Loam Drop Rates

[Ngreth Thergn]

I've been camping golems off and on with some guildies for a few weeks.

We have a camp consisting solely of smithing table models. (majority lvl 75) In a typical 6 to 8 hr camp (yes we really really want our cultural) we would see maybe a loam every 1 to 2 hrs (parses show basically 1 kill per minute) so that's 1 loam ever 200 to 300 kills.

We spent 8 hrs (600 to 700 kills) there yesterday and got 1 loam. Also got about 55 bricks of level appropriate ore one lower level ore and the single loam was soluble. The mobs principally drop titanium so their main loam should be alkalai. Over that number of kills I am not prepared to believe that the RNG is solely responsible. I think it more likely that somehow the "rare" loam drop was somehow turned into a change at a higher lvl ore. What was unusual in this camp is that we got around 10 tantalum bars which is far more than ever fell before. It's just a guess but maybe that is where the loam went or maybe we're only meant to have metal now.

I understand within limits the T3 only drop thing for lvl 80 armor. I don't agree with it as it took massive amounts of kills to generate a few lvl 80 drops and a decent amount of 75 lvl drops before. Now a massive amount of killing yields you little but ore and no finishing products even for lvl 75 symbols (and impending armor) Guess we'll have a GM smith of every race in the guild now and nothing to make since the ore stockpile at least will be good for working skills.

Ngreth, I know you said you'd watch if it went too far and as best I can tell you're on your toes. So anyway, just would appreciate if you'd look at the level appropriate drop rates on loam in general. Already the bazaar price on elegant and sublimes on my server is 400kish each and this is before the impact of the nerf hits (ie stockpiles dwindle etc). Compared to 800k for a cultural BP and aug, the new ready to wear armors are selling below 200k. The droppable armors are nice, but there is a certain pleasure in making your own and me and my friends are not unwilling to put in the time to farm our ingredients and do our quests. I've got a couple million banked and could just go buy a new set of the infusible in bazaar and get purity augs if I wanted or go camp it or whatever. Either way, it's kinda less fun that stuff you make yourself.

Guess we will go try Steam Factory again but we didnt have a lot of luck there before for the plate/chain classes. And if what the people camping Crystallos are saying is true, then there really is a problem. If you can't get the drops there even, then the recipes might was well just be disabled. When the loam is gone or 1 million per its effectively the same thing.

Sigh, i hope to have good news this was the most exciting thing to come along in a long time for active grouping tradeskillers (me and my friends) and now we all just feel like we're being told that grouping SoF named for armor is what we're "supposed" to do and grouping mobs to tradeskill our own is somehow wrong.

Either way, I wonder if something didn't go horribly wrong on loam with the changes for the 80 drops.

Waiting and watching to see what happens now.

Which specific Loam are you speaking of?

[Ngreth Thergn]

A quick question to double check what I think I understand: Gyrospire Zeka is consider a T3 zone while Gyrospire Beza is not?

One more question. How high is your stats to be consider over kill (doesn't matter anymore beyond that point) or the "higher the better" still apply? Thanks

Correct.
The current issue though is that there really are not any cultural dropping mobs in gyrospire zeka.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Hyphnos, I think that the 0.03% number was only for the loams not the ore. I agree with you that the drop rate seems low considering the number of mobs that your group slaughtered.

that is for the 80 DROP from the 75 table, not the 75 drop. Getting a 75 Drop is better than that...

The issue is the amount of NPC available.

I am at home without actual numbers...

but with a purely fictional numbers, lets say there are 2400 T3 and T4 mobs... (level 80 drops)
the chance to get a level 80 drop is say... 1%... that is 24 drops available at any one time on average.

There are probably well over 30000 possible NPC's that are in the level range of level 75 drops, and viable. lets say the chance is 0.5% to get a 75 drop... that is still 75 drops available in the world. A bit more than three times the availability overall of the drops. And I am probably low on the number of available NPC targets.

Yes, it is harder for a person to farm it for themselves, but available to the world, there is more of the stuff.

This all stems from the fact that this is tradeable.

Yes, it will be faster for you yourself to go get the armor from the in zone rares, than get a suit of cultural armor. But theoretically someone can be even faster by going in the bazaar and spending 2 minutes there (after having farmed some money) to get an equivalent suit with none of their own effort. The more common we make this stuff, the more likely that possibility becomes.

If he drop components were no trade, and the resultant armor was no trade so that you can ONLY make it for yourself, then we could make the drop rates such that your average chance to make a piece is about the same as the average chance to to get a drop of a piece from the rare NPC's

[Dalmoth]

Its just as easy to go the bazaar and get the baseline armor as its tradeable as well and right now its running around 1/2 the price with practically no availability compared to cultural stuff now.

