I could almost guarentee at least 15-17 of the green ones (drawing a blank on the name.. preservation stones I think) a week, now I am lucky to get 2, that actually conserns me more.
Well, to be fair, before they introduced 'refinement points' and made wards BoP, if you didn't get a coal ward, you were guaranteed a preservation ward (I have 60 of the suckers in my bank from those days). So yeah - the drop rate on those has been very heavily nerfed. But I think the coal ward drop rate has always been around 3%.
I have had 20 toons since almost the begining of the game, and I can tell you from experience I would get one maybe two a week. Since they lowered the rate I get 1 every 2-3 weeks, so near as I can figure they lowered it from 5% to 2-3%
Not critisizing or commenting, just reporting my findings. Actual number may be different and I may just be unluck, but I could almost guarentee at least 15-17 of the green ones (drawing a blank on the name.. preservation stones I think) a week, now I am lucky to get 2, that actually conserns me more.
Not a direct reply to you, but for the ones who keep saying you can get all your coal wards from boxes... is what everyone does? Make 20 chars to farm enough coal wards to equip one char? Is that how 'easy' is it?
I only have 6 (one for each class) and that's already too many for my daily patience... and I haven't seen a coal ward come out of a chest since they added the refinement items.
kaiserschmarrnMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 390
edited August 2014
I have a lot of chars and did the ward thing twice, once in the pre-refinement days, where I had saved my boxes for many months and then opened 270 boxes in one go - giving me over 60 wards.
I did the same thing in 2014 post refinement, 230 boxes and only got 12 wards.
@captfrancis, that's what i did. i just pray and do leadership on most of my alts. Doesn't take much time at all. i get maybe 1 coal ward every other week, doing 18chars (and have 4 more i don't pray on, only do leadership on.)
Not a direct reply to you, but for the ones who keep saying you can get all your coal wards from boxes... is what everyone does? Make 20 chars to farm enough coal wards to equip one char? Is that how 'easy' is it?
I only have 6 (one for each class) and that's already too many for my daily patience... and I haven't seen a coal ward come out of a chest since they added the refinement items.
*shrugs* If you just invoke, it only takes a couple seconds per toon, a few more seconds once you're at max celestial coins to grab a coffer. It takes like... an hour to get a character to level 11 and have them able to invoke.
I've got the process very streamlined. What I do is, I have all my alts parked on an invocation spot. I have a key bound to log me out on all my toons (the command is "/bind x gotocharacterselect", by the way, where x would be the key you want to bind). I log in to the top character - invoke - and while the invocation animation is playing, hit the logout key I bound. The logout is on a 15 second timer, I let it run long enough to see that my invocation was successful, then hit 'exit now', which takes me directly to the character select screen where I select my next character. Repeat. Takes, literally, about 3 seconds per character. I've scrambled and invoked every single one of them with less than a minute on the maintenance timer.
If you want to do all of your professions, that takes a bit longer. I use the gateway for that rather than the game.
So i got 5 toons now, play the game for over 10 months (had mostly 2 char, the others are freshlings), let's sum it up: Rank 5 enchants don't drop, juts the 2 silver in quest line during leveling up to 60 and now in Icewind Dale, but over rank 4s mostly nothing. Now tell me guys, which party excepts players in PVE or PVP, with rank 4 enchants. C'mon!
Building a rank 7 or even better with wards is for ... now, since the huge prices for enchants and a 1% chance needs a coalescent ward!
Make rank 5s using the 4s that drop. Every character I've made since the change has had all rank 5s around level 50 paying nothing since Lesser Marks of Potency drop so frequently. Then save up and buy preservation wards (not coal wards!) and a blue mark of potency. Slot more rank 4s into your rank 5s, rank up to 6. Do the same on all your 5's. Then save up enough to get two blue marks and start working on rank 7s. Total cost of a rank 7 is 75k (run dailies and do leadership to hit the cap for just over three days) and preservation wards. Auction House prices only matter for the preservation wards, or plan ahead in advance and wait for the ZAX to come through and save some AD that way buying the wards from the ZEN shop.
