Let's discuss the current state of chests and drop rates

Game Feedback & Ideas
22

I am not a fan of the changes at all. I had been targeting a specific drop of a specific color for quite some time now and it has been quite frustrating. In doing so, I have been opening gold and and iron chests and letting the minions doing the work on the ruby and diamond. Yet, I no longer believe the ruby and diamond chests have much value at all. I hardly see any gear, and when I do, neck pieces seem to be disproportionately represented. Although it is a bit late, I may try to start tracking the drops from all looted chests to put some data behind my perceptions. I am also targeting spell drops from dungeons and would like to know the drop rate.
Some points:

  • Gear in dungeon chests and shards in skirmish chests was a fantastic idea. Please go back to that idea and adjust within that framework
  • Gold, ore, and food should be baseline drops and then each chest type has an additional, specified number of drops and loot table
  • Relics/glyphs need to be more accessible. I know this is difficult to balance in the endeavor to find the right level of player frustration (frustrated enough to spend but not enough to quit), but there really seems to be no point to gearing up more than one class unless you are a huge spender. The level 35 gate is ridiculous.

It will be hard to keep playing if the chest drops remain as is.

Edit: After playing a few more and paying closer attention to the drops, I think the only rational thing to do is to not use keys on anything. I will let the minions do their work on ruby and diamonds and salvage the rest. It is simply not worth spending resources when there is potential to waste two (or more) of the drops on 0 gold and 0 food, given the new drop rate of gear in dungeon chests. I don’t think this will change as long as the game has no useful mechanic to use food or gold.

4 Likes
23

This happened.

This didn’t.

I know this makes me look like a :poop: but I’ll take the hit. You can’t come into the forums saying you are genuinely interested in player feedback and encouraging other voices and getting more people involved and then 4 days later you are still absolutely silent despite people responding to your request. Since @Kafka requested more voices, I have not seen one instance of a CX person in chat asking about this issue. There has not been one comment in the last 4 days about the growing number of voices expressing discouragement about the changes.

At the end of the day, talk is cheap. I keep hearing the same words (We want to hear from you! We want engagement!) but then the same action (No followup, No in-game interaction of any continuous sort). I keep hearing how the team is small and has a tough time getting to things. Yet I’ve seen plenty of small teams have daily engagement with players/community on topics of interest, especially when the information is being specifically solicited by the Community manager.

I get tired of constantly beating this drum. I know there are probably lots of players that get tired of hearing it to. But what else are we supposed to talk about. We don’t know specifics on forthcoming changes (Yes, I acknowledge the roadmap was put out, which is good, but we don’t know anything about the changes or whether our many voices in the past have even been taken into consideration). We don’t know if there some bigger plan in mind when changes are made (What is the purpose of certain changes? Why are these recent changes “improvements”, etc). We are often left to figure things out for ourselves and in doing so often discover that we are worse off as a result.

The sad part is that the thing most players ask for the most “passionately” is engagement. Maybe if we had that we would see more voices and more discussion here.

7 Likes
24

Hello Devs and support Humans,

Thank you for recommending we discuss this more. The road to one Legendary item is long and frustrating. Anything you can do to help reduce that frustration would help. Removing bottlenecks like Glyphs/Relics by making them more common/easier to get or having higher level chests actually drop higher rarity items (it hurts to open a common item on a lvl 100 dungeon chest). A 5% Legendary drop rate in level 100 diamond chests (skirmish or otherwise) would result in more Legendary gear, but not all of it would be usable for your builds.

Currently, my approaching upgrading one of my slots is:

My chest is Epic and level 35, but it has bad attributes. To optimize this, I need to go on a chest opening spree. After opening x+1 chests, I get the piece I need, but it’s common or uncommon. So I level it up. Oh, it’s not in the right color, so I salvage and keep going. I open another x+1 chests and this time it’s rare, and in the same color! great! Now I use hundreds of shards to get it to Epic. Oh no, I just looked at the attributes and it has darkpact and lightward. But it’s the right color. Ok, salvage and start over. Open another x+1 chests and…hey, it’s a common that I upgraded to Epic and it has everything right!

