Guild Wars 2

this isn’t intended as a criticism. please don’t bother trolling.

one of the personal goals i’ve set for myself ingame is to have all of the dye colors opened up on my main character.

in the past few months, i’ve seen the dye drop rate from pve fluctuate drastically. In January, i and my friends would get 5 or more dyes each, in an evening of play. (that’s when i set the goal- when it seemed to be something attainable!)

in february, it slowly seemed to taper off, until we all went days on end without seeing a single looted dye. when we DID see one, it was almost exclusively when we were playing low-level alts in beginner zones, and almost always when gathering from plants.

i’m saying ALMOST. no hate for me reporting the experiences of myself and my friends, please.

As of today, i’m on a 4 day dry period on looting dyes. Not a single one. I’ve gotten my fix through a few a friend sent me, and selling off some herbs in exchange for a few off of the trading post. not something i’m likely to do again, but we should try everything once, right? at this rate, however, it looks like i’m going to have to abandon my goal.
~sad quaggan~

i guess my question is: is this ONLY my experience and that of my 5 or so close friends? is there something going on with the dye drop rate on anet’s end? perhaps adjusting it to find a happy medium? idk. it’s just something i’m curious about.

I think the whole loot drop alltogether in this game is abismal. Because of the bad weather this week (in Europe) I played all weekend and leveled my Guardian to level 20. I did not get ONE item that was actually usefull to me. I think I got 2 or three greens, which werent worth anything on the TP, the rest was salvage and a few white and blue items. My weapon and armor upgrades I bought myself on the TP with maybe one or two items from the heart vendors. The Veterans I killed didnt even drop ANYTHING. This game has some real serious flaws.

Eh, I’ve kinda noticed dye drops seeming to be less and less and usually found on my low level alts. I still think RNG has the most to do with it.

But hey, I’m happy. I looted Abyss dye a couple days ago ^.^

I’m fairly certain the actual rate is the same and the ‘fluctuations’ are just RNG screwing with you all

I have also noticed my dyes coming mostly at lower levels, for some months now. I’m lucky enough to be able to buy gems at whim (must .. control … urge to buy …) so I sate my need for colors by an occasional dye pack or five. When they went on sale I opened five packs.

Still, I have to carefully consider which dyes go to which alts and which ones I will give to guildies. I miss the days of regular drops.

My advice is to sell your unidentified dyes, and buy the dyes you need.

You can buy all blue ones really cheap, so leave these for last. Start with the most expensive rare ones (filter consumable → dye → rarity), which you’ll spend the most with the first 5~10.
If you can get one of these with the RNG, luck, if not…

From my experience it’s not worth it, I’ve spent about 60g+ on dyes before when they were about 3~4s each, and opened 1000~2000, mystic toilet’ing the duplicates.

I got some Abyss/Celestial/White/Blacks that I got to resell back for some gold, but in the end I still spent more than I earned, and after a while I just decided to sell the unidentified and buy the ones I was missing. It got much, much cheaper.

If you don’t think you got the most awesome luck you can imagine, I suggest avoiding opening unidentified dyes. And even if you do, go play the lottery instead of opening dyes.

Don’t get your hypes up by reading stories of people getting rare dyes non-stop. It’s highly improbable you’ll get it too.

My statistics comes from nearly 2000 unidentified dyes, farmed 500, bought the rest, opened them all, and got about 4~5 Whites, 2~3 Celestials, 3 Abyss, 4 Blacks, a few Midnight ones for 2g~ (back then), and mystic toilet’ed them all.

I haven’t checked prices lately but, selling 60 unidentified dyes and buying nearly all greens/blues with the gold you get is better than getting alot of duplicate greens/blues and a few cheap rares.
That way you don’t have to worry about getting unidentified dyes as you won’t have to open them.

you can also just buy dyes with laurels- that is what I do and it is enough to get my fix- I sell what I don’t want and use/buy the ones I want

I currenlty have 13 rare dyes which I opened up. My Blue dye collection is nearly complete, while the green ones I have about 20.

I have also seen fluctuation in dye drop. In one day I received 7, then in the next few days I received none.

Almost all the dyes I get now are in low level zones or the occasional one from harvesting.
I have done an event with elementals and gotten 5 in less than 10minutes and then gone a week not seeing another. RNG I guess.

Goatjugsoup.8637:

I’m fairly certain the actual rate is the same and the ‘fluctuations’ are just RNG screwing with you all

While I agree with this, it has also been my experience that I get more dye loot between levels 1 and 20 than further on (I’ve got 3 characters at 80, 1 at 32, and I’ve leveled 8 or so from 1 to about 18 as I tried various class and race types). This has been since October when I started. Again, maybe it is RNG, but it has happened enough to make me wonder if level is a factor in the calculations.

I think its just random. Sometimes i go days without getting one.

The other day i made a new character, and got 4 dyes before level 5.

Neural.1824:

Goatjugsoup.8637:

I’m fairly certain the actual rate is the same and the ‘fluctuations’ are just RNG screwing with you all

While I agree with this, it has also been my experience that I get more dye loot between levels 1 and 20 than further on (I’ve got 3 characters at 80, 1 at 32, and I’ve leveled 8 or so from 1 to about 18 as I tried various class and race types). This has been since October when I started. Again, maybe it is RNG, but it has happened enough to make me wonder if level is a factor in the calculations.

It could be somewhat like how Guild Wars 1 loot may have been calculated (not sure if this was ever more than speculation or not but people claimed that you would get more dye drops at lower level areas because the loot table would be smaller. It’s still RNG but with better odds)

It’s dropped pretty severely from what it was 6 weeks ago. They are trying to get you to spend cash in the store on over-priced dye packs. They recently nerfed how frequently you get rare’s from the laurel vendor.

I get most of mine from harvesting. Surprisingly I’ve been getting them lately from Fractal runs.

Dim.5720:

I think the whole loot drop alltogether in this game is abismal. Because of the bad weather this week (in Europe) I played all weekend and leveled my Guardian to level 20. I did not get ONE item that was actually usefull to me. I think I got 2 or three greens, which werent worth anything on the TP, the rest was salvage and a few white and blue items. My weapon and armor upgrades I bought myself on the TP with maybe one or two items from the heart vendors. The Veterans I killed didnt even drop ANYTHING. This game has some real serious flaws.

I feel the same way, the whole games loot system is horrible, needs a total over haul, and less useless tokens..

I’ve been getting more dyes lately, no matter where I play. I mean a lot more. There was a period the other night where I was getting dye about every 20 minutes. I thought something was broken.

While it’s possible that lower level zones do have more drops, if you want dyes there’s nothing to stop you from going to lower level zones. I’m all over the place. I’m helping guildies, I’m leveling alts (who get dyes which you can put into your bank and bring to your main), I’m doing the meta events in the early areas like the Maw, and the Fire Elemental and such…getting good loot from that too, there are decent reasons to be in low level areas.

Go and start farming vanilla beans in starter zones, if you think you’ll get more dyes that way.

But I do think RNG has a lot to do with this.

Dye drop rates have been fairly consistent for me for the last 2-3 months. Don’t let variations in a random distribution fool you.

I actually got a lot of dyes this week. A bit of advice for your dye goal. Sell the unidentified dyes and buy the ones you need. 80% of the dyes sell for significantly less then the unidentified ones so you’ll be much better off buying direct.

I make more off selling unidentified dyes than I do from ectos. Doesn’t help that I’m an altoholic, but I’m not exactly swimming in rare drops on my 80 either.

If there is a level based tilt to the drops it is the area/mob, not character that drives it I would suspect from my observations.