Weapon and armor enchants pretty much require coal wards. The current situation with those is a legitimate gripe. Normal enchants are something you can work for and achieve in a fairly short amount of time.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
I'm sure this has been asked already but this thread took a bit to read through:
Why is there an artificial cap on Zen to AD? Why cap it at 500:1? I don't understand this at all.
An attempt to keep zen from ever getting too expensive for people who want to buy it. A somewhat noble goal, but it's just resulting in no one selling zen, ever.
@rhoriangelus Thanks for the keybind! That'll make it even faster for me! Now instead of just having follow set to F6 i'll see that to F5 or F12. That'll definitely help streamline my process!
An attempt to keep zen from ever getting too expensive for people who want to buy it. A somewhat noble goal, but it's just resulting in no one selling zen, ever.
Thanks for the reply. I don't see nobleness here though, but something far more $$$ related. If the market is free, let ZAX be free too.
@rhoriangelus Thanks for the keybind! That'll make it even faster for me! Now instead of just having follow set to F6 i'll see that to F5 or F12. That'll definitely help streamline my process!
You're welcome It's not strictly necessary to stick around and make sure your invoke 'lands', by the way, I just do for extra insurance. From what I can tell, it's totally possible to log in, invoke, log out without waiting and your invocation stuff will have safely landed in your inventory (or overflow bag) next time you log in. That's how I manage to get them all invoked within a minute if I have to.
Thanks for the reply. I don't see nobleness here though, but something far more $$$ related. If the market is free, let ZAX be free too.
It's to protect free players from having to pay more for zen than would be reasonable, so yeah, it is somewhat noble and not entirely driven by money. However, with so much AD currently in the economy that Zen isn't worth being sold for only 500 AD apiece, it's breaking down.
The game is funded by the minority, paying customers, the ones with the wallets but not the time to grind.
The majority supports the minority through grinding, the free players, the ones who complains about not not having enough or less ZEN in the ZAX for them.
Most here believe otherwise, but it is unlikely the backlog has converted many free players or contributed to an increase in ZEN sales that way.
However, the reverse may be true. Consider this, It now takes a lot more AD to get anything good that you can't get through ZEN or need to grind. A paying customer without the time to grind would have to buy more ZEN to get enough AD than in the past.
Now also consider the complaints of a higher exchange rate on ZEN items in the AH. This is mainly a problem for free players perpetuated by free players. Unless paying customers actively keep abreast of the exchange rate in AH, majority of this are free players who converted ADs to ZEN (in a way exploiting paying customers) to jack prices resulting in paying customers having to actually pay more.
Paying customers are paying money to be ripped off because of the fixed exchange rate.
The exchange cap doesn't put free players with the time to grind items and AD at a disadvantage as what many believe, in contrast, it's actually the other way round. Paying customers have to open up their wallets more to play this game. But eventually they will wise up to their wallets actually making themselves having to play more.
This is beneficial to PWE in terms of ZEN sales.
However, should they want to fix this? Yes.
As free players continue to jack up AH prices, there will only come a time when players who speak through their wallets say it's enough.
The ones truly having the power in this game are the free players, the ones who can easily stockpile AD.
The only ones who can actually do anything about it is Cryptic/PWE.
It's also possible to change the keybind for invoking. I've got mine set to F8, which not only makes it a bit faster, it also gets rid of the annoying camera swing if you hit Control first. Also, when changing chars quickly, it's a good idea to wait for the counter to go to 14 because if you hit the button to quick (or if the counter is lagging) it will log you out instead.
"We have always been at war with Dread Vault" ~ Little Brother
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petestarksMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited August 2014
At least we can finally put to rest all that nonsense about nerfing or removing leadership now. Sure it adds to the supply of AD, but after today we can see it was only a drop in the bucket on the grand scale. You would need 3-5 level 20 leadership characters just to MAYBE recreate what was happening on the back channels of the market in seconds. Hopefully it fixes the backlog, but at the very least ends the leadership witch hunt.