Oh…now I have to get it to Legendary. Wait, that takes HOW MANY gems to get a glyph?!? and it’s only a chance?!? wait, it also takes relics?!? OK, gotta keep grinding for those. Oh, this other game mode lets me have a small chance to get a resource I can trade for glyphs/relics, but I can get 1/4th of one at random per week? sigh, why am I doing this?

This has taken MONTHS. It’s been a year since I’ve seen a Legendary armor piece drop.

7 Likes
25

You forgot to add the loop which is where the pain really begins

Now, if/when you actually/finally get the resources required to evolve the item, you get to spin the wheel to see what attribute you get
Oh, and if its another X-ward or Smart or 4/5 chance for an off-color pact, well now you can’t really salvage and start again because you have invested SO many resources into the evolve and the salvage rates for high level items do not return the relics/glyphs

There needs to be a way to choose or at least re-roll

I don’t see why we can’t see what attributes an item has once it is Rare (or higher)
Show us in advance what random attributes we are going to get - then we can skip the disappointment or at least make informed decisions
Also would make every item worth a look rather than auto-salvage (with no actual auto-salvage based on rarity rule I could set)

(As an aside, when opening a chest, why can’t I click on the gear item to see what it does?)

1 Like
26

Dungeon chests drop is the most sadly thing in the game.
Beat dungeon 100 lvl to get couple useless runes and scrolls from diamond chest? Opening skimish chests or followers crafting have much more chances to get gear from the wanted set.
Dungeon farming is just wasting time for now.

27

This is an intentional design choice to push players into buying a Season Pass. Even with a Gold Pass, players are unlikely to obtain everything in the Shop/Season and will have to make choices on what to pursue. That, or buy a Platinum Pass.

This came up a while back. When rolling loot tables for gear, the game rolls for loot type first. For dungeon sets, which are restricted to their 6 set pieces, this can appear to cause the impression of loot imbalances.

For example, looking at the Royal Set, there is 1 weapon, 4 armor pieces, and 1 accessory. If the game rolls an accessory drop, it looks at the accessory loot table for the dungeon and sees exactly 1 possible drop in that set and that’s what the player gets every time.

2 Likes
28

On the state of chests… I have to wonder…

/tinfoil hat time

The devs like to implement large changes in pieces, and I’m pondering whether the chest changes in general (except the dungeon loot ticket fix for Seasons) are to set the table for the next round of changes in 1.2.

I’m of the mindset currently that 1.2 will bring some tectonic changes to standard gameplay thinking. Kingdoms/Guilds are a major cornerstone of gameplay in GoW, and there should be little doubt that such a cornerstone will be forged here in PQ3.

The changes in 1.1.1 are okay, if and only if there will be ways to modify color and/or attributes on Gear implemented in 1.2 with the new Kingdom functionality.

  • Additional resource (gold/food/ore) drops are okay if there will be new resource sinks implemented for them (i.e. Kingdom features / tasks / reworked followers) that will benefit players.

  • Reduced Gear drops are okay if players will gain the ability to alter color and/or attributes, because the player won’t need to see as many Gear drops and shard drops tend to roll more shards than salvages Gear (unless said Gear rolls at levels significantly higher than 1).

But how could the game get there?

Well…

Super-tinfoil-hat-theory-time.

image

What if… kingdoms/guild will have their own Citadels, a la PQ1? Crazy talk? Maybe, maybe not.

The current Kingdom Bazaar is due to be sent to the scrap heap. But what replaces it? If a player looks at the components of the Hero(ine)'s Citadel in PQ1 and project them into PQ3,

Forge / Mage Tower - Gear modification, check.
Statue - Guild tasks a la GoW
Temple - Temporary stat boosts a la GoW Guild Wars stat boosts.
Siege Workshop / Towers - Offense/Defense against Kingdom Bosses?
Stable - Speed boosts?

All of these things would need to be maintained periodically through guild donations.

