Guild Wars 2

I would like to infuse a ring and I can because I don’t have any of the essence needed…or rather I only have 1. My personal fractal level is 40.

Is this stuff just crazy rare like lodestones or am I just unlucky?

You’re just unlucky. Run enough fractals and you’ll have plenty.

My usual crew of five runs three tier 4 fractals 3-5x/week. We probably get 2-6 essences per week. Assuming my estimates are correct (which I don’t, because it’s been a while since I’ve kept careful track and human memory for stats is unreliable) that’s

• Max ~13% = 6 / (3 * 3 * 5)
• Min ~2.7% = 2 / (5 * 3 * 5)

If you want to farm them, people recommend killing the foes that spawn in the first part of the volcanic, dredge, and underwater fractals. Which you chose is a personal preference. People report better results by maxing out magic find, but I haven’t seen actual numbers; it’s certain won’t hurt and you might get better miscellaneous loot.

The essences state on them that:

• Vials drop at L1-9
• Globs @L10-19
• Shards @L51+

The wiki says the first two can be found at higher levels, but in practice, I’ve never gotten either outside the stated ranges. However, since the update that changed them, I’ve mostly been finishing 76+.

I’m in tier 2. I can’t do tier 4. I’ve been doing scale 19 (volcanic) for 2 hours and I haven’t found a single one.

Will.9785:

I’m in tier 2. I can’t do tier 4. I’ve been doing scale 19 (volcanic) for 2 hours and I haven’t found a single one.

Just do the first room in Volcanic, not the whole thing. Ideally, do this with 4 other people with builds designed to kill off the respawning grawl as quickly as possible.

When my group did this, I believe we got 3 mist essences after 3 iterations — one person got two, another got one, and no one got any in the first instance.

(Remember: you’ll have to do 20+ to get the top tier; L19 is good for the mid-tier mat.)

Yeah, I’ve been sticking to the first room and restarting. To give you an idea of how many runs I’ve done… I’ve leveled 75% the final tier of the fractals mastery with this. So far I’ve found 2 of the lowest tier essence (not even the mid tier). I’ve been doing 29s.

I tried opening it up but no one wants to farm grawl for hours on end.

They should really bump up the drop rates on these.

Oh, and I’ve been using birthday booster and MF boosters too.

If you intend to do high level fractals you will need to get ascended gear anyway. You might as well get that out of the way first which will also get you enough infusion slots to do higher scale fractals without having to worry about mist essences.

The easiest thing to do is actually getting HoT so you can attune rings which is functionally equivalent to infusing and gives access to +7 versatile infusions.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

(Remember: you’ll have to do 20+ to get the top tier; L19 is good for the mid-tier mat.)

I thought that was based on the old 1-50 fractal levels. The wiki currently says 1+ for vials, 26+ for globs and 51+ for shards.

@OP
I know it’s probably RNG distorting my experience, but I had quite a lot of luck farming in the dredge fractal. My group had been farming maw and we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere, so we decided to change things up and try grawl and dredge. Grawl wasn’t great either, but dredge was giving everyone a shard every 2-3 runs. We went back to maw briefly because one of the group was convinced his drops was better there, but we ran into the same drought, so switched back to dredge.

Btw, if you’re farming essences, you don’t need AR (unless you farm 91+ for some strange reason), so you don’t need to limit yourself to lower levels.

I’ve found 14 vials so far in lord knows how many runs. I need 31 total. I’ve been running 28 because that’s as high as my fractal level will allow. I haven’t found a single glob. That’d be worth 5 vials.

onevstheworld.2419:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

(Remember: you’ll have to do 20+ to get the top tier; L19 is good for the mid-tier mat.)

I thought that was based on the old 1-50 fractal levels. The wiki currently says 1+ for vials, 26+ for globs and 51+ for shards.

I was going by the text on the mist essences themselves. Although that matches my experience, as I said above, I don’t do enough sub-50 fractals to have enough personal data. I have only gotten shards in T4, never globs or vials.

Will.9785:

I’ve found 14 vials so far in lord knows how many runs. I need 31 total. I’ve been running 28 because that’s as high as my fractal level will allow. I haven’t found a single glob. That’d be worth 5 vials.

Like I said before; farm higher fractals. You can ask someone with a higher level to help you open and advertise on LFG. You don’t need any AR and it’ll be more time efficient:
When you convert to lower tiers in the MF: 1 shard = 3 globs = 9 vials

… and now you can just buy them if you have HoT

If you have the Follows Advice Mastery, INFUZ-5959 will sell you Vials, Globs, and Shards of Condensed Mist Essence, as well as Agonized Essences and Infusion Extraction Devices.