Picklocks, % and opportunity to use them

Anyone who's using lockpicks is certainly a little disappointed.
the fact that they are rather expensive makes them good only to open chests in few areas.

i'm considering 3 main scenarios: a random lvl20 guy without any chest or lucky title, a good runner with 3-4chestrun tiers and maybe the 1st title of the lucky track, a chest addict with tier7 and maxed lucky title(5)

A- Chances for him to destroy a picklock = 90%.
Opening a chest with lockpicks bought from the trader at 1500 = 1500(90%) = 1350g
Opening a chest with lockpicks bought from other ppl at 1200 = 1200(90%) = 1080
this lead to the conclusion that for him picklocks at 1500g at the trader are completely a waste of cash for regular mode's non elite chests, even with the built in bonus.
Fissure chests, aswell as The deep's, Domain of anguish might be a decent opportunity aswell, specialy if u can buy these lockpicks from other ppl at a discount price

B- Chances for him to destroy a picklock = 79%.
Opening a chest with lockpicks bought from the trader at 1500 = 1500(79%) = 1185g
Opening a chest with lockpicks bought from other ppl at 1200 = 1200(79%) = 940g
Again, completely a waste of cash for regular chest even with the built in bonus, a huge deal for elite area's chests, might be a good deal for hard mode chests, at least for areas where skins are valuable.

C- Chances for him to destroy a picklock = 59%.
Opening a chest with lockpicks bought from the trader at 1500 = 1500(90%) = 885g
Opening a chest with lockpicks bought from other ppl at 1200 = 1200(90%) = 708g
In the best possible scenario, still picklocks are not cheap for average locations, considering the built in bonus, this just like buying keys at 600g each. it's therefore an unbelievable discount price to open elite area chests.
At these prices i'd suggest to open all hard mode chests, specialy if u can find picklocks chea from other ppl.


Conclusion: Imho picklocks are cool idea for sure, tho a little tweak in prices/% is needed. As for today picklocks are a good opportunity in elites areas and in hard mode, completely useless for every other regular mode location.
Lowering the price to much would turn fow chestrun in an insanely cheap trip.
A good suggestion might be making the base retain rate to 30-40% for a level 20 + the same bonus for titles, but requiring 2 picklocks to be used on elite chests.
i.e. to open in fissure of foe u use 2 picklocks, each one with the same chances to be destroyed. opening that chest u could save both picklocks, destroy one or destroy both.

so what u think?

Don't buy them in a few hours I've had 2 lockpick drop which I've used to open 2 chests.
I would love keys to drop as much as the lock picks are.

They only drop in hard mode?

just use them for hard mode and buy the appropriate keys for whatever zone you're in if playing in normal mode.

The hard mode "chests" only use lock picks. There are no keys for them.

It sucks however that the chance to keep the lockpick is so small and based on grind titles...

i totally agree only got chest run level 3 all my percentage is is 19% lol but on the other hand only openend 4 chests yet and they all where gold... hope it will stay that way otherwise a waste of my 1.5 k ^^

opened 5 chests so far. only 1 was purple.

Also, in HM perfect weapons are dropping waay more for me. like the 1st thing i found was a 15(enchanted) spiky war hammer (req 9). I was like WOOOOT!

just now i found a crimson claw scepter with 20HRT and 10% HCT all.

so far my drops are unreal.

lol bought 4 picklocks last night and did some chest farming with them, not really worth the gold

All chests (last night, possibly not today) were auto gold drops, so 1.5k is worth it to most.

Btw. Does the chests in HM count toward treasure hunter? Didnt have completed Prophecies till now and dont have an oportunity to try it out. Could someone post an update ?

Yes. They do count

hardly worth the gold

Im under the impression Lockpicks are crap, its dependent on sheer luck which is just uncool.