If they put some juicy carrots at the end of kingdom task lists or though kingdom bosses, then farming might take off in a big way that currently doesn’t exist. For sure, it would end any sort of talk about “active” guilds only requiring 300-400 Crests per week (bar would go potentially much higher). Makes one wonder how closely the devs are scrutinizing data for individual task completion rates from Golden Week, as well as weekly highly active player crest counts.

Will be interesting to see what happens in 1.2.

1 Like
29

I think that the game mixed up being a collecting game (spells and minions) with a loot acquisition game (gear) and trying to use what seems like the same system(s) for both (inventory caps, random drops) isn’t working. If the systems for the two different kinds of games could be separated, I think it would feel better to players (or at least clearer).

Being able to fix passives on gear makes sense if it’s a collecting game. Letting things be random and unchangeable makes sense if it’s a loot acquisition game.

For each item type, we should gain clarity on what system we are going to be playing with.

3 Likes
30

This reminded me of something that I puzzled over a year ago along the same line of thought:

As you are saying @Zudaio we are still stuck in the same state. We do not get enough loot drops and upgrade materials to for this to be a loot fest where you finally stumble across the perfect item, nor do we have avenues for gear improvement based off of limited drops and slow evolution/refitting opportunities to be a “collection” game where once you have the item, it’s just a matter of making that one item the best that it can be.

I agree wholeheartedly, the game needs to be one thing or another. It cannot sustainably be the worst parts of both.

1 Like
31

Thank you–yet that does not explain why I am seeing so many neck items. The set I am farming has 2 accessories, 3 armor, and 1 weapon; and I am hoping to get a shield. The distribution between neck/shield does not seem close to 50%. Weapon seems to be the second most common, and the armor pieces lagging well behind that. I am going to start tracking the drops just to see how it pans out.

Even so, I cannot believe that the devs would not set probabilities that account for the number of items per classification in each set.

32

I tracked well over 50 level 60 dungeon chests and here is a sample of the results.

Tracked items: gear, shards (all), epic+ scrolls, epic+ runes. Chests that did not contain any of these items were ignored in the data.

Total tracked chests: 50

  • Iron -12
  • Gold - 20
  • Ruby -15
  • Diamond - 3

Gear

  • Neck - 9
  • Shield - 3
  • Gloves - 4
  • BP - 3
  • Pants - 4
  • Weapon - 4

There were 23 chests that contained gear, so the percentage of dungeon chests with gear was under 46% (as I did not track several chests). Neck items accounted for 32% of total gear drops in this sample.

Kind of interesting, but I do not plan to continue tracking the results.
(here is a sample of the tally. The gear is level and stars–1.3 is level 1 three-star gear. I didn’t bother cleaning the formatting)

image
image1613×381 11.4 KB

2 Likes
33

IMO, the power creep train has still not yet left the station, not after 3 months of live service (and upwards of 15 for us Early Access players). Power level limitations are the same today in 1.1.1 as they were in 0.34.

I’m expecting the power creep train to finally slowly start accelerating from an idle position in 1.2 via Kingdom rework incentives. These will likely appear as end-of-rainbow glyphs/relics that will only be obtainable (at least initially) by the most of active of guilds. Devs would still have plenty of train tracks left to travel before having to think about when to raise level caps to move power maximums forward, because Mythic ascensions will still block most players for a good while still.

34

Continuing to track Seasons Chests in the following thread, along with my most recent commets:

EDIT: one person messaged me and said they got 1x Red Gear. Do I hear 2!

35

I ended up being out sick a bunch last week unfortunately, so I’m just spending today running around catching up on everything. This thread is on my list and we already mentioned it to the team again this morning as I’ve asked some questions about drop rates.

I also want to take my time here and not rush my replies.

36

Sorry to hear that you were sick. Obviously I didn’t know; I only knew you had posted 3 days ago on Gems of War forums so I felt like this was being overlooked. I hope that you are feeling better soon. We look forward to hearing your thoughts.

1 Like
37

No probs, Sibelios, you couldn’t have known, and I know it was the worst timing for me to go awol. Murphy’s law!!!

Me too, oddly though that meant I needed less Gear and more shards to evolve the Gear to find the exact piece I was looking for, so I have a shard shortage rather than a Gear shortage.

