Guild Wars 2

With the release of HoT each map in Central Kryta has its own individual Map Bonuses, mostly crafting materials and some other items and of course the relative Dry Top/Silverwastes rewards for those 2 maps.
These Rewards seem to be account-tied, as switching to another character in your account will not affect the ‘’Next Reward’’ of a map nor will exiting GW2.

Each Map has its own range of possible rewards and this range of rewards is the same for every player and every account
The higher the map level, the higher the tier and rarity (Lodestones) of the crafting materials awarded from it.
Some maps also award loot related to their environment and creatures that spawn there. Southsun Cove can give Karka Shells and Kessex Hills can give Pristine Toxic Spore Samples.

The order of the rewards for a Map Bonus doesnt seem to be important. For example in Cursed Shores, the Destroyer Lodestone stands below the Elaborate Totem and Destroyer Core, but above the Pile of Incandescent Dust and Pile of Crystalline Dust. But we all know that currently the Lodestone has a higher price than all of the above Materials.

All accounts begin from the same reward-item for each map, ie. Vial of Powerful Blood for Malchor’s Leap. Note that any item can be awarded twice or more in a row.

The first explorable areas of each race (Queensdale, Caledon Forest, Metrica Province, Wayfarer Foothils and Plains of Ashford) and the WVW maps do not give any Map Bonuses.

Presumably these items are awarded upon the completion of an Event, but that didnt always seem to be the case. I did a few tests in Mount Maelstrom with 5 events.
Defeating 2 of the Hidden Garden Keepers did award me with a Map Bonus Reward (2x Powerful Venom Sacs). The Champion Golem inside the CoE area, a huge Champion fish and 3 veteran Kraits (event) did not give any award, although all 3 of them are counted as an event.

Now I noticed that some maps have some very interesting items within their possible rewards:
Shiny Bauble can be earned from various maps.
Unidentified Dye from Diessa Plateau
Box of Cooking Supplies from Gendaran Fields
Azurite Crystal from Harathi Hinterlands
Obsidian Shards & Onyx Lodestone from Fireheart Rise
Charged Lodestone from Straits of Devastation! kudos to Anet for that, lets hope they didnt decrease its overall drop rates with this patch tho.

The most surprising one is Giant Eye from Mount Maelstrom. Currently siting at 6 gold in the Trading Post (was 6,7 gold before i started writing this post~30 mins earlier). Now would be a good time to sell them, as the price will drop even more after new brave adventurers make their way on the top of… IN the core of the mountain in search for Giants and their… eyes.
And who knows, maybe Anet will award each player with a point in their Giant Slayer achievement track if they manage to find one’s eye.
Dont forget to add to your Watch List

Anyway, I checked the wiki to see all the events in that Map and there are only 2 Meta Events (Mega-Destroyer and capture CoE). Perhaps the ‘’deliberately fail the 2nd or 3d event of the chain to start from the 1st again’’ strategy will help players in farming some Giant Eyes or maybe some other Event in the Map that trigger very often. Haven’t tested any of them so far.

P.S. I will not bother attaching pictures of every map, as rewards are the same for every player and all one has to do is open his Map(M) to see them.

Here’s the thing to remember.

That interface does not properly indicate the sequence of rewards. All it tells you is what’s next. How they sit in the other rewards section is irrelevant.

For example I chased charged lodestones in Straits of Devastation for quite some time and my rewards went something like
Vicious Claw
Vicious Claw
Incandescent Dust
Vicious Claw
Vicious Claw
Charged Core
Vicious Claw
Vicious Claw
Incandescent Dust
Vicious Claw
Vicious Claw
Charged Lodestone.

And writing that out feels too short (maybe because that doesn’t show that each one was two events?), so that might be inaccurate by missing a few more of the T5 dust and possibly a second core. But I stopped at the first lodestone because it took ages and I was simply done with grinding events there.
For the super pricey ones like eyes now is probably a good time to farm them, but I dunno about some of the others.

I still don’t completely understand how the map rewards work. I wish there was a visible track you could see (like the pvp track) that shows your progress and where you are and what you need to do in order to get the reward you’re after. After spending way too long in Snowden Drifts….I managed to get a single silver doubloon. The map reward system is very unclear (to me) and it needs some tweaking in the old maps.

Completing hearts should count toward your map bonus as should getting hero points and other map completion items. You can only do the map completion items once so it shouldn’t be deemed a way to exploit the map rewards. There are no map bonuses in the starter zones so this isn’t something you could make a character, do the map, delete repeat. It would make mapping the zones more enticing rather than skipping past it to do events.