The fact is that that plate arms from the zone rares can ONLY exist in one spot on the server at a time (assuming a normal rare spawn location) and its probably 50/50 that the arms are there. This armor is rarer than TS armor and yet its not really any better and when it does drop guess what, its most likely going to be put up for sale in the bazaar since the people getting that armor now really don't need it.

[Bobaten]

Its just as easy to go the bazaar and get the baseline armor as its tradeable as well and right now its running around 1/2 the price with practically no availability compared to cultural stuff now.

The fact is that that plate arms from the zone rares can ONLY exist in one spot on the server at a time (assuming a normal rare spawn location) and its probably 50/50 that the arms are there. This armor is rarer than TS armor and yet its not really any better and when it does drop guess what, its most likely going to be put up for sale in the bazaar since the people getting that armor now really don't need it.

The tradeable armor is the tier 2 armor. To get the tier 3 armor you have to combine the tier 2 armor with a drop from tier 3 named mobs, in a container you have to earn faction to buy.

[XyloGnome]

the "mobs" were not well classified as summoned/constructs or animals. The developers since then have put more effort into making sure to classify the mobs correctly, and still many are missed.

No no Aldier, I'm actually saying that I agree with you exactly!

So perhaps the drop rate issue isn't one to fuss about here, but should be one we should push on to the EQLive boards about mob classifications?

I don't have any problem with testing out a low-level summoned nuke on golem-looking things to start compiling a list.

[Vilforn_Majel]

Buying Cultural Armor

It keeps getting mentioned to buy the TS armor in the bazaar.
That's fine if you have literally MILLIONS of plat.
With each armor piece going for 350,000P-500,000P and 8 pieces total, that equals 2.8-4.0 million plat for a set of armor, and we're not even talking about Type 11 augs yet. Not sure what drugs you people are on or how much "duped" plat you have, but I can't afford that and I know that the vast majority of the people in my guild can't afford that either. (high-end raiding Guild on CT server)
Now I get to look forward to the inconsistencies of drops across zones, in spite of the "claim" that Porous Loam & Tantalum Ore is a world-wide drop off of 80+ mobs.
I'm not advocating that these items drop off every orc in West Commons, but get real. You put the drops for level 80 armor on level 80+ mobs. Ever heard of "Catch-22"? You can't get the armor, because you can't kill enough of the mobs to get your drops, because you can't tank the mobs you need to get the drops from, because you don't have the armor that you need to tank the mobs......

So, what I get from this thread is:

1. Go farm and/or buy plat (a practice deemed illegal by SOE) and just buy you armor in the bazaar. This is a ludicrous suggestion. "Go get ya 6-7 million plat and buy you armor/augs, IF and I repeat IF you can find your armor for sale.
OR
2. Attempt to farm you own ingredients by spending the next 6-12 months in Tier3 zones. HOPE that you win the rolls on your ingredients when they DO finally drop. And then further HOPE that you don't fail (or the GM Smith that you find doesn't fail) on your combines.

Maybe you should call it "Epic Armor".

Vilforn Majel
(disgruntled Half-elf Paladin)

[Unapuma]

Ouch that was a nasty complaint. You forgot one point: new items tended to be very pricey but give it about 6 months the price will go down as more spinneret fluid, marrow, and loam find its way in bazaar and more competition between sellers.

I remember when glossy drake hides and metallic drake scales (used in old Elaborate recipes, formerly Grandmaster) were over 100k each after a couple months (I missed the first couple months of DoN when I left EQ). They were down to about 20k each after a few years and Grandmaster gears went from as much as 500k for chest/leg to about 100k or so.

Give it a few months, by then it'd be cheaper.

[Vilforn_Majel]

Yes, I know they were pricey, but they WERE farmable. I farmed EVERY MDS that I used in creating my Elaborate (formerly GM) armor set. At least they came from a specific zone, from specific mobs. Now they've made the Porous Loam & Tantalum Ore (as well as all Elegant ingredients) a random (RARE!) drop world-wide. Porous Loam is SOOOOOO Rare it's sought after in Bazaar (on CT server) by people willing to pay 300k EACH. That's friggin rediculous.

Absolutely brilliant implementation. (extreme sarcasm)

I have to wonder if SOE even cares anymore. I guess they made enough money on LoN. It seems to me that they are actively (or at least indifferently) trying to push all of their customers away from the original EverQuest. Perhaps it's just pitiful management and the developers are helpless to make a difference. I don't know, and I'm rapidly approaching "I don't CARE". I'm sure I will find something to do with my time/money when it finally reaches "last straw".

Feel free to edit me some more, Kyros

[hyphnos]

More info for Ngreth

Which specific Loam are you speaking of?

Ngreth,

In this context I was speaking of ANY loams, though my expection was that a lvl 75 "golem" would drop Alkalai loam predominantly with slight chance up or down.
They do in fact drop Titanium ore predominantly which is as expected.