At least we can finally put to rest all that nonsense about nerfing or removing leadership now. Sure it adds to the supply of AD, but after today we can see it was only a drop in the bucket on the grand scale. You would need 3-5 level 20 leadership characters just to MAYBE recreate what was happening on the back channels of the market in seconds. Hopefully it fixes the backlog, but at the very least ends the leadership witch hunt.
You know one clever fellow was arguing against the whole AD sink/ supply side thing for a while here. Charming, good-looking guy from what I hear
idk about that yet, I still think some sinks are needed that are viable. We have to wait till after this is cleared and then hopefully we'll see things a little more clear.
One: transmuting is way too expensive, so hardly anyone does it. RPers, who care the most about what their stuff looks like, will just keep a set of RP gear without ever transmuting anything. Most other players don't care that much what their stuff looks like. I, and many other people, would be transmuting EVERYTHING if it were more affordable
Two: Upgrading mounts/companions. Again, so expensive, most people don't bother, and just nab an epic mount and don't even look at the others. This means people will buy fewer mounts or companions from the Zen shop, because so many of them require upgrading. If training was cheaper, we'd buy a lot more of the cheaper companions/mounts and upgrade all of them. I'd have bought at least three more zen mounts if the ones I wanted were available at epic quality, or if they were affordable to train. And that's just off the top of my head.
Making stuff ridiculously expensive doesn't encourage spending. Making things affordable encourages spending.
I think a great idea would be to implement some kind of barber shop, also. This is especially necessary for people who rolled characters pre-upgrade that they don't want to change the look of. I have a lot of characters I don't want to change the face of, but I would happily spend a few thousand AD - very, very often - to change JUST their hair/facial hair (maybe eyebrows). When WoW introduced this, I spent SO much gold cutting/dying my characters' hair depending on my mood, and I know I'm not the only one.
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petestarksMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited August 2014
On the off chance anyone missed it from my last post... I am 100% for better/more AD sinks. I just think today proves we need to leave the legit supply side of it alone seeing how a few bad apples can do waaaay more damage than people grinding dailies and leadership.
Those people who are buying Zen and not directly exchanging it for AD, aren't just sitting on the Zen. They are buying Zen store items that can be traded or sold on the AH.
I'll say it again, if you are a dedicated player who believes in supporting the product, there is no better time than now to buy Zen. There is ZERO reason to use the ZAX.
I'm no economist but I don't see why they don't just raise the exchange limit to reflect the exchange rate of zen items to in-game price.
Coal Ward should do nicely for exchange rate example.
They don't have to, it's just still happening. Some consistency with paying customers is they are willing to spend, without having to worry (or the time to) about other things.
(Myself for example who only uses the AH to buy things whenever I need them.)
Zero reason to use ZAX hasn't resulted in zero ZEN being flipped. And the cap is to their (paying customers) disadvantage.
Otherwise there will be even more whining, because free players can no longer get ZEN through ZAX, since AH flipping doesn't support free players to get store items other than the few lucrative ones at a higher price.. unless ZAX is abolished and rely simply on free trade in the AH for AH to ZEN (which would require all store items be transferable). That will likely drive free players away, and not beneficial to the game.
Why? Do you really not get that the artificial locking of a fixed ZEN/AD exchange ratio is the root cause? Why would I buy blueprints with Zen and sell them at an 1100:1 AD exchange rate instead of waiting for 10 days to be paid 500:1 on the exchange? Really, you have to ask why?
harkur, rather than actually try to explain why your sarcasm is so misplaced, I'm just going to suggest that you look at the posts of the person that I was asking to explain their attempts at logic.
The simple solution is to raise the ZAX cap. Will it make zen cost more? Yup. Will you be able to buy zen when you need it instead of waiting and stockpiling? Yep. AD is already inflated which means everything costs more so why not Zen? When you really wanted Zen for a sale and could not get it would you have payed extra to have it?
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mircalla83Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 36
The simple solution is to raise the ZAX cap. Will it make zen cost more? Yup. Will you be able to buy zen when you need it instead of waiting and stockpiling? Yep. AD is already inflated which means everything costs more so why not Zen? When you really wanted Zen for a sale and could not get it would you have payed extra to have it?
