Guild Wars 2

Tonight, I decided to drink my stash of Liquid Karma and buy Lost Orrian Jewelry Boxes.

I had +90% karma buffs: 50% from Karma Booster, 15% from Guild 24 hour boost, 15% from Karmic Infusion, 5% from Bowl of Saffron-Mango Ice Cream, and 5% from a Karma Banner. (Another 5% can be obtained by using the new 10% Guild Banners)

I started with 1,964,101 Karma. 1530 Lost Orrian Jewelry Boxes later, I was down to 3361 karma. So each box really costs 1282 karma, because all boxes give karma in the form of drops, tastes, vials, and swigs.

From the 1530 boxes I got 23g 45s and 239 Obsidian Shards. So each Obsidian Shard has a 15.6% (less than 1 out of 6) chance to drop. By comparison, an Obsidian Shard is 2100 Karma from the Temple of Balthazar so the Karma I used could have bought 933 Obsidian Shards.

I got a total of 64 Lodestones (I include Pile of Putrid Essence). So each Lodestone has a 4.2% chance to drop. There are 8 different types of Lodestones. My results have a maximum of 11, a minimum of 5, a mean of 8, and a median of 8. The variance is 4.75. Despite the high variance, I expect they are each equally likely to drop. 64 is a small sample size amongst 8 types.

I got 15 Risen Priests of Balthazar. So the Risen Priest of Balthazar has approximately a 1% chance to drop.

I got 3 Hard Potions. So the Hard Potion has approximately a 0.2% (1 in 500) chance to drop. (This value does not have a high confidence interval due to the abysmally small sample size. Two of the Hard Potions actually dropped in a row.)

I stumbled upon an interesting tidbit. Very rarely (at least twice for me) you can get 4 Swigs of Liquid Karma from one Lost Orrian Jewelry Box. These have a base value of 3000 Karma, I was getting 5700 Karma from each, so a single box can give you 22800 Karma.

Conclusion:
In my tests, using 1,960,740 karma I obtained 239 Obsidian Shards and 86g 02s 05c after selling everything. If we value Obsidian Shards at 2100 karma then 1,458,840 karma is worth 86g 02s 05c.
So each 1 karma is worth 0.58965 copper via this method.

For reference, capturing a Keep in WvW without any buffs gives 1,360 karma, a value of 8s 02c in addition to the 7s 84c from the event. Karma gained from events is worth more than the coin given. This becomes more profitable if you have karma buffs. A Karma Booster would add another 4s 01c for example.

I also got the mini. Well, 15 minis, but they’re account bound, so kitten that noise.

TL;DR I spent an hour of my life buying boxes, opening them, and using the liquid karma. I probably double-clicked over 6000 times (1530 purchases, 1530 openings, and a ton of Drop of Liquid Karma. kitten that noise! I want that hour of my life back; and my sanity.

did you include the money from the potions? They’re tradeable now. I dont know if they’re still as expensive as they were, but it might alter the end money by a few g.

Actually, I use the boxes to transfer karma from one character to another. I have one guy that has too much karma, I don’t need much of anything…I want to be temple armor on a new 80 and that’s one way of, inefficiently, transferring karma between characters.

I’ll probably keep doing this until I get then mini, then stop.

Wait what? Potions are tradeable now? Well thats just great….seeing as they werent when I got mine. Great.

Zenyatoo.4059:

did you include the money from the potions? They’re tradeable now. I dont know if they’re still as expensive as they were, but it might alter the end money by a few g.

Worth 22s – 38s. Sold all 3.

If you haven’t already (and if you kept track of exactly which lodestone etc. you got) you could add your data to the drop rate page on the wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lost_Orrian_Jewelry_Box/Drop_rate

They’ve got a lot already, but all the data helps improve the accuracy of the drop rates reported.

Eh, 86 gold? I opened 1.1mill karma worth of boxes and made around 12g total from selling stuff. Was still nice since I have no use for karma but you got a massive amount of pure luck if you made that much.

It does seem like a high estimate. I do hand-ins of 1,000,000 Karma and get about 15g~ but I only rock 60% karma. Great data, thank you very much for doing this.

4% for a lodestone seems high to me. Just a hunch, I have no data outside of memories of my own luck. Also when dealing that that amount of lodestone’s the profit range could have a huge swing might be best for your calculations to average out the value of lodestone’s and determine an average lodestone value. Sorry if you already did that, thanks again for this.