From what I’ve seen, after introducing giant eyes and unidentified dyes into the map bonuses system, the price only seems to have dropped because of people panic selling after seeing those items in the drop tables. But after going to mount maelstrom to farm giant eyes (I just go for about 1 per day, maybe 30-45 minutes in the zone) there is hardly ANYONE farming there. Most of the time it’s just me. I think people zoned it, did a few events and had it not come up, and then said “Eh, this is taking too long” and jumped ship.

khani.4786:

I still don’t completely understand how the map rewards work. I wish there was a visible track you could see (like the pvp track) that shows your progress and where you are and what you need to do in order to get the reward you’re after. After spending way too long in Snowden Drifts….I managed to get a single silver doubloon. The map reward system is very unclear (to me) and it needs some tweaking in the old maps.

Completing hearts should count toward your map bonus as should getting hero points and other map completion items. You can only do the map completion items once so it shouldn’t be deemed a way to exploit the map rewards. There are no map bonuses in the starter zones so this isn’t something you could make a character, do the map, delete repeat. It would make mapping the zones more enticing rather than skipping past it to do events.

The way they put it in was a little confusing, but here’s roughly how it works: The “next reward” is what you will get after doing about 1.8 events/mini dungeons/jumping puzzles (pretty sure the rate is the same between all 3). After you receive that reward, the system will randomly pick an item from the list of potential rewards, with the higher up items having a higher chance of being selected. After an item that is not the primary reward item of the zone (the item at the top of the list) is received, from what I’ve seen the next “next reward” is the primary item. After every 10 rewards given (I think) you’ll get 10 of the primary item of the zone. Be warned though- DR hits after maybe 45 minutes, leaving you having to farm upwards of 4 events for one reward. That’s why I go for one rare item per day (like a giant eye).

Somehow it seems really inconsistent though. I went to Sparkfly for a Teq run only and along with 3 out of the 4 dragon chests I got some map reward. My friend went to Jormag and completed some of the crystal pres as well and got nothing.

I am actually actively farming Mount Maelstrom for glacial cores and lodestones (working on Frostfang). I think I farmed like 3 hours the other day, getting mostly t6 mat, a few cores, 2 lodestones and 3 giant eyes…
The giant eyes are nice to sell but I have to admit I do go “I don’t really want you” when i see it as my next reward (Yes I know I can sell them and then buy glacial stuff on the tp, but I’m weird like that). xD

the 4th map reward was a giant eye for me (2x powerfull venom sac, 1 lodestone and then eye). Got it right after killing the Mega Destroyer

I also forgot to point out that at the moment i uploaded this post there were exactly 666 Giant Eyes listed in the TP (i found it amusing, thus i still remember the exact number) and now there are 772. Such a rare item and despite that 106 more have suddenly appeared in 3 hours. Either the new system is working well or people have indeed started to empty their banks in fear of prices dropping.

ZachAttack.3957:

After you receive that reward, the system will randomly pick an item from the list of potential rewards, with the higher up items having a higher chance of being selected.

There’s no randomness in the Map Rewards, it’s set up exactly like a PvP Reward Track, except only the next reward is ever visible in the game. There are forty rewards available in each map. Larger prizes await at the 20th and 40th reward, which will each be 10x the primary reward. So using Straits of Devastation as an example, your 20th Map Reward will be 10x Vicious Claws. By the time you’ve reached that reward, you will also have received 3 Charged Cores and 2 Charged Lodestones as earlier rewards.

Proceeding onwards from there, the 21st to 40th Map Reward, Charged Cores get dropped entirely from the reward lists, instead with 5 Charged Lodestones taking their place.

The only thing I’m not sure of still is exactly how the rotation on the maps will work. Will your progress be saved for eight weeks later when the original rewards return on a given map? Or will you carry over your position to the newly rotated reward track once it comes in? We’ll find out when a rotation happens, I guess!

Thanks for the post, which covers more than just Giant Eyes — very informative.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

ZachAttack.3957:

After you receive that reward, the system will randomly pick an item from the list of potential rewards, with the higher up items having a higher chance of being selected.

There’s no randomness in the Map Rewards, it’s set up exactly like a PvP Reward Track, except only the next reward is ever visible in the game. There are forty rewards available in each map. Larger prizes await at the 20th and 40th reward, which will each be 10x the primary reward. So using Straits of Devastation as an example, your 20th Map Reward will be 10x Vicious Claws. By the time you’ve reached that reward, you will also have received 3 Charged Cores and 2 Charged Lodestones as earlier rewards.

