitten together Anet! And i’m pretty much definite it’s not supposed to work like this as I have like tons of Vials of Cobalt Salts, from farming Iron, that I guess work pretty much the same way.
The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.
No one forced them to use alts. They OPTED to use alts in order to speed up a process that is INTENDED to be long.
You have the option to pay for convenience. No one is forcing you to do it.
Keep making excuses for them. You have no proof that this specific item was intended to be some convoluted stupidly long process. Stop making things up.
if they didnt intend it to be a long process then surely they didnt also have a secret evil plan to force people to have a lot of alts to farm the thing like you were suggesting previously…
yes it sounds like it is an issue but id be surprised to hear it was intentionally done this way
This is getting ridiculous! It is totally against the whole idea of a non RNG way to acquiring a precursor. I’ve spent like 10 hours with my TEN characters farming effing corals!! Get your kitten together Anet! And i’m pretty much definite it’s not supposed to work like this as I have like tons of Vials of Cobalt Salts, from farming Iron, that I guess work pretty much the same way.
I started posting regions with coral on wiki a few months back, partly in response to this thread, but mostly as an answer to a different problem I was having: farming orbs.
Coral is the only node that gives a guaranteed gemstone, every time (not counting Blooming Passiflora). The interesting thing is that there are a couple spots on land where a coral commonly shows up, down by Rotbeard and near Izzmek’s second beacon on the way to Temple of Melandru.
I stuck with the high-level regions like Cursed Shore and Malchor’s Leap, because once you leave there, you don’t get orbs. The locations I see above though suggest you guys might need to hit lower level nodes, because Straits and Mount Maelstrom are mithril-platinum tier resources, and all the gripes on rarity make me think the Manganese Oxide may be level-locked.
This is pretty bad grind, one of the worst, but the Mount Maelstrom area did work pretty well for me so far. I’m at 6 at the moment, and I only farm this area. I take a break and finish other pieces of the precursor while I wait for coral respawn.
They really should either reduce the amount of this stuff needed, or increase the drop. It isn’t fun, it is tedious and frustrating. I’m enjoying the rest of the collection so far though.
ANET PLease increase the drop rate from Coral please!!
Definitely not level locked. I got one Manganese Dioxide in Frostgorge Sound today.
The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.
No one forced them to use alts. They OPTED to use alts in order to speed up a process that is INTENDED to be long.
You have the option to pay for convenience. No one is forcing you to do it.
Keep making excuses for them. You have no proof that this specific item was intended to be some convoluted stupidly long process. Stop making things up.
You actually think they intended precursor crafting to be fast?
Precursor crafting was added to the game to remove the RNG factor.. so what did they do? crud it up with more RNG.
Definitely not level locked. I got one Manganese Dioxide in Frostgorge Sound today.
kitten … well, at least I won’t have to start the collection to investigate on my own.
I don’t think it’s level locked. I’ve so far gotten 1 on a level 80 character in Cursed Shore and 1 on a level 65 character in Iron Marches.
It is frustrating to farm though. I was able to get all the Vials of Cobalt Salts (the one which comes from iron nodes) in one day – mainly running a level 27-8 character around Diessa.
I’ve since done 3 circuits of Cursed Shore and 2 of Iron Marches and come away with 2 Manganese.
I’ve still got plenty of time because I still need loads of other things for the collection, but it’s frustrating that it’s looking like it will take a very long time to get this one item.
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
Well that wasn’t so bad in the end.
In total I had to harvest 60-70 coral nodes to get 10 Manganese Dioxide. I don’t know exactly because I didn’t count at first, but after the first two I was camping an alt in Iron Marches and he got through 1 50-use Harvesting Sickle and had 42 uses left on the 2nd one, so that’s 58 nodes. I don’t think I harvested more than 10 on other characters.
I tried Cursed Shore first because I’d heard it was the best place to do it. But I got frustrated with having to stop and fight risen because they’d immobilise me or simply do too much damage to ignore. Plus some of the nodes were in annoying places like the bottom of Captain Rotbeard’s ship.
So after two attempts to go around there I settled on Iron Marches because I remembered seeing coral there frequently and the wiki said it had a lot of locations where it could spawn and the enemies are much less annoying. I set up a circuit, going around Bloodfin Lake and Ironhead Lake, up to Monger’s Sink, across to Lake Desolann and then to Lake Carnifex. Then I’d log out of that character until it had respawned and do the run in reverse.
I was doing about 2 runs a day and apparently it took me about 7 or 8 days in total (including time spent in Cursed Shore).
There was an annoying period of about 2 days when I got nothing, and other individual runs when I got nothing. But then once I got 2 in a row.
Overall it certainly took me a lot less time than everything else I need to do for that legendary collection.
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
This drop rate is horrendous, i’ve farmed for 5 days multiple times each day. Still have only gotten 2 drops as of yet. please anet if you are out there do something about this.
I think their idea of doing something about it is to put consistent spawns in Ember Bay …
I have farmed for 2 years straight, still no Vials and a truckload of coral/coral tentacles. It’s the only thing I need unlocked. That alone made me quit the game, then I returned, guess what? I farmed corals for 2 weeks straight, 7 days a week. Still no vials and a truck load of tentacles and corals. It depends on RNG I guess.
They haven’t been available for 2 years yet … only 1y3m. There has also been mentioned of only working with certain tier of coral but I never found a need to test after finding ones that work.
It took me a few days to get all the vials I needed, but I guess it wasn’t too bad. Bitterfrost Frontier helped since there are a few nodes there.
I have farmed for 2 years straight, still no Vials and a truckload of coral/coral tentacles. It’s the only thing I need unlocked. That alone made me quit the game, then I returned, guess what? I farmed corals for 2 weeks straight, 7 days a week. Still no vials and a truck load of tentacles and corals. It depends on RNG I guess.
Even allowing for the apparent hyperbole that would be extremely poor luck, far worse than would normally be expected for RNG.
Here’s some questions which might help us work out what the problem is:
Do you definitely have the Bifrost III: The Legend collection active on the account you’re using to farm? This is the most likely problem because Manganese Dioxide will only drop while you have the collection active (since you can’t sell it and don’t need it any other time), so if you haven’t got the collection active or you’re using a 2nd account to farm it you will never get any at all.
Assuming you do have the collection active which map/s are you farming coal on? What level is the character? What quality gathering tool are you using? I don’t think any of this should make a difference, but it’s worth checking just in case. I can confirm from personal experience that it does drop from coral nodes in Iron Marches on a level 65-67 character using Ori quality tools, so if possible it might be worth trying that combination.
How many nodes do you typically gather from per day? If you’re doing 1 node a day as and when you come across it you will take a lot longer to get the vials than someone who is searching out 5-10 a day. But what you’ve reported would still be an extremely poor drop rate.
Alternatively maybe you could try contacting Support for help? (Using the link at the top of this page.) Try to give them as much detail as possible (character level, where you’ve been looking etc.) and try not to exaggerate (like saying you’ve been trying for 2 years to get something that hasn’t existed for 2 years) because it will be much easier for them to work out what’s wrong if they have accurate information. They should be able to identify the problem or help you out, as they will have access to information we don’t have (like exact drop rates and bugs).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
(edited by Danikat.8537)