Advanced Solo Instances no longer giving legendary/fabled rewards?

Ok, I got curious, the loot has definitely changed in that there are no more mystery boxes, so at least one middle step is gone. I'm all for that personally bc I like the ST zone and if you're standing on that platform you might get the dot and die before you can loot (too many clicks of "Accept" and "Loot All"). I hadn't done Chelsith before (except during the signature) so i went and did that, liked it and went back later to do it twice. Got loot from there twice, second time a nice adorn on the loot but the loot both times was +160, nice if you're solo, trash if you raid.

I also did Wurmbone Crag and End (non-challenge bc I'm in squishy raid scout aa setup, and usually i duo it with a healer but was just experimenting today). End gave me food and adorn book, Crag gave me actual loot, and in fact Crag gave me 3 level 93+ ability/spell books, which none of the other zones gave. Oh I think I got one from Chelsith the second time through. Sometimes I wonder if they do something to buff unpopular zones and debuff popular ones just to make you guess where to go. I didn't go globetrotting to the other zones so you'll have to carry out your own experiments. It does seem less random and I did only get one adorn that is of value to me out of the experiment. Also some transmutable stuff which is always welcome. So 4 zones (adv solo), results: 3 legendary, 4 mutable books, one useful adorn, some random junk temp adorns, food etc. No research reducers this time.

Seems less "fully random" than before. Seems like it will be much more likely to drop +160s from now on. I wonder if the traditional 3 drops from challenge mode Wurm End and 2 from ST will still be true. More experiments later. Sleep now.

I did Wurmbone's End (CM) last night and received:

2 Crude Astral Material and 1 Advance Adornments 10 book.

Wasn't too amused.

Hmm... 24 boxes items (4 runs) from WE today. Didn't notice a statistical difference between today and other days. Didn't get a fabled today, and got a large number of green adorns, but neither are statistically out of line for such a small sample size.

One day I need to run my logs through a perl script and get a grand tally....

I've ran WE HM twice in the past 3 days as a zerker/warden duo. My warden has received 3 primal chest pieces from 6 crates. 2 x Primal Robe and 1 x Shaman bp. I have no use for any of them!

But they drop. Still waiting on any fighter, scout or warden fabled item to drop so I can actually equip something!

I'm still trying to get something useful for my Conjurer.. running instances as group and the solo.. have found only 3 jewelry items to equip..

I have been putting the time in and not been getting upgrades.. my dps sucks as a result.. I'm averaging 183k.

Oh well... if there was a better game to play I would..

For those people mentioning 6 crates in wurmbone, is this new? I only ran that adv. solo once while doing the signature line, but I didn't get 6 crates. Are repeat visits more profitable than the quest run or am I misunderstanding?

A week or so after CoE went live, they changed the advanced solo zones to give a crate to each person in the zone.. so if you duo it, each person gets a crate.
Wurmbone's End, if you do the final mob HM, each person gets 3 crates

This is a great post. I think this is what the devs were trying to do, and no matter what they try, the Sky is Falling™

The issue behind some people is that loot is fine just dropping from wrong locations. I have only a few personal issues beyond what I have said in the past here is a simplified version.

1: Heroic Loot is worse than Solo Loot when it comes to FABLED drops.
2: Red Adornments should drop from Heroic zones imo and not from Solo.
- Yellow Adornments are more than powerful enough to get a Soloer into a group.
3: Raid Gear is too close to Solo Fabled and it is making non-HM Geared raiders concerned.
- That or Raids are being inundated with Solers who "think" they know what they are doing and utterly failing.

Weather or not any of those points is true is up to debate. I would rather point 1 and point 2 addressed to make Heroic > Solo again but not leave Solo in the dust like it has been before. As per Raiders... the problem is there is no X2 zone making the jump from Heroic to X4 EM bigger that is why people are concerned there is "too little gap".

