Item drop rates: raids vs. shards

[Landru]

I have seen some discussion of this topic on the forums but I have not seen anyone lay out the real numbers completely so I will attempt to do so. Please correct me if any of this is inaccurate. Also I’m only looking at the top tier of the raid content as the normal mode gear is not useful for most already geared players. If you want to add it just double the loot drop rate for raids.

Raids: Purchasing 1 item for each slot with tokens cost a total of 50 tokens. At 5 tokens per week it will take 10 weeks to buy those 5 items, or 0.5 items per week. With a 10% luck drop rate you should average an additional 5 items dropping while earning those 50 tokens. This is another 0.5 items per week. So in total the average number of items you can acquire from raiding is 1 per week.

Shard dungeons: One guaranteed roll per day. One guaranteed drop for 1 of the 5 people in the dungeon = 0.2 items you average per dungeon. Plus an additional 10% chance for a random drop or 0.1 items per shard dungeon. So for your first shard dungeon done you should average 1.3 items and each additional shard dungeon you should average another 0.3 items. If you do 1 shard dungeon per day you will average 9.1 items per week. 2 shard dungeons per day = 11.2 items per week. 3 shard dungeons per day = 13.3 items per week, etc…

There is a drastic difference in 1 item per week from raids vs. 9.1 items or more per week from shards.

[Draven]

Shards scale from 1 to 10 though, so yeah, you can easily get 9.1 pieces of T1 gear per week but you aren’t really progressing. If you are going for T10, you need to do a number of additional shard runs which will yield lower tier gear to get the T10s, which will bring your average down. Hard mode raids also provide T12 gear, which is even better than the top shard gear.

I could see a case being made that normal raids give T5 gear too slowly to progress to make it worth it, though the fact that you are getting progress for up to 10 people at once does help a bit.

[Cameron_W]

Well for normal I agree that this is very true, unless if you want the pet and cape from the 4th and 5th boss you have 0 reason to do it, you can spend your time doing shards and have way more chances at loot as well as getting a shard past tier 5 for better than normal raid drops, leaving the gear as a cosmetic benefit that, I believe and other may or may not agree is not worth 7 weeks of time, since the weapon looks the same so has no cosmetic benefit so 35 tokens at 5 each week, for just cosmetic armor. Some may want to do that but to be realistic spending time in learning shards and completing them for more shards and better gear chances is the better alternative.

For hard mode it is the only way to progress past tier 10 so no matter what the drop chances are it has a big benefit for obvious reason. I don’t mean to derail your topic from your initial point but I think the difference in what you need to do enter the hard mode raid and get a possible T12 drop which is only 10% yes but still possible to get from killing a boss our two that are very less demanding to do time wise and skill wise. A huge factor of getting T10 gear before hard mode raids let alone just the raids releasing was having to role shards up with a time constraint for difficulty as well as increasing the actually scaling of the shard to progress towards the T10 gear. It was not easy and still so many groups and people have yet to achieve that and even some who have cant do it efficiently to keep getting T10 gear consistently. So I find the problem when you can walk into the hard mode without any kind of requirement and even have a chance at loot better then T10 gear that comes from a way more difficult system. Yes obviously shards have way more drop chances but that doesnt matter if you cant role the shards up, lets be real you arent going to only get easy shards while rolling it up. So even having a chance with T12 gear without being able to even consistently role shards to T10 doesnt seem right to me. I know a lot of people who this benefits will completely disagree for obvious reason, but I strongly believe the rewards you get should reflect what you are capable of doing across all aspects. The 1st and 2nd boss in the raid are not mechanically difficult, dodging the AoE and dealing with a debuff for more damage is nothing new from shards lets be honest. Im not trying to call anyone out and there is nothing wrong but I mean when you are taking 25 minutes to kill the second boss in the raid it shows that the mechanics arent preventing people from accessing the content when not properly gear but just making the fights last longer with no consequence other than your physical stamina, and if you are able to put up with fighting a boss for that long great, but it also means you shouldnt be there, the raid needs to incorporate mechanics that if you are not gear and lack the skill you should not be able to kill any boss period. Boss 1 is an absolute joke the boss kill is 5 minutes on average and rewards better gear than a crypt 10, and people struggle with all levels of crypt but youre telling me those exact people can walk into a boss with two mechanics that are both jokes and now get a chance at a T12 anything. That is not right at all. There needs to be serious consideration into how these raids fit into the game as far as difficulty and reward with the previous content for receiving gear.

[Richleth]

I mean you can always farm up 50 raid tokens after you get t12 gear to help boost a new player to the game or a friend to a level 20 set

[PeskyCashew]

So I find the problem when you can walk into the hard mode without any kind of requirement and even have a chance at loot better then T10 gear that comes from a way more difficult system.