So instead of a 12.5 Million backlog at 500, you have a 12.5 Million backlog at 600/750/1000/2000/5000 then. Really helpful.
Bind Zen Store goods to Account, then unbind Tradebar Coals and Prewards again. It requires more Keys to open enough boxes to get a Coal Ward.
The backlog means only one thing: Zen is more valuable than Astral Diamonds right now. It's that simple, people. I rarely kept a stash of Zen and always converted to AD and usually only bought Zen when I wanted AD NOW (or something fun appeared in the Zen market).
Now I have 30k Zen stash with no interest in buying AD (no, I don't buy ZM items to sell in AH) - this is because AD are so worthless right now, partially due to the high prices in AH (which, technically, devalues the Zen used in ZAX).
Unfortunately this is a self-looping paradox: AH prices are high because there is so much AD and so few ZAX exchanges, and there are so few ZAX exchanges because AH prices are so high (among other things). When AD prices start coming down again I might consider selling off some of that Zen I'm sitting on.
And for you "Nerf Leadership" types: the problem is hourly Events like Skirmishes where all that AD generation is coming from. What you can make in a day in Leadership you can make in an hour in an Event like skirmishes.
Comments
Well, to be fair, before they introduced 'refinement points' and made wards BoP, if you didn't get a coal ward, you were guaranteed a preservation ward (I have 60 of the suckers in my bank from those days). So yeah - the drop rate on those has been very heavily nerfed. But I think the coal ward drop rate has always been around 3%.
Not a direct reply to you, but for the ones who keep saying you can get all your coal wards from boxes... is what everyone does? Make 20 chars to farm enough coal wards to equip one char? Is that how 'easy' is it?
I only have 6 (one for each class) and that's already too many for my daily patience... and I haven't seen a coal ward come out of a chest since they added the refinement items.
I did the same thing in 2014 post refinement, 230 boxes and only got 12 wards.
*shrugs* If you just invoke, it only takes a couple seconds per toon, a few more seconds once you're at max celestial coins to grab a coffer. It takes like... an hour to get a character to level 11 and have them able to invoke.
I've got the process very streamlined. What I do is, I have all my alts parked on an invocation spot. I have a key bound to log me out on all my toons (the command is "/bind x gotocharacterselect", by the way, where x would be the key you want to bind). I log in to the top character - invoke - and while the invocation animation is playing, hit the logout key I bound. The logout is on a 15 second timer, I let it run long enough to see that my invocation was successful, then hit 'exit now', which takes me directly to the character select screen where I select my next character. Repeat. Takes, literally, about 3 seconds per character. I've scrambled and invoked every single one of them with less than a minute on the maintenance timer.
If you want to do all of your professions, that takes a bit longer. I use the gateway for that rather than the game.
Weapon and armor enchants pretty much require coal wards. The current situation with those is a legitimate gripe. Normal enchants are something you can work for and achieve in a fairly short amount of time.
Why is there an artificial cap on Zen to AD? Why cap it at 500:1? I don't understand this at all.
An attempt to keep zen from ever getting too expensive for people who want to buy it. A somewhat noble goal, but it's just resulting in no one selling zen, ever.
Thanks for the reply. I don't see nobleness here though, but something far more $$$ related. If the market is free, let ZAX be free too.
You're welcome
It's to protect free players from having to pay more for zen than would be reasonable, so yeah, it is somewhat noble and not entirely driven by money. However, with so much AD currently in the economy that Zen isn't worth being sold for only 500 AD apiece, it's breaking down.
The majority supports the minority through grinding, the free players, the ones who complains about not not having enough or less ZEN in the ZAX for them.
Most here believe otherwise, but it is unlikely the backlog has converted many free players or contributed to an increase in ZEN sales that way.
However, the reverse may be true. Consider this, It now takes a lot more AD to get anything good that you can't get through ZEN or need to grind. A paying customer without the time to grind would have to buy more ZEN to get enough AD than in the past.
Now also consider the complaints of a higher exchange rate on ZEN items in the AH. This is mainly a problem for free players perpetuated by free players. Unless paying customers actively keep abreast of the exchange rate in AH, majority of this are free players who converted ADs to ZEN (in a way exploiting paying customers) to jack prices resulting in paying customers having to actually pay more.
