I guess i was rolling some crappy dice earlier today then. I again admit 500 salvages is a small sample size. But it seemed VERY consistant over the 5000 or so sample size we had done over days prior to the patch. Will give it another go and risk a few hundred plat and see what we see.
There has been an on again/off again discussion on the TS forums about whether raising rare harvest skills improves your chance at getting spellshard/foundations or hurts it. I wonder if the response about quintessences from Caith answered the harvesting question too. If it operates under the same set of rules, then you DO slightly diminish your chance at the spell rares by increasing your normal rare harvest rate.
Weird, i sold 2 some quintessence for 1500 pp ;-), i should feel nasty If they stay around 500pp I may still make some, otherwise i won't bother since money is useless (i never saw a warden "healing" master on sale ).
Assuming they haven't changed it, no. There are two harvesting tables. Raising your harvest skill increases your chances of rolling on the "good" table (more rares, more multi-common harvests). It doesn't just bump your rare chance by some percentage. IIRC, the game rolls a "(your harvest skill)"-sided die, and gives you the better table if you beat a certain number based on the zone you're in. So increasing harvest skill should only decrease spellshard chance if the tables are written wrong and the "good" table actually has less of a chance at them than the "normal" table...
Just salvaged 2000 handcrafted items between me and a friend. 0 Quintessences 1 rare You can't tell me that this wasn't ninja nerfed.
And the flip side of RNG: I salvaged 100 handcrafted items and got 2 Transcendent Quintessences just yesterday.
I did but that was 3 weeks ago when they were first posted. Having reread the post in question I officially retract my comment. Sorry, I can't remember things from such a long, long time ago. My memory ain't what it used to be. And it used to be pretty bad. :>
A few of us discussed this and we came up with the following formula regarding the chance at a quintessence. Roll 1 = is rare / is common is rare goto Roll 2 Roll 2 = is rare / is quintessence So since the weight of the rare on the chance table is now less, so is the chance at a quintessence.
I haven't noticed a significant change in the number of quintessence I get from salavaging since the rare chance has been reduced. I'm still usually getting about 1 per hundred on handcrafted items. Sometimes I'll get as many as 3 per hundred, others 0, but the experience in my house (between my husband and myself) averages to about 1/100
Quintessence is not a sub table under rares, so reducing the chance at a rare effectively increases the chance at a quintessence, though not in a significant amount on that particular table.
The consensus in Crushbone chat channel is that the rate of Quintessences from Handcrafted has gone way down since the change. It isn't just me who has experienced it. My own RNG being horrible is something I have been dealing with since I made my character, but it is not just me this time. *edit* If you are using the same statistic subroutine to check the quintessence drop rate that is also telling you that the drop rate for Advance Adornments 11 is within acceptable parameters, may I suggest you double check to see if it is really giving you an accurate reading.
I still don't get why this change was made to begin with. This was a tedious way to get the Hiven Roots I need for the new poisons (still upset and feel this is a plat gouge to poison using scouts). But it was better then harvesting which I find boring as hell. Plus it had the bonus of getting some Quints a long the way.
Quoting myself, since I am also on Crushbone. I am getting the same average drop rate that Mermut is seeing: about one quintessence per 100 handcrafted [common] items salvaged. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but that's my average rate over a few sessions.
Shmogre like you said RNG is RNG however it used to be quite a bit more than 1 to 100 before the change for sure.
Not trying to argue about RNG, but that's pretty much what a guildee and I were seeing before the change to rare weight as well. We spent a fair chunk of time [and plat for fuel :^) ] the night before the change went live cranking through a ton of handcrafted stuff, and both of us saw about one for every 100-150 or so. We've actually seen a very slight increase in quintessences [and a massive decrease in rares] since the weight change, so we've been able to keep ourselves supplied for purple adorns for the guild. [Heh, as I was typing this, a guildee salvaged a Wavecaller belt and got a quintessence...yay, RNG. :^D ]
We averaged 3 to 4 per 100. Which was acceptable. Everyone needs war-runes, adding yet another RNG item to making them when they already cost 1 blank rune and 2 kindling was a bad idea to begin with.