I would like to see a suggestion on how you might change the system and how you justify that hard raids are much easier than T10 shards. Even if you are able to clear bosses 1-2, that’s only 2 tokens and a 20% drop rate every week. It’s hard to implement content that simultaneously provides a scalable challenge and doesn’t overlap some with old content. If you have ideas for how that might be done, I’m sure the devs would like to hear it as it genuinely is tough to design and implement. Say for example you had to have shard 10 gear to do the hard raid, so as to make sure you’re not getting in without deserving the chance for T12. You have just locked out most of the players and guilds in the game from even attempting a major piece of content.

[Cameron_W]

So I do understand that the implementing of new content like the raid and making it fit is not a simple task, and yes I know that 2 tokens and a 20% drop every week is low. My point is that if you look at the game before having raids added having even one piece of T10 gear was a big deal considering like you said that most of the players and guilds in the game have yet to even do one and are still struggling to get the ability to do them. So what that means is the effectively you have a 0% drop chance at a T10 piece of gear every week. I mean these guilds and players that havent been able to get a T10 shard let alone get it and beat it depending on the shard could possibly break the wall and get one at anytime but if they have been facing a wall Im pretty sure they will continue to be hitting it. But those people at the same time have a 20% chance a week and then tokens however low they are for T12 gear. If you want to argue that the first and second boss are harder than T10 shards besides certain ones for obvious reason I’d like to have that conversation. I personally dont agree with that at all now to stay at a no bias standpoint, I can understand how for players that have hit a wall before getting T10 pieces can now get T12 and use those to help them push past a wall they may be at with shards and get T10 gear that will then allow them to start progressing more in the raid. And that may not be a bad thing I think there needs to be something to help the community progress because there is a lot of people that seem to be getting discouraged and not continuing to play the game. And maybe hard mode raid should be this thing to help with that. But that being said if that is the case then Expert mode needs to be the content with the lock out, maybe having to have killed all 5 bosses on hard mode should be the lock out I dont see that being an issue. That is just a quick suggestion so please dont think that I am coming up with an end all perfect solution cause Im not. I personally believe that there needs to be content that needs a lock out that few can get through while not limiting the amount the rest of content for everyone else. And maybe it is wrong for me to criticize the way hard mode fits into the game currently without the release of expert mode. So I think me suggesting anything to the devs if they decide to read it should probably wait to see how the raid fully fits into the game.

After writing all that i realized you also asked me to justify how hard raids are easier than T10’s. I’m not saying the raid as a whole is easier. I am saying that the first two bosses are easier that T10 shards. May be able to argue that even 3rd boss could be depending on gear, cause it definitely has a gear check more than a skill check. But regardless for the sake of the argument since I started by talking about the first 2 bosses I’ll justify those. Now to say there arent easier bosses through the dungeons system would be wrong, there are. But those easy bosses dont make up the whole dungeon except for maybe about 2-3 of them but then the trash factor and affixes for a lot of groups make the trash harder than the actual bosses for those groups. with all that said a T10 shard isnt just handed to you like the entrance to the raid was after the hard mode patch. You have to go through a minimum of 5 dungeons to take a T1 to a T10, it would only be 7 if you complete all of them with 15 minutes remaining. for groups that are hitting walls on certain dungeons especially when the walls tend to be on 4 out of the 7 available dungeons for them. So the odds of you getting 3 out of 7 of the ones people dont have difficulty with 5 times in a row is what 1.3% so you need some good luck for that. Even looking at not getting those three 5 times in a row going back and forth until you have luck of getting the easy 3 till a 10 im sure is incredibly discouraging. this is also ignoring all the affixes that there are on the shards that can make even easy wons not completed in time for groups. I also am ignoring skill factor on all this greatly in all of this and this is the biggest part of the difference in all of this. The 1st and 2nd boss have two very simple mechanics with the 2nd i guess having 3 but still simple. It is very easy to have less skilled players brought into these fight considering boss 1 your tanks are really what matter and dps is just there doing whatever they want realistically. It may take awhile but is a joke. Boss 2 has a little bit more difficultly since now everyone is taking damage and has to dodge an AoE, but still pretty easy. But regardless not having time on any of these fights which can be argued as one of the hardest part in rolling shards isnt present. Id love to hear from the community though on what I’m saying. I could just be just completely wrong or people may agree with me or have an opinion somewhere in the middle. I just know from my experience people have done the first two bosses more times than doing a T10 shard which is zero and because they havent been able to get and shards to 10.

[PeskyCashew]

I guess we just differ in the opinion that having the opportunity to occasionally get slightly higher gear than usual isn’t a bad thing. If people get to the point where they simply can’t clear T10s then I see no reason why giving them an opportunity to gear up comparably slowly with T12 items to make that content easier really hurts, but that’s obviously an opinion that has people on both sides arguing for and against it. It seems that would also slowly narrow the divide between organized guilds of high-skill players solely dominating top tier content, which has been a major point of contention as of late.

[Richleth]

If your group can clear 10-20 T10 shards within the 15 minute timer: (First of all wow your group is good) Whatever the drop chance for a t10 shard is someone if not everyone will get 2 or more as everyone gets 1 freebie.