Paying customers are paying money to be ripped off because of the fixed exchange rate.
The exchange cap doesn't put free players with the time to grind items and AD at a disadvantage as what many believe, in contrast, it's actually the other way round. Paying customers have to open up their wallets more to play this game. But eventually they will wise up to their wallets actually making themselves having to play more.
This is beneficial to PWE in terms of ZEN sales.
However, should they want to fix this? Yes.
As free players continue to jack up AH prices, there will only come a time when players who speak through their wallets say it's enough.
The ones truly having the power in this game are the free players, the ones who can easily stockpile AD.
The only ones who can actually do anything about it is Cryptic/PWE.
You know one clever fellow was arguing against the whole AD sink/ supply side thing for a while here. Charming, good-looking guy from what I hear
Fox Stevenson - Sandblast
Oh Wonder - Without You
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas
One: transmuting is way too expensive, so hardly anyone does it. RPers, who care the most about what their stuff looks like, will just keep a set of RP gear without ever transmuting anything. Most other players don't care that much what their stuff looks like. I, and many other people, would be transmuting EVERYTHING if it were more affordable
Two: Upgrading mounts/companions. Again, so expensive, most people don't bother, and just nab an epic mount and don't even look at the others. This means people will buy fewer mounts or companions from the Zen shop, because so many of them require upgrading. If training was cheaper, we'd buy a lot more of the cheaper companions/mounts and upgrade all of them. I'd have bought at least three more zen mounts if the ones I wanted were available at epic quality, or if they were affordable to train. And that's just off the top of my head.
Making stuff ridiculously expensive doesn't encourage spending. Making things affordable encourages spending.
I think a great idea would be to implement some kind of barber shop, also. This is especially necessary for people who rolled characters pre-upgrade that they don't want to change the look of. I have a lot of characters I don't want to change the face of, but I would happily spend a few thousand AD - very, very often - to change JUST their hair/facial hair (maybe eyebrows). When WoW introduced this, I spent SO much gold cutting/dying my characters' hair depending on my mood, and I know I'm not the only one.
(Myself for example who only uses the AH to buy things whenever I need them.)
Zero reason to use ZAX hasn't resulted in zero ZEN being flipped. And the cap is to their (paying customers) disadvantage.
Otherwise there will be even more whining, because free players can no longer get ZEN through ZAX, since AH flipping doesn't support free players to get store items other than the few lucrative ones at a higher price.. unless ZAX is abolished and rely simply on free trade in the AH for AH to ZEN (which would require all store items be transferable). That will likely drive free players away, and not beneficial to the game.
In short, we need the ZAX, not circumvent it.
harkur, rather than actually try to explain why your sarcasm is so misplaced, I'm just going to suggest that you look at the posts of the person that I was asking to explain their attempts at logic.
So instead of a 12.5 Million backlog at 500, you have a 12.5 Million backlog at 600/750/1000/2000/5000 then. Really helpful.
Bind Zen Store goods to Account, then unbind Tradebar Coals and Prewards again. It requires more Keys to open enough boxes to get a Coal Ward.
This.
FYI, I have some knowledge about other glitches going on around so goodluck raising the zen cap and failing horribly.
If so you could save us all a lot of heartache by posting them (anonymously of course) on YouTube. That way they should be fixed....
Now I have 30k Zen stash with no interest in buying AD (no, I don't buy ZM items to sell in AH) - this is because AD are so worthless right now, partially due to the high prices in AH (which, technically, devalues the Zen used in ZAX).
Unfortunately this is a self-looping paradox: AH prices are high because there is so much AD and so few ZAX exchanges, and there are so few ZAX exchanges because AH prices are so high (among other things). When AD prices start coming down again I might consider selling off some of that Zen I'm sitting on.
And for you "Nerf Leadership" types: the problem is hourly Events like Skirmishes where all that AD generation is coming from. What you can make in a day in Leadership you can make in an hour in an Event like skirmishes.
Let's have emergency maintenance week. Have a new glitch posted on youtube each day that brings the servers down.