Staves, staves, staves!

Am I the only one who finds a ridiculous amount of staves? I started noticing it the other week, just after I bought Factions, when the first SIX purple items I found were staves or wands. This pattern has continued, and today I went and ran ten of the hidden holiday chests. Ten rare items. Seven were staves. This is really, really tiresome and I wanna know if I'm just cursed or if it's a new trend.

It depends on the area you're in.

Well, the treasure chests are all over Elona, and I've had the same thing in a large part of Canthas.

I suspect you are not alone, have had a lot of them with the treasure chests and buried treasure. Biggest gripe is the items attribute ie: energy storage .

I do remember when factions came out that a lot of bows were dropping, not the case anymore. Be nice if it was more "balanced".

I will say that I have pulled 1 +1 20% and 1 +1 19% wrap from said items, so not all bad.

On the other hand those chests and buried treasure yielded me a pretty decent zealous axe Not to mention that each char is averaging 30k in gold when all done.

my toons have been getting inspiration staves and suntouched scythes.....one holy rod.......would like a nice focus item for a change, but right now the extra cash from merching them is fine by me.....
I have often found that it depends on the character....my eles get daggers and scythes....seems whatever the toons profs are I DONT get that as a drop (no wands for my ele, no holy rods for my monk, etc)...but once again, it may just be my crummy luck with the game (have this same issue with bosses and greens---can never get a boss of my prof --either primary or secondary--to drop an item for me, change toons and viola...green).

Out of 12 chest I got 8 staffs. I don't mind the energy storage part. You usually run at least 9 in storage.

Well, lets see... We have the Ritualist, Mesmer, Monk, Necro and Elementalist. Thats half of all classes that use staves, so if you think about it, there would be a lot of staves floating around. I think this is normal.

The issue isn't the fact that you meet the requirements on the staff... the issue is that when you mod it with, say Adept of Mastery, you'd get half cast and +1 to Energy Storage, rather than what you'd want it in, ie Fire, Earth, etc. This problem persists with Soul Reaping staves, Fast Casting, etc.

Anyway, I agree with Mad King, half the classes are casters, I'd expect half the drops to be caster items. I think it's about right. Personally, I get more off-hands and wands, but that's neither here nor there.

The thing is that the chests can drop other things than just weapons. So far, I've seen/heard the following:
weapons
gems (diamond, sapphie, ruby)
shields
armors (the salvageable kind with runes, not actual armor)

And it's not just the Wintersday chests, I've noticed a similar pattern in other places. If you consider all the different things a chest can drop, the fact that half the professions make use of staves (and wands/focus items) still doesn't justify the extremely high drop rate of them that I, and apparently others, have had lately. I ran the ten easiest chests on my second character, which makes 20 holiday chests opened today, and the total result is:

Ruby
Sapphire
Gold spear
Gold paragon shield
Gold scythe
Gold monk wand
14 gold staves

I'm not kidding, that's 14 out of 20 items found that were two-handed staves. If the issue was that half the professions are casters, shouldn't we be seeing an equal amount of wands/foci and staves? Shouldn't we see as many melee weapons as caster weapons?

I obviously haven't opened enough chests to make an official statistic, you'd need to open hundreds to eliminate the random factor, but I still think it's surprising that such an unbelievable amount of staves are dropping. Like I said before, I saw the same thing last week when I played an assassin through most of Factions, and the first seven purple items that dropped were all staves. I won't write this off as bad luck.

You mean ravenstaff??, ive found TONS and TONS of them >.>

Well, look at it this way...