Proceeding onwards from there, the 21st to 40th Map Reward, Charged Cores get dropped entirely from the reward lists, instead with 5 Charged Lodestones taking their place.

The only thing I’m not sure of still is exactly how the rotation on the maps will work. Will your progress be saved for eight weeks later when the original rewards return on a given map? Or will you carry over your position to the newly rotated reward track once it comes in? We’ll find out when a rotation happens, I guess!

I have been doing this for a while, and I am almost 100% sure there is an element of randomness to it. I’ve done a run in mount maelstrom where I got venom sac > core > venom sac > core > venom sac > core > venom sac > venom sac > eye. I will do a study to confirm, and will come back and tell you. As for the comparison to PvP reward tracks- would they not have made the same UI as PvP reward tracks if it was the same? I’m quite sure it would not have been that hard.

After seeing the implementation in beta, I was hoping that there would be a UI update by the time it reached release, but that wasn’t meant to be. The data-mining work of the Reddit community did list it as being just like a PvP Reward Track, though, and the list of rewards that was posted there matched up exactly with what my own experience has been, right down to the 10x Vicious Claws I mentioned in my last post.

If you search on Reddit you can find the exact data-mined list of rewards, if you want to compare it. Find the list, go to a zone you haven’t touched at all since the expansion’s release, and see if the rewards match up.

Xiahou Mao.9701:

ZachAttack.3957:

After you receive that reward, the system will randomly pick an item from the list of potential rewards, with the higher up items having a higher chance of being selected.

There’s no randomness in the Map Rewards, it’s set up exactly like a PvP Reward Track, except only the next reward is ever visible in the game. There are forty rewards available in each map. Larger prizes await at the 20th and 40th reward, which will each be 10x the primary reward. So using Straits of Devastation as an example, your 20th Map Reward will be 10x Vicious Claws. By the time you’ve reached that reward, you will also have received 3 Charged Cores and 2 Charged Lodestones as earlier rewards.

Proceeding onwards from there, the 21st to 40th Map Reward, Charged Cores get dropped entirely from the reward lists, instead with 5 Charged Lodestones taking their place.

The only thing I’m not sure of still is exactly how the rotation on the maps will work. Will your progress be saved for eight weeks later when the original rewards return on a given map? Or will you carry over your position to the newly rotated reward track once it comes in? We’ll find out when a rotation happens, I guess!

So then, what is the mechanism used to keep track? For example, i have PvP reward tracks, and a UI that tracks my progress in each one. If i do a PvP match, i get progress on whatever track i have active, and i can leave the mists to go do whatever, come back to it a week from that last PvP match and pick up where i left off.

Does this mean that you have to stay logged into the map, on the same character to do the 40 events or whatever?

I’m not complaining. I totally dig what they did here, but i’d like some sort of idea on how it works, so i can plan my play time to go after certain rewards.

slamfunction.7462:

Xiahou Mao.9701:

ZachAttack.3957:

After you receive that reward, the system will randomly pick an item from the list of potential rewards, with the higher up items having a higher chance of being selected.

There’s no randomness in the Map Rewards, it’s set up exactly like a PvP Reward Track, except only the next reward is ever visible in the game. There are forty rewards available in each map. Larger prizes await at the 20th and 40th reward, which will each be 10x the primary reward. So using Straits of Devastation as an example, your 20th Map Reward will be 10x Vicious Claws. By the time you’ve reached that reward, you will also have received 3 Charged Cores and 2 Charged Lodestones as earlier rewards.

Proceeding onwards from there, the 21st to 40th Map Reward, Charged Cores get dropped entirely from the reward lists, instead with 5 Charged Lodestones taking their place.

The only thing I’m not sure of still is exactly how the rotation on the maps will work. Will your progress be saved for eight weeks later when the original rewards return on a given map? Or will you carry over your position to the newly rotated reward track once it comes in? We’ll find out when a rotation happens, I guess!

So then, what is the mechanism used to keep track? For example, i have PvP reward tracks, and a UI that tracks my progress in each one. If i do a PvP match, i get progress on whatever track i have active, and i can leave the mists to go do whatever, come back to it a week from that last PvP match and pick up where i left off.

Does this mean that you have to stay logged into the map, on the same character to do the 40 events or whatever?

I’m not complaining. I totally dig what they did here, but i’d like some sort of idea on how it works, so i can plan my play time to go after certain rewards.

I am in favour of the idea as well, but based on my own experiences with the system the way the rewards are chosen is semi random. It goes Base Reward, random next reward (selected from base reward and other rewards), base reward, and on until a certain amount of rewards are received at which point you will receive 10 of the base reward.