I can agree with 1 and 2, but not 3. Why does there need to be a gap? I wear my fancy shoes Walmart and you wear yours to the opera. My having a good time at Walmart in no way detracts from your opera experience and don't worry I'm not going to come and slum up your opera.
I think the fact that raids may perhaps be struggling with new membership now than before (if that's true), it's the fact that you can level to 95/320 extremely quickly with very little thought or effort and then have people who have only had a character for a few hours, but consider themselves an expert. I've been a soloer or grouper for almost the entirety of my 9+ years playing and I can guarantee that I know the ins and outs of my characters far more than a lot of raiders of the same class.

3 Is a personal preference. During my leveling I thought that the idea behind Raiders having the best gear was a good thing. It gave non-raiders something to strive for and a goal outside thier own level. Red Adorns were introduced in SF as "raid only" adornment slots. Heroic players had Yellow Adornments. This trend continued in DoV and I very much liked when they gave Red Slots to X2 Raid gear.

This whole "Solo having red slots" seems like an attempt to devalue raid gear beyond its normal slightly higher stats. The "small gap" in CoE is due to missing X2 Raid content which normally bridges the gap between tiers. Again take Sentinels Fate for example.
*I am going from memory

Vigilant X2 Gear was better than Vastly Deep/Erudin/The Hole instances but it was worse or very VERY close to say Perah Celcis' Abominable Labororty gear. Vig gear was close to stuff that Vuulan and Toxxulia dropped, BUT in CoE there is no X2 and not even Harrows End (arguably one of the hardest zones outside of Wurmbones End) doesn't drop the BEST non-raid BP which is imo wrong.

I can forgo having 3 done... I am not the one in charge nor am I in contact with the devs at any level that has influence (I.E like you all I can send a PM and pray for a response). If they ultimately want Raid gear to be "slightly better" than heroic gear without anything special beyond it well, that is their decision. I won't agree with it but I am a single player.

Edit: Your last point about raids having problems is actually true. Most guilds (on my server at least) are missing some class or another because the majority of new applicants are power leveled hot-shots who think they know what they are doing when really... they don't. It takes a lot of knowledge by comparison to do HM Raids over Heroic zones, hence my belief that Raid Gear should always be the best over non-raid gear.

Kharma's competing guild Antithesis just recently kicked a very poor Guardian, who then apped to Kharma and was instantly turned around because we knew how bad he was. Power leveling yourself only manages to HURT you once you hit max lvl because you are playing sub-par for your level and players WILL avoid grouping with you if you suck too much. I have 5 people on ignore because of how badly they performed in the 3 groups I ran with them.

So in the past week or so I've run several Adv Solos, including as I said I would, Wurmbone's End Challenge mode, which does give 6 crates (3 per person if you duo it in challenge mode). And ST Forgotten Adv Solo which gives 2 crates per person. I've also found Wurmbone Crag to be very productive as you are not able to skip names and therefore can stock up on those lovely Subversion crystals that help you do Wurmbone's End in challenge mode. I'm fond of Chelsith for the same reason, though that last fight, I could knit a sweater while that guy heals himself as part of the script 3 times.

I've ONLY received +160 gear from any of these zones in several days now, and the highlight of this second run was a research potion that is one day and an Etherflare yellow adorn (love those). My friend did get a Dusklight Soulripper for his tank +300 or so 2-hander with 2 adorns on it. Since I dont' have a use for the Etherflare right this second, I'm thinking to let him have it for the weapon. But his tanks are both in the low numbers yet. We'll see what develops.

It does seem rare to get really cool gear anymore from the Adv Solo zones. And at first yellow adorns were raining down plentiful, now they're not. Or rather, those useless green ones are coming out, when you add them up they give you lovely things like +0.5 Mitigation Increase. Woohooo! They should really make those level 70 or something.

