Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I remember the generic crafting materials like Fine Silk and Indium Ore having a pretty decent drop rate back in the day and I'm just not seeing that on Selo. Is this normal for TLP servers? Does it get better after a server bounce? For example, Magelo shows mobs in Grieg's End dropping either an Ore, a Hide, or a Silk roughly 25% of the time. Killed there for an hour and got 0 drops.
Completely normal. You will need to buy em if you want to do that skill up path and avoid having to kill thousands of humanoid mobs.
Globally they are dropping. But they are very scarce. I got maybe 4-5 ores in Tofs killing golems in like 5-6 hours. I got nothing at all from GE in 2-3 hours. For comparison I hopped on live and killed 25 mobs in GE. I got 3 silks, 1 animal pelt and one ore. So the drop rate for Selo seems to be busted if at this point its supposed to be the same as live.
They start dropping in DoN on TLPs. The old DoN cultural mats don't work anymore so the global drops come in with the DoN cultural armor. It was the same on Phinny. For some reason the level 60-64 mats had low drop rates. The rest of the mats had normal drop rates, which is something like 10%. Don't know if this was intentional to prevent players from easy skill ups with out of era items or not. Violet Hero's forge is actually the secret OP if you're trying to level smithing/tailoring with self found mats. You can Mage farm the lower tier mats+permafrost crystals very easy and Lower Faydark has like 20-30 ground spawns for the Red Dye.
I got tired of alt-tabbing to look up the global crafting mats so I made a StoryWindow page so I can pull it up in game. http://www.raspersrealm.com/Everquest/DoN/index.html Has instructions and the link to the file.
You aren't going to skill up using only what you get as drops during DoN. But, if you bank everything, you will have plenty to skill up with by Underfoot, when it matters.
Drop rates are ... odd. Lowest level mats are dropping 1 in 4 (as per live), like Crushbone and Field of Bone. Dragon Necropolis rats I got 17 drop in 180ish Chetari and Velks Lab I got 6 in 50 spiders, both around 1 in 10 (1 in 4 on live). I'm curious to see if the server bounce on next week's patch changes things up, or if maybe a future expansion is what triggers the increase.
Not all mobs have the same drop rates. The global rate is roughly 1 in 10. Certain types of mobs have bonuses to drop certain types of mats though. For example normal spiders/silkworms typically drop silk twice as often. Golem type mobs normally drop twice as much ore ect ect.
Example: https://eq.magelo.com/npc/98599 Level 56-58 humanoid 1302 pristine silk 1212 indium ore 638 rhenium 637 pristine pelt 631 fine silk 373 fine pelt 180 rubicite 173 natural silk 115 flawed pelt Total drops - 4921 Total kills - 18727 Drop rate = 26.2% i.e. 1 in 4 Cheetari Warrior on Magelo, 307 out of 859, 35%. A far cry from the 10% in my sample.
I love this. I put it in my folder right away. Great reference, clever way to utilize it. I'm sure there are a number of other things that could be accessed in the game this way.
Back in SoF / SoD I had one that had all the key phrases for requesting missions/raids. I also wrote a program that would scrape the DKP data from my guild website and populate a story window file. If the file exists when you log in, it is in the list, but the contents are loaded when opened, so I could run the program while in game, overwrite the exsiting file, and have the latest dkp listings on hand. Very useful.
From my experience on Phinny the drop rate was very very low in DoN. But it seems the increase steadily as more and more expansions unlock. By SoF/SoD you're getting quite a bit to drop and by HoT/VoA you are swimming in the drops.
To me it makes no sense why these wouldn't be dropping at the same rate they originally did. When DoN hit originally I was making stuff for every iksar in guild. Now I can farm for hours without a drop. It took the fun out of it.
I understand they want to bottleneck TLP's somewhat. But IMO once the content is unlocked then that content should not be any different then live. It's not like they went back to DoN on live servers and changed the drop rate of items. If I can get 4 drops in 25 mobs on live I should have that same ratio on Selo.
Not to mention Selo moves faster then any other server. So why would some things be slow and everything else be fast? The skins/silks/ores that drop now become obsolete in 2 months. Where on live you could take a year to farm a set if you needed. Making the drop rate match live servers still limits our time to farm/skill/make but at least it moves at a pace closer to the server. P.S. sorry for the triple post. I'm like that dude in an argument. "oh and another thing!".
You are correct. Its been a while since DoN obviously. But either way kind of moot. If TLP's are on the same systems as live then we shouldn't have a different drop rate. Especially with Selo's speed. And you still need loams/spinneret's etc to make the armor. So why not make the template mats match live servers at least? I understand the system was revamped in TSS so by then the drop rate in DoN didn't matter. I am guessing they went back and added code for TLP to decrease drop rates. But I still think Selo's moves so fast that these kind of slow down's don't match the servers rate.