Guild Wars 2

I’m just wondering, whether the droprate of these items isn’t broken, because before one of the recent patches, if I opened let’s say 500 giant gifts, I could craft 50+ exotic essences of luck, and got a reasonable amount of various snowflakes. But the last batch I opened today gave me 9 fine and 68 masterwork essences, while the snowflakes kept dropping like crazy, yielding 1-3 stacks depending on the tier.

Seeing their drop in value on the TP and lack of interesting uses, they become virtually useless, and I’m wondering if this was intentional, as I would very much prefer getting my magic find slowly up to getting yet another unvendorable junk.

Yeah, they upped the Snowflake drop rate. It’s obvious from the sudden crash in snowflake prices before and after the 17th Dec patch.

It seems that ANet forgot the lesson they learned from Halloween 2014, which was to give players a wide variety of goodies they could earn by turning in tokens (i.e. stuff we can work towards, with a visible, definable goal). This year, they drastically choked off the amount of stuff we could earn from the Wintersday merchants, instead locking a lot of it behind RNG through the Gifts. End result: Players get frustrated when RNG doesn’t give them what they’re after, while generating far too much “useless” junk that even the new MF recipes are not making a dent in. (Because the only things the recipes create is more Gifts to start the RNG cycle again, which the players are already sick of.)

A second part of the problem is that the loot tables of the Gifts are just too wide. They can drop loot, crafting mats, snowflakes, various wrapped gifts, finishers, clothes and more. The odds of you actually getting the item you’re after is tiny.

Instead, what ANet should have done is made the Gifts mostly give out just clothes, snowflakes and a few “wrapped gifts” that act like the “Ultimate Wintersday Gift”. (That is, when opened, the Gifts let you choose the specific item you want.) Next, adjust the Wintersday merchants so that you can trade in ugly clothes or snowflakes for the rare goods. Perhaps you could earn the Rime Rebreathers for 500 Ugly Sweaters, for example. (And you can convert up the Ugly Socks/Hats to Sweaters via the same merchant.) The same goes for a lot of the other rare gear, like the Endless Tonic recipes. (I’d prefer it if these goodies were tradable, but if ANet prefers to keep players playing, they could make these account bound.)

Voila. You now have massive sinks for the various mats dropped by the Gifts, and incentive for people to open lots of Gifts.

Ive just opened 50 chests and haven’t had even ONE luck essence drop – no blue or green essence atall let alone an exotic one.

Something is very wrong here and if im not getting luck there isn’t any point in this as im getting nothing nice drop.