Guild Wars 2

Opened 83 champion bags, got 2. Normal rate over the past few weeks of running SW has been 1 in 5-6. This is 1 in 40. Seems too much off to be rng outlier and looks like a change in drop rate. As if they weren’t already hard to get :/

83 bags isn’t really enough to tell with high certainty that it’s not just an outlier. Each drop is independent from the last so when you opened the 83rd bag, it had no indication that you had not received any spirit shards.

For all you know someone else has gotten a remarkable increase in the number of spirit shards and when you two put your data together, comes back to the 1 in 5-6 ratio.

I got 33 from around 200 or so a couple of days ago.

@ Seera

Yeah I understand how RNG works it’s just I farm SW alot and always open bags at about 100~ish at a time. Whenever it deviates it might be 1 in 7 or 1 in 4 if im lucky. I’ve never seen 1 in 41.5 bags however. Not in more than a year of farming SW daily. Also, the outlier is so extreme, the likelyhood of it indeed being bad rng is very very small.

Verificus.4320:

@ Seera

Yeah I understand how RNG works it’s just I farm SW alot and always open bags at about 100~ish at a time. Whenever it deviates it might be 1 in 7 or 1 in 4 if im lucky. I’ve never seen 1 in 41.5 bags however. Not in more than a year of farming SW daily. Also, the outlier is so extreme, the likelyhood of it indeed being bad rng is very very small.

ANet keeps RNG balanced based on everyone’s drops. 83 isn’t large enough for it to be an outlier. They don’t keep every individual at the statistical rate.

And I said it wasn’t high enough to tell with high certainty that was nerfed.

Is it high enough to warrant someone at ANet looking into it? Yes. You’re data point is an outlier and with the number of patches that have been released, it wouldn’t be out of the question for something to have accidentally affected the spirit shard drop. That drastic of a nerf I don’t think would have been a stealth nerf. They would have mentioned it in a patch.

I might be a bit biased but I’ve been in an understandiung that no one has a shortage of those things and that makes this question a bit moot for me. So is it that the shards are in short supply?

Spirit shards are usually the last Material i need before getting a new legendary, so it really depends on your need for shards.

I only have 90-ish shards. I craft infusions as I like to max things out. 1 infusion = 50 shards. Or, 100 shards for the versatile infusions.

I always have next to no shards.

Get an asc drop? Bad stats? That’s another 10 to change it. They all add up. I have a friend who has over 4k shards… How I wish they were a tradable currency.

Rayden.3695:

I might be a bit biased but I’ve been in an understandiung that no one has a shortage of those things and that makes this question a bit moot for me. So is it that the shards are in short supply?

Depends on what you do with them. I’ve made 3 legendaries and crafted dozens of Vision and Lesser Vision crystals. It’s historically been one of the currencies I always lack the most of. They took away my main way of getting them: making alts and doing skill point challenges. Back when you could do that I didn’t have a shortage indeed. But the only way to get them now is by looting or by using tomes of knowledge. You also get 25 for leveling a character from 1-80. Either way I’ve always felt that since the chance to Hero Points the availability has been at an unfair level. E.g. with my last 2 legendaries I’d have all the other stuff for days but had to grind SW for champ bags that had kitten poor droprates. I mean this is a farming game so it’s all good but my problem is they took away the easy way to get them, for no apparant reason. No reason to make them harder to attain. All it does is add extra days to people crafting Ascended/Legendary.
Another way I’ve spent alot of them lately is changing my armor and weapon to new stat sets because of meta changes in HoT. Like conditions becoming more prevalent in PvE. Overall I feel it was just badly iterated when they changed all those systems. Imagine you need around ~339 to make a legendary and if you have to farm them all its at the very minimum 1700ish champ bags you need to open. The daily only rewards 3.

Ah okay, now that I think about it the ways of getting them have been slowly disappearing. But I remember I had somewhere around 2k of those things after the hero point system was implemented, but that’s mostly because pvp, as in scrolls of knowledge got turned into shards. But I did craft ascended gear or change stats for full gear and crafted a legendary after that and I still have around 2,5k rolling in my account wallet so I must be getting them somewhere. But wasn’t it that before HoT you’d get one if you leveled up when you were level 80? And I do get that now with the masteries that isn’t really possible because you no longer get one every time you gather 254k exp. Out of interest tho, do people who haven’t gotten HoT so far get the shards that way anymore?

You can get them from treasure mushroom daily chests. 6 mushrooms in total per day.