Sibelios mentioned Shards are easy to farm in Skirmish, and you wouldn’t farm Dungeons if you were after Shards… Guess who plays Dungeons almost exclusively sheepishly raises hand I have very much been playing PQ3 for fun and less so on the maximising my progress side of things so I hadn’t even stopped to think about doing Skirmishes to get more shards. Needless to say, since that convo I’ve been playing more Skirmishes (although subsequently having less fun, so I stopped doing that again) :sweat_smile:

^ This 200% this. It’s less that we like doing it in increments and more a necessity for our live service games. Games that only launch once get more time to perfect all their systems before that one launch, whereas live service have to constantly update everything, we do our initial launch then as we get feedback and add new features or change things, the economy has to be rebalanced over time. You’re always on the ball with this stuff @Lyrian - if we introduce a change that seems incomplete or less than you want, it’s usually because of 2 reasons:

  1. We undershot so we could buff it later if we missed the mark (buffs are always better than nerfing it if we overshoot the mark on the balance)

  2. We have more changes around the corner to add more of the things/balance the current thing out more and something is just the start of what’s to come.

CX have made sure we put forward that re-rolling element and attributes is the big thing players want/need.

On a personal note, there’s not much I don’t agree with in this thread. I’ve also raised collecting Glyphs to be problematic and plan to again at a future point (no doubt, not too distant future).

Regarding the Shards vs Gear drop rate topic and how this recent change seems to roll things back to before we said we want to make Dungeons and Skirmishes more distinguished from each other in the chest drops, you’ve all got a point! I mentioned this to Sirrian and I know he was going to discuss it with the other Producers.

I don’t have the exact drop rates, but I did confirm that the drop rates haven’t reverted back to pre 0.38 (which I believe was the update we made the Dungeon chests drop more Gear and Skirmish drop more Shards). In other words, “less Gear in Dungeon chests” is still more Gear than the drop rates in 0.38’s update. Of course I can’t find the spot in the patch notes I’m thinking of right now but I’m sure it was between 0.36 and 0.38.

We were getting feedback that players wanted more Shards and Relics and the data we had from the game itself was definitely showing most players needed more Shards and less Gear.

I think the thing was that probably, from this discussion, more shards were wanted from Skirmishes rather than Dungeons and in retrospect I think we should have drilled down into that feedback more, which is definitely something we as a CX team will keep in mind in future when taking any feedback.

Having said all this, if there were a way to re-roll element and attributes on Gear, then we’d probably find we need less shards again.

We mentioned this topic again today to the team to give them a heads up we’ll have more questions for them throughout the week. Some of the team including Sirrian are in the office last and this week moving all our machines and getting the internet setup etc for the new office, so any updates I have from the team will come later in the week when they’re more available for these sorts of discussions and not AFK sorting out our new office.

If you have any further questions or comments in the meantime please yell out. I do think this is a good discussion.

1 Like
38

More gear dropped in dungeons because less Shards, it’s in the very patch notes I quoted to you. Here it is again for reference:

So “more Gear, less shards” were a part of this update to differentiate the game modes. That fact has been discussed quite a lot in game due to this change so why you would be expecting differently, I’m not sure. The recent QoL change which was described this way:

So Shards are added back and it expressly states that less gear is now provided. To requote you again:

So to reiterate, the reason that Dungeons now dropped more Gear (before the recent “QoL Fix”, was because Shards were removed in 0.38. Shards have been put back in so how can you say that the amount of Gear that drops is still better than either pre- or post-0.38. It can’t possibly be! Also, I’ve provided plenty of evidence in the other thread that Seasons chests are behaving differently and in fact the amount of Food/Ore seems to have increased so the combination of this + Shards reintroduced means that Gear is less present in these dungeons chests than ever before.

Please explain how its possible that Gear is somehow “still more Gear than the drop rate in 0.38’s update”. It’s not possible.

So again, you introduced a change to the behavior of something in the game and qualified it as a “Fix” and an “Improvement”. Please explain what you actually needed to fix? Clearly the ability to reroll Masteries or Attributes is not part of the thinking because you said it was something that was still being offered as feedback to the developers. Therefore the fix/improvement was supposedly driven by something else.