I did in fact run into a lot of end mobs that gave just a research reduction and a crude astral material or something like that, so I can verify that that is happening a lot. Or food and temporary adorn. Yippee! Perhaps the effort level should be considered. In Wurm Crag, there is no skipping names or leashing, well, maybe if you're a raid warden and can't be stunned or snared, but how many of us can do that? Ditto Chelsith takes a long time and ST. But Wurm End, you can leash and get to end mob and do it in challenge even solo if you're in raid gear and don't mind working out a method (personally I don't get that perfectionistic, I just bring a friend to share the loot). Certain others can be leashed that way, I've heard people say they've worked out Faceless methods that take only 10-15 miin.

If they're going to nerf, maybe they should be using a scalpel instead of a blunt instrument. But that's just one opinion.

I seem to be getting 1 fabled about every 8-10 runs. ...that wouldn't be so bad if it were actually for my class, or was guaranteed to be a non-duplicate.

You are insane. Why does there need to be a gap? To give raiding some kind of point. The gap is laughably minimal these days anyway and its starting to piss me off to read that STILL you soloers are crying about it.

The same people that complain how hard it is to find groups. Try regularly getting the RL schedules of at least 24 people to sync up and reliably play for a few hours a night a few days a week. You people run a solo zone on a whim in 20min whenever you feel like it and get 100% of the loot in the zone, but "can't see" why a 3 hr run with 24 people working together and sharing the drops on harder scripts, should receive any benefit for the extra effort?

What are you smoking?

Soloers are not crying about anything. It's riders who whines about fables dropping in solo zones. Very rare btw. The rewards are in general on par with SS rewards. I am not sure what is pissing you off...

Drop for me have been quite common over last few days. Finally got a plate tank upgrade, plus some scout gloves that I don't really need as I have raid gloves.

I've not seen that many Raiders really ranting. The same gear that drops in Solo zones, drops in Raid zones as trash.

It's the Heroic players (myself included) who are the most cheesed off. It's really, really hard to work up the enthusiasm to run heroic zones - knowing they have no chance to drop anything better than the solo gear. Knowing that even if they work through the HM versions of the fights (at least the first two) for HM body pieces, and work through the obols and spirits to get a set of faction body pieces, or finish the last zone and get the rare fabled chestpiece/robe to drop, well, they've wasted their time - they'll never get body pieces as good as if they were soloing that entire time... It completely destroys the any motivation for the heroic aspect of the game.

(The only thing even worth thinking about going to a Heroic zone for is the extremely rare Essence of <Named> for a piece of faction jewelry, which seem to be even more rare than the fabled drops from solo zones...)

Raiders still raid, and get raid gear.
Solo'ers have plenty of places to solo, and get, well, raid gear.
Heroic players say Meh, and either solo, or log out...

Completely correct.

I group occasionally because I like grouping. But the only incentives are the mount and jewellery essences. The spirit essences are a stop gap until the solo fabled stuff drops for me.

Raiders whine about fables drop in solo b/c few on this forum rather not have them droped in solo at all. They feel that it's unfair based on amount of effort. Read first other posts then you would understand the meaning of mine. Soloers never demanded to get better or the same gear as in raid zones.
Anyway I am not going to argue. There were like threads about it. Same ol same ol here.

I don't understand how so many people on the forums can complain about how the game feels so dead, how we need server merges, how you can never find people to group with or do anything with, how they can't find people to fill slots in their raid, yet see no problem with solo stuff dropping raid loot.

People have to have a reason to do something. Just because it is fun really doesn't happen for PvE in an MMO. To some extent it does at the absolute top of raiding because their is competition, but that doesn't work beyond that. There has to be a carrot. Without a reason to do something people just aren't going to. PvE isn't about being competitive. There is no puzzle after doing it a few times. That means there needs to be a reason to run it, that reason has always been a chance at some sort of loot you can use. I'd like to see things like TSO/SF with some really rare loot (and rare nameds!) in heroics and a shard system to purchase some of the stuff after like 100 instances worth. For the challenge heroic content it should be a good alternate source of red adorns. If it is a sufficiently challenging zone they could even be slightly better like Guk Spire was.