Well im back to keys for now.

its not "auto-gold", ive had 50/50 gold/purple drops id say. ofc, those were in the most overfarmed areas of them all

as of now, i think its only really worth it to use them in areas where u can get skins that are very desirable, but not guaranteed to be max. It doent seem to make sense (at least atm) to use them in say realm of torment, where every chestdrop is max per default.

this is my impression, ill get rank4 of treasure first before i keep experimenting tho

PS there seem to be rumours that there will be items which can only drop in hardmode, that would change things a bit

5 chests - 2 gold / 3 purples = all keys lost with 3 luck and 2 treasure

Bought 2 sets of picks - both destroyed on 1st use(lvl 3 in wisdom and tresaure hunter). Did get 2 gold drops, both however were bunk... Waste of 3 plat IMO

I used 5 picks with r7 Treasure and r3 Lucky... all broke, and I had a 37% chance to keep.

Annoyance :/

Do Lockpicks have less chance to break when used on Hard mode chests?

So far, I only used it once (didn't break, whew) and got a regular Ele Tome with it. (meh, worth 1k I guess)

Oh, and I have no titles, so it's 90% chance of breaking for me.

Do the drops matter what area you are in? Will Ring of Fire hard chests have better loot than Ascalon hard?

No, its the other way around. Its got a "normal" chance to break in HM, but if you use them in normal mode, it has and extra % chance of not breaking, that is inherent to the regular chests.

Another place where titles are affecting game play. I knew it'd turn bad when they were added, but it just keeps getting worse and worse.

I agree. I'm ok with titles having a slight effect, but a 30% chance is not slight.

Picks should be 50/50, and maybe a little better odds if you have some titles, but paying 1.5k for something that breaks 90% of the time is Bull.

(and chests are the best way to get decent loot in some areas - I don't want 3g grawl necklaces, I want nice items for my work, thank you.)

I just got my first lockpick drop in Kryta. I was going to hold onto it for a higher level area, but temptation took over and I used it. It broke and left me with a purple req 13 shield.

It's a nice idea, but if there's such a high chance of immediate breakage, I'm not sure I see the point over simply boosting key drops a bit. I certainly won't be buying any.

Every weapon coming from a locked chest that I have got has been req 13 WTF Anet!!! 9 locked chests, 5 lockpicks, 5 req 13 weapons, 4 armors...


The price and the risk is NOT worth the reward.

i think anet is gonna reconfig those %.

maybe higher end chests will get higer % of breaking eg. DOA, Deep etc..
and locations like ascalon will be lower.

Ascalon -> 60% chance to break
Southern peaks -> 70%
Ring of fire -> 80%
etc...
and 90 would be in deep and DOA locations and fow and uw

Let's dispense with the myth that titles actually affect the lockpick rate. Like one of the posters earlier, I have 3 ranks towards Lucky and 7 ranks (max) towards chesting. For kicks, I bought a lockpick just to see what my preservation rate was (I expected 70% or higher, not knowing the calculations). It turned out to be 37%... whoop-de, a whopping 27% higher chance than a person with no ranks toward either! Suffice to say I won't be lockpicking any chests soon -- the rates are terrible whether you've got 10,000 chests or 0 chests to your name

I agree that they should have a higher percentage of NOT breaking regardless of titles (grind titles that cost a lot none-the-less). I purchased 4 of these lockpicks and all 4 broke on me. I have lvl 1 treasure hunter and lvl 3 luck title. (so close to level 4). The items were ok but not that great..not worth 1.5k it didn't seem.

But that's just in my limited experience with them thus far.

I used one with my mesmer who has no titles, it broke on the first try but I recovered quickly from my disapointment when I saw a Sup Vigor. I think I would be pretty disappointed paying that much for a lock pick and getting some purple with high reqs though. I know some people with no titles that got lucky and can use their lock picks roughly 3 times before breaking. Most of us with not titles in my guild have them break after first try.

I haven't tried the lock picks yet, but will do it tonight.

From what i heard, (guildies) got rare items sometime but most of the time they gotten purple with high requirement.