I believe it that players have been begging for Relics. But where are they begging for more shards? You all have made numerous changes to bump shard availability the last 6 months. Clearly Shards have now been increased yet again. I remember you telling me when I was doing the new player run through back in 0.36 and 0.37 that there were plenty of resources like Shards for players to improve their gear but they were just misunderstanding what to do and not improving their Gear Score fast enough. What’s changed? AND where’s the Relic increase? You say it exists but I’ve pointed to numerous times where it was said “Relics have been increased” but it’s never true. You are telling me that “the data you had from the game itself” was showing that most players needed more Shards, but the same data is not showing you that player after player is hitting a hard cap of epic gear with no ability to find the sufficient items to evolve them?

If there really are future changes that are affecting these half measures, why not mention them? Why is everything so obliquely referred to rather than being clear-throated about the changes?

Anyways, In my opinion nothing that players have brought up here was addressed in this response. Hopefully you will get more specific information that will actually be useful in understanding what is happening both in behavior of Seasons chests and the chest drop rates issue as a whole.

EDIT: Just to add, if players really do need more shards why not come into the game and talk about all the ways that shards are available? Why was it an information issue before (as I detailed above), but after several increases to Shards availability both in EA and in launch, it’s now an issue that necessitates even further shard intro- and even reintroduction? Feels very inconsistent.

39

Can we get some confirmation as to whether or not the relic drops are associated with level of chest or rarity of chest? I’ve completly stopped trying to farm relics because I’m not sure if its more of a quantity or quality thing, and I’d like to get rid of some of these keys without doing it the wrong way

1 Like
40

So, you have noticed that players are concerned about the change of color and attributes, as well as the “difference between chests in a skirmish and in a dungeon.” This is a good start.

What do you think of the lvl 40 vs lvl 100 chests? Will we ever be able to run low-level dungeons when we need Rare/Epic scrolls and runes? What about meaningful rewards for more challenging content? Lesser Shards are not what I expect to find in a level 100 chest.

What do you think of the Gold vs Diamond Chests? I cannot stress this enough. A chest that opens in 24 hours and has a rarer chance of spawning (10% diamond vs 30% gold) should always contain better loot, more loot, less food, and Rare+ gear/spells/minions (actually, can we place minions in skirmishes instead of dungeons? So we could farm skirmishes when we need minions/shards and farm dungeons for gear/spells/upgrade materials)

1 Like
41

Say the drop rate was 20% when 0.38 released, then it was increased to 29% later on, and then it was decreased to 24% - 24% is still higher than 20% (obviously these numbers are random ones I just made up as an example to illustrate what I meant in my last post and they aren’t the actual drop rates.)

We collect feedback from every source players can contact us including but not limited to:

  • This forum
  • Support Tickets
  • Reviews
  • Social media
  • Steam forums
  • Reddit
  • Twitch chat
  • Game chat
  • Youtube

We don’t announce anything until the design is locked in. A lot changes during production so it’s important we do our best to only announce definite changes.

It’s a balancing act, we respond based on future design plans, player feedback and the game data. It requires tweaking over time. We’re not a release once and done game, these tweaks will be continuous over the life of the game - they should just become less frequent in nature over time depending on the features that we release that will effect the economy. We’ll never be done with the balance tweaks permanently as long as the game is live service releasing new features multiple times per year. We’re also in the first couple of months of the official version so we’re still gathering a lot of data and feedback. No doubt there will be less adjustments like this over time, just like in our other game Gems of War which is I believe almost 8 years old now. We barely do any drop rate changes over there any more unless we introduce a new currency/chest type for example, but that wasn’t always the case in the earlier days.

I’ll see what I can do. I want to get as much info as I can and not just give a yes or no.

@tau I’ve noted the feedback you mentioned about chests and the quality of the items they drop and including the Epic drops when you’re playing high level are non-existent which leaves that gap in your inventory where the “middle” items are the ones in short supply. These are good points. I suspect the epic item issue is one the team are already aware of as it should be showing clearly in the game data but I will follow up on it anyway.