If all of a sudden, all these perfect rare skinned melee weapons started dropping, then they would all fall in price. Then everyone would be wondering why there are no rare staves dropping. Melee items have been worth more since the start, hence why ANet makes then drop less frequently. Do really expect them to start making 100k+ items drop all over the place? They arejust going by how the GW economy already works, keep the rare stuff rare, and if you get one, lucky you. If you don't get one, then it wasn't your time. So enjoy these FREE items while they last. I think getting 60k+ per character is REALLY nice of ANet to do for Wintersday. Thats possibly a lot of money for some people with multiple characters/accounts. (personally have 15 characters, 60,000 gold x 15 characters = 900,000 gold, thats a damn good present IMO.)

interesting theory Drumer1029. You don't think the fact that everyone, their dog, their grandmother and the kitchen-sink has a warrior as his main has anything to do with melee weapons being expensive?

incidently being the same reason people are miffed about finding staves.

I do believe you are right, GreatLich. That is the real reason swords and axes are way overpriced (hammers take a backseat, because they are viewed as crappy in PvE, not that they are). In fact, I would bet that drops are actually weighed more toward swords and axes than any other single item type (Req-wise). Maybe not from these chests in particular, but in general.

There is another point that needs to brought up and that is that not only are half the profenssions casters, but that each of those casters may stress any one of their attributes and require a seperate weapon for each(ex: healing, protect, smite monk or fire, lightning, water, earth ele). So for instance, an ele has up to 5 different attributes that could be req on their staff/focus/wand where say a dervish scythe will only ever require scythe mastery. So, in this instance alone, odds are about 20:1 that you get a ele item instead of a dervish item.

Also, look into the law of averages. Yes, overall, it's probably 50%, but that doesn't mean YOU will always get 50% of something even over the course of years of playing the game. It's RANDOM, you might get all staffs and someone get all melee weapons, you just never know, but that's how averages work. <smile>

After doing some browsing on Guildwiki.org and some quick calculations, there are roughly 75 combinations of weapon/attribute combinations that could drop from a chest. 63 of these combinations are staff/wand/foci leaving only 12 for all the rest of the posible drops including armors. That means roughly 84% of the time you should expect a caster item to drop. Keep in mind that this doesnt even take into account different skins. So the chances of you running up to a chest and finding excactly what you want is EXTREMELY slim.
Taking all the above into account, i dont think anything said here so far is out of the ordinary.

so far all i gotten were staves, focuses and spears. Never do i get warrior weapon or any type of shields.

Maybe it depends on what profession you are and what heroes you are with?
Or perhaps it's just unlucky to get that many staves.

My first run with a mesmer, monk, MM, ele.
2 butterfly mirrors, 1 paragon shield, 2 foci, 2 staves, 3 daggers, 1 sword.

My second run with a ritualist, monk, ranger, ele.
1 paragon shield, 1 axe, 2 hammers, 1 dagger, 1 staff.....so far!

Gambler's Fallacy is what it is...
It's also the reason people tend to believe that (when rolling dice for example) a series like 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 is less likely to occur than 2, 5, 4, 6, 5 the odds of which are the same for both.

whether chests and their drops are 'random' instead of wheighted? It would take a huge data-set (not to mention keys) to determine that. Actually, from past updates one could assert drops are weighted: +30 hp-mods from golds are more likely to occur than from blues. (At or near the release of factions they had an update to "increase the quality" of drops from chests) High end chests also "perform" better than low end.
As to what weapon they drop is a whole different matter; I think that's random, accounting for who plays what would take some serious number crunching...

Too many hammers normally, I never use them but I think there was a definite abundance of Divine Staffs (go figure), paragon shields and Diamond Aegis` this weekend, should get some of those cheap for the next few days.

There is a silver lining to every cloud.

Maybe Anet should do hidden treasure more often?

A large number of classes in guild wars are casters... and there's staves for each attribute, making staves a highly common drop. I myself loathe this too, a req 13 communing in domain of pain WTF!

wish this were the way mine went.....but I got mostly scythes.....and I DONT have a dervish....and then the inspiration staff.....one holy rod and that adamintine sword. thats it....

also I DONT have any warrior characters other than the heros.....I dont like to play them, so I think I get stuff that I cant use for the most part.....but its worth a few hundred gold so its worth something no matter what it is.