I think its great, they are basically normal keys now, with about the same(if not better since they drop from all monsters I think) drop rate as the old keys, and they work on any chest in the game with the same or better item rate as the old chests. But now... you get a %chance to keep it after each use! Not much of a chance, but I kept my first pick with only 10% chance to do so with no titles. I'm happy with it.

have to agree, 1st chest got a purple and the lockpick broke, it's a waste would be better if the chest broke and not the lockpick

For 1500 gp per lockpick you should never get a purple...

IMO

I also agree. First off, they picked the two biggest gold sinks in the game. The upper tiers of both tracks require dropping a few million. To play the game to the fullest, they must expect us to grind out all that gold through solo farming...D'oh!

I've determined that the Lucky title is a waste of gold for me personally, and never made much progress on it by choice. Also, you can only make progress on that track sporadically. I.e., whenever Anet feels like putting in the boardwalk.

Another problem with Treasure Hunter in this context is it's character based, not account based. Unlike Wisdom, where you can funnel all the unids you pick up to one character, I quite often open chests with whatever character i'm playing at the time. Thus my, and probably others' like me, progress on this track is spread out between characters.

People have paid 1500 for highend chests for some time (Urgoz Deep FoW DoA) and took the chance of getting a grape with a one time only key.

With a lock pick at least you get the chance you may not have to buy another one.

I will note from my experience so far

2 HM chests opened - lock pick DID NOT BREAK

I have in HM a 21% chance of it not breaking (must work on those titles I know)

then I went to regular mode and opened 1 and still the lockpick did not break

So I am guaranteed to open 4 with my very first lockpick which isn't bad.


What I Found interesting was in Regular Mode when I opened the chest it said I had a 51% chance of it not breaking.

Now I don't know if that was a glitch but if not that means using lock picks in regular mode you start at a base 30% chance of it not breaking


Its not a glitch Guildwiki has it up under lockpick that you get an extra 30% in regular mode

So, even with the related titles maxed you don't even get 50% failure?

BTW, IMO, any key of more than 500g is ridiculous expensive! Keys are too expensive, I rarely buy one. I don't get why I must expend 1,5k and then sell the item to merchant by 300g. More keys I buy = More poor I am.

Yep - I stopped buying keys ages ago and finally managed to afford prestige armours as a result. I'll be trading any lockpicks I find in, especially as I only got 104g for the item I got with one.

It sounds to me like people are happy with them, if they were already happy with keys - but if keys felt like a waste of time, then lockpicks aren't a significant enough change.

what in gods name are you talking about
only a few elite chests are worth opening pff lol made me laugh

i opened 2 chests, near ascalon (in hardmode)
got a gold aegis recieved dmg -2 in stance, armor 16 req 10
and a gold wingblade 15-22 with +30hp mod

the next monster i killed there lol dropped a spatha with 20/20 sundering and +5 defense mod...

dont talk like that
all chests do have good items in hard mode..

Hahaha! I am planing to start buying keys the day when I have the FINAL armor(s) and weapon(s) for every PvE character I have. I don't see that day too soon! (at least I am not planing FoW armor at all)

In respone to SaelFaer - No they dont, just got 2 grapes from 2 locked chests in a row, both times the damned picks broke (lvl 3 in both wisdom and treasure). Both were junk items...

What a !@#$$$! pissoff.

You have to realize: Locked Chests are High-end Chests. They have a high chance of golds (so far I have opened ~10 chests: 7 golds, including an Elite Monk Tome). People buy high-end DoA/FoW/Deep/Urgoz etc. keys. If there were no Picklocks, there would be Hard Mode Keys for 1,500; people would buy those. ArenaNet did us a big favor by even giving us the chance for them not to break.

You realize, that if picklocks had 30-50% or so chance of not breaking, no one would buy keys anymore; what would be the point? We are just lucky there is no % chance of them not even opening the chest.
Wisdom doesn't count. It's Treasure Hunter and Lucky.