Farming items is the biggest turn off

[krimsonrane]

So, I'm about 30 runs into farming the last of 3 parts of a set. It's so frustrating. I've gotten everything but what I'm after. Can we get a "what are you looking for?" option? What about a list of items in the award list after you do the series? We've done that before.

Needing to farm till my eyes bleed in order to move forward and play the game further isn't my idea of fun. After a while you just want to give up and forget DDO.

My goal was to spend some time at cap. A year or so. Instead I find myself playing less and less. No, I don't want to TR again. I'd like to just concentrate on improving my main and enjoying the game. This ridiculous farming thing puts a big hole in that theory. Time sink times a million.

I even spent real money on your illegal slot machines called chest re rolls. it ended up being money thrown out the window.

[Thrudh]

So, I'm about 30 runs into farming the last of 3 parts of a set. It's so frustrating. I've gotten everything but what I'm after. Can we get a "what are you looking for?" option? What about a list of items in the award list after you do the series? We've done that before.

Needing to farm till my eyes bleed in order to move forward and play the game further isn't my idea of fun. After a while you just want to give up and forget DDO.

My goal was to spend some time at cap. A year or so. Instead I find myself playing less and less. No, I don't want to TR again. I'd like to just concentrate on improving my main and enjoying the game. This ridiculous farming thing puts a big hole in that theory. Time sink times a million.

I even spent real money on your illegal slot machines called chest re rolls. it ended up being money thrown out the window.

You playing on elite, hard, or normal?

[krimsonrane]

You playing on elite, hard, or normal?

Does it matter? is there a punishment clause for not doing reaper or elite?

[HungarianRhapsody]

Does it matter? is there a punishment clause for not doing reaper or elite?

There's a reward clause for playing on Elite/Reaper.

Chance of named loot in a chest that can have named loot is about 10% on Normal and 33% on Elite. +1% per skull on Reaper.

(Edit: That's part of what makes getting an item from Wildnerness chests so very annoying)

[Tsutti]

Does it matter? is there a punishment clause for not doing reaper or elite?

On normal you could easily do 100+ runs and not get the item you're looking for, on hard idk how unlikely you are to get it but I've occasionally gotten loot running hard... I'd guess it might still reasonably take 40+ runs to get the specific item you're looking for. Elite can still easily take more than 10 runs to get your item, on r10 you could actually expect to get the item within the 8 runs to ransacking the chest because of a high chance of getting loot in the first place and because if you're doing r10 you likely have a full group so 6 ppl pulling stuff, but I don't think I've ever seen r10 farms--highest is probs r6 and only a couple ppl do that either. I'd just farm elite/r1 for solo farming but would recommend not farming solo because you are very likely to ransack the chest without getting anything you want.

[LittleLexi]

Items being somewhat rare is sort of a good thing. It provides incentive to run certain quests. It gives players something to work towards. It means some folks will spend shards to reroll chests(win for SSG). It also means less powerful items aren't invalidated immediately.

Having said that - it can be frustrating. Especially if all your playtime is directed toward farming specific items. My suggestion would be to mix it up. Do other content for a while. Maybe TR and try get it next life. And when you do come back to the quest with the items you want - put up an LFM and politely ask if others are willing to pass said item, if they don't need it.

I do wish there were more options though, rather than one or two best-in-class items or sets. That really restricts what people go for and what quests they do; leading to burnout. Perhaps something the devs can rectify in the future. Though recent history has not been encouraging, in that regard.

[arminius]

Does it matter? is there a punishment clause for not doing reaper or elite?

From the wiki, the chances for named items:

Normal/Epic Normal: 10%
Hard/Epic Hard: 16%
Elite/Epic Elite: 33%

Reaper boosts Elite’s numbers by 1% per skull

There is a potion that boosts the chance but it is only obtainable by gold rolls, or the Wayfinder Affair. The standard loot boost does not boost named items.

So if there is a 10% chance on normal, and there are five named items in the quest, IF each item is equal, and I am not sure that's been proven one way or another, then that is a 2% chance per run to get the item that you are looking for, or 1 in 50.

Whereas the same scenario on elite you'd have a 6.6% chance of getting the item you are looking for, and a pretty decent chance of getting an item that you either already have but mythic where yours is plain, or a high level named item you truly don't care about to stuff into the maw of a sentient jewel for 290 xp, which is a deliberate part of the system, they designed it that way so when you get named items you don't want you still have a use for them and a motivation to get them.