The mobs are correctly tagged "golem" or whatever as they only drop gems, smithing TS items (mostly ore) and other vendor trash.

The predominant TS drop is Titanium. After patch, Tantalum dropped at about 20% of the rate of Titanium which based on your prior posts would seem high. It made me wonder if something happened that maybe the "rare" event of loam falling was somehow instead turning into a higher ore drop. We had gotten in 4 or 5 camps of similar duration prior maybe a grand total of 15 tantalum ores. We got I think 9 in one camp. Could be luck but we're talking fairly big numbers.

I haven't been to Tier 3 zones again, however, while working on Minotaurs drops for Meldrath key with a friend (sometimes friends) we got more 2 to 3 loams (soluble), 3 spinnarettes and 2 to 3 marrows in a roughly 4 hours with 2 to 4 people. That's 7 to 9ish lvl appropriate drops with 1 of the spinarettes jumping up a level. Compared to that 1 drop of a lower level loam from 6 to 9 players chain killing "golems" (mostly lvl 75) for 6 to 8 hrs seems a bit off. So it's not a problem with "humanoids"(minotaurs) in Dragonscale. It's hard to find golem tagged mobs to see if it's just an issue with those. I'll try to find some in SoF somewhere to compare.

Hopefully this helps if there is a problem with some or all the smithing models and loam. You'd think you would see loam at at least the same rate you see spinarettes/marrows/loam together off a similar number of kills of humanoids. Or is that an incorrect assumption?

Thanks again for the feedback.

[dendail]

loam drop rates

i have the idea lets all go to the spammer on eq and buy millions of pp so we can buy it online to aford the out rageous prices now being afforded with the mds i farmed all mine to make every piece i had i don't see that happening anytime soon the drop rate is stupid sony never listens to what paying custmers want on luclin there is not any subline symbols of growth for sale the spinnerets go for over 350k, marrow a little less so yes lets go flood eq with online plat so we can have a chance to make the armor and symbols

[daw4888]

i have the idea lets all go to the spammer on eq and buy millions of pp so we can buy it online to aford the out rageous prices now being afforded with the mds i farmed all mine to make every piece i had i don't see that happening anytime soon the drop rate is stupid sony never listens to what paying custmers want on luclin there is not any subline symbols of growth for sale the spinnerets go for over 350k, marrow a little less so yes lets go flood eq with online plat so we can have a chance to make the armor and symbols

It really depends, if they fix crystallos so all the useless loams are changed to porous, then the drop rate there really isnt to bad, expecially since you can now kill golems without having to worry about one getting off a 52k round on inc(13k quad).

The whole reason we are stuck in this debate about nerfing lastbloods if they made the componets for armor and sublimes WAY to common to begin with. If the drop rate started off like it is now, then odds are the uber people would have gotten there l33t 800 hp gear by the time most groupers got teir3/4 enabled and started getting drops. The whole problem with the tradeskill delima is they totally fubared the code and had lvl 80 drops in zones like thallius ~_~

[biggrol]

Some of my experiences. Kited both Gyro's and have recieved exquisite silk and hide drops and a few Tantalum ores. I have gotten a couple porous loam drops as well. They are still rare and I was solo kiting so it wasn't like I was clearing out the whole zone, but than again I'm not rolling against anyone for the drops Had other highend TS compenents drop as well.

Spent 2-3 hours in S.H.I.P and was doing pretty good on Tantalum drops. We average 2 drops per hour but that was all that dropped for high end TS components.

Spent a couple hours in Ashengate and we did get a couple porous loam drops hunting the west wing.

Hunted a lot doing the lakeskaters in Valdeholm. Bunch of silk drops but exquisites spinneret drops were probably 1 in 10-12 exquisite silk drops. Was getting Titanium drops along with a few cobolts and a few Tantalum drops. No marrow or porous drops of course.

[drhoads]

Bummer

So where is the Alkalai Loam ? I grouped Steam Factory last night for 6-7 hours straight killing odds and ends but alot of gnomes and not one loam not one spinnerette Fluid . Sure got a couple of Exqusite Silks and Animal pelts I think but the stuff you really need the Porus loam or Exqusiste spinnerette not one.

So then I realize I hardly ever see an Alkalai loam drop even in a Thallius Mission and I would think they would be more common. Sux your in the Teir 3 zone doing what your supposed to do killing mobs till your FAAK and not one loam. Not even an Alkalai Loam to make an Exalted Symbol to sell.

[drhoads]

no loam again

Tonight a good solid 6 more hours this time in Fort mech with a group in upper teir killing lots of gnomes and some minataur and not a single Alkalai Loam . Several Exquisite silks and pelts . No Porus Loam no Exquisite spinnerette Fluids nor Exquisite Marrows.

Now I realize this is just Teir 2 but I would think a single Akalai Loam would drop.