[Zbarb]

As a player two quit the game twice (!) because i couldn't get a jibbers blade I totally feel you. (N.B I am a wayfinder player so Jibbers is even more important. And i do have it now, when it finally dropped we pulled two in the same chest ... RNG fail much?)

One loot system is to have valuable items with low drop chance, like Jibbers blade.

Another loot system is guanranteed drops that allow eventually to buy valuable items, like slavelords crafting.

What i would suggest is a hybrid system you could name a progressive chance system. It starts out with the low chance drop but the game keeps track of the number of failed opportunities and after a certain threshhold starts increasing the drop chance of that particular item until it is a (virtually) guaranteed drop

There is nothing wrong with having to put effort into getting the best gear, the frustrating thing is that under the current system even if you run something for the 1000th time you still have the same low chance.

[GramercyRiff]

I can't stand farming for stuff I paid money to acquire. If I pay over $100 for an expansion, it's crazy that I don't receive everything that expansion has to offer immediately. I have to grind out chests and raids to get virtual things? In the past, this did make some sense because there wasn't $100+ expansions and there wasn't other totally crazy grinds in the game. Chasing items after paying money is just really bad and feels really bad.

Yes of course everyone can group to get a better chance, but I just spent over $100 (on an old buggy but good game) and I still didn't immediately receive everything I paid for. It's the principle here. Feels bad man etc.

[SpartanKiller13]

Party up, run Elite/R1. 6 pulls on Elite > 3 rerolls solo.

You've had this discussion at least a few times by now (3 minutes searching finds this thread from three weeks ago, this one from two years back and this one from 2015), you know how this works.

Farming gear in DDO isn't terrible by any stretch of the word. 6 players on Elite pull an average of 2 named items/run. Quests typically have 4-5 named items, and appear to have uniform results. If you ransack with 6 players on Elite, you'll average 16 named items. With a 5-named-drop quest, your odds of pulling a specific one are 96.2%. With a 4-named-drop quest, your odds are 98.4%.

Nothing is guaranteed, but you can hugely improve your odds pretty easily - up the difficulty, get more people pulling chests.

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If the first time I ran any quest/raid I got offered every named item in it, what's the point? Seriously, why bother? Skill, difficulty, whatever - who cares? 20 raid completions as you struggle through on Normal to buy a raid weapon? Nah, just find a PUG and do it once. You don't even need to bother to learn the mechanics. Where's the magic? Where's the accomplishment?

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I'd be alright with adding some chain rewards back in, help steady the loot out a little. But party drop rates are nuts in DDO, and being able to pass named items makes this game so much friendlier than so many other games out there.

[Tsutti]

What i would suggest is a hybrid system you could name a progressive chance system. It starts out with the low chance drop but the game keeps track of the number of failed opportunities and after a certain threshhold starts increasing the drop chance of that particular item until it is a (virtually) guaranteed drop

Love this idea, would probably need to exclude raids that give a 20 run reward list and raids that give runes tho--or just raids in general.

[arminius]

Love this idea, would probably need to exclude raids that give a 20 run reward list and raids that give runes tho--or just raids in general.

Or, just adapt the 20 run reward list model to the named item quests.

I'm ok with it as is, because as far as I can tell, this IS endgame. Everyone has motivation to run high level quests on the highest difficulty you can manage, and it gives you something to strive for. You're rewarded for making your character better by graduating to a higher difficulty level, which has greater chance of reward.

[krimsonrane]

Party up, run Elite/R1. 6 pulls on Elite > 3 rerolls solo.

You've had this discussion at least a few times by now (3 minutes searching finds this thread from three weeks ago, this one from two years back and this one from 2015), you know how this works.

Farming gear in DDO isn't terrible by any stretch of the word. 6 players on Elite pull an average of 2 named items/run. Quests typically have 4-5 named items, and appear to have uniform results. If you ransack with 6 players on Elite, you'll average 16 named items. With a 5-named-drop quest, your odds of pulling a specific one are 96.2%. With a 4-named-drop quest, your odds are 98.4%.

Nothing is guaranteed, but you can hugely improve your odds pretty easily - up the difficulty, get more people pulling chests.

-----

If the first time I ran any quest/raid I got offered every named item in it, what's the point? Seriously, why bother? Skill, difficulty, whatever - who cares? 20 raid completions as you struggle through on Normal to buy a raid weapon? Nah, just find a PUG and do it once. You don't even need to bother to learn the mechanics. Where's the magic? Where's the accomplishment?

-----

I'd be alright with adding some chain rewards back in, help steady the loot out a little. But party drop rates are nuts in DDO, and being able to pass named items makes this game so much friendlier than so many other games out there.

You know how sick I get of this circular reasoning?
Right now there is exactly one lfm up on orien for capped toons. 1.
I'm in a guild of 1 person. One.
I don't log on to find friends. I log on to play ddo.
I'm not interested in joining pugs so i can beg people to pass me loot.
When i play, I often go AFk for a variety of reasons. That's not good for group play.

So here's the circular reasoning.
1-I am sick of farming dozens of times.
2- What diff are you doing?
3- The difficulty I'm capable of doing.
4- Well do reaper 99 and you'll get it easy.
5- did you not just hear anything I said?

[ShifterThePirate]

Don't do it if you don't like it... they will release new and better loot eventually anyway with new Expansions/Adventure packs.

[arminius]

Well, I think it is as equitable as it can possibly be.

There's a smaller chance that one can get the best stuff on the lower difficulties, but not no chance. That seems fair to me.

And if there was a high chance that you can get the best stuff on the lower difficulties, like, for example, a 20 run end reward list, then everyone will just do 20 runs on normal as fast as possible, ignoring ransack limitations entirely, get to the end in record speed, get what they want, and then never run the content again.

If DDO has taught me anything, it is that if you leave an easy way to get something and a harder way to get the same thing, people will knock you down to trample towards the easy way.

The Crucible exploit (which is the reason optional objective XP ransacks permanently) showed that if you just give people a button to hit that will give xp and/or loot by hitting the button, people will use that button 24/7 until they get so bored they walk away or you turn off the button.

[krimsonrane]

I can't stand farming for stuff I paid money to acquire. If I pay over $100 for an expansion, it's crazy that I don't receive everything that expansion has to offer immediately. I have to grind out chests and raids to get virtual things? In the past, this did make some sense because there wasn't $100+ expansions and there wasn't other totally crazy grinds in the game. Chasing items after paying money is just really bad and feels really bad.

Yes of course everyone can group to get a better chance, but I just spent over $100 (on an old buggy but good game) and I still didn't immediately receive everything I paid for. It's the principle here. Feels bad man etc.

Glad someone get it.
This is a strange form of buyer/seller relationship where the customer who pays money for years has to endure a beatdowns from strangers on the forums for daring to be unsatisfied with the product.

[Tsutti]

Don't do it if you don't like it... they will release new and better loot eventually anyway with new Expansions/Adventure packs.

The problem is then you have to play on a gimped char without working to ungimp it and the game is no fun, so this doesn't work very well. Basically this equates to not playing ddo (not figuratively being unable to do anything type of not playing but actually not playing) until the better loot comes out and then hoping you can farm that with some better luck.

[krimsonrane]

Well, I think it is as equitable as it can possibly be.

There's a smaller chance that one can get the best stuff on the lower difficulties, but not no chance. That seems fair to me.

And if there was a high chance that you can get the best stuff on the lower difficulties, like, for example, a 20 run end reward list, then everyone will just do 20 runs on normal as fast as possible, ignoring ransack limitations entirely, get to the end in record speed, get what they want, and then never run the content again.

If DDO has taught me anything, it is that if you leave an easy way to get something and a harder way to get the same thing, people will knock you down to trample towards the easy way.

The Crucible exploit (which is the reason optional objective XP ransacks permanently) showed that if you just give people a button to hit that will give xp and/or loot by hitting the button, people will use that button 24/7 until they get so bored they walk away or you turn off the button.

We don't all play daily for hours. 20 runs of anything isn't an easy task when you only play a few hours a week at most.

[krimsonrane]

The problem is then you have to play on a gimped char without working to ungimp it and the game is no fun, so this doesn't work very well. Basically this equates to not playing ddo (not figuratively being unable to do anything type of not playing but actually not playing) until the better loot comes out and then hoping you can farm that with some better luck.

That's an insulting assumption to make. "if you can't solo reaper you're a gimp"

[Tsutti]

The Crucible exploit (which is the reason optional objective XP ransacks permanently)

My comment here is off topic but I didn't know of any crucible exploit, I figured it was wiz king where you could run 3 man epic normal for 70k+ xp every 5 minute run that led to the opt ransack.