I must say, the drops were horrible. Really horrible. And RARE! It's nothing like killing super hard monsters only to get the occasional white drop of something their normal-mode counter parts would drop worth 25gold. You just spend 15 minutes clearing this group of level 30 monsters. Here is a tooth worth 20 gold. Congrats. Oh wait, there is a blue item. Yay, a rune that I can sell to the trader for 10 coins. I'm rolling in the cash now.
There were 3 chests. All three lockpicks broke, 1 gold item and 2 purple, none of which were any good, especially the purple. Not max damage or anything worth salvaging. The gold item did have 1 thing I could salvage, but +7 armor to elemental damage for a staff is hardly a highly wanted item for the market. Oh and last week, my percent of keeping the lockpick was 13%. I spent all my money I had left in my chest 45k to get a lucky title (not to mention leaving my account idle for 15 hours) just to get 2 more %. Yep, I'm happy at 15% now. Totally worth the money I spent. I mean if I can can possibly afford 100 lock picks (150k), then I could statistically keep 2 more of them.
Ok, I'll end my rant, but I just wanted the folks at Anet to realize that this is a game. There are people that want to have fun and escape real life stress every once in a while. And if the game just give you more of life's problems, why play it. Yes, get rid of the bots, etc. But not at the price of ruining normal gameplay.
Oh, and the best part. After a little more than an hour we cleared the level (and I mean clear it - including the green animals wandering around - they arn't my enemy, why include them as part of hard mode) we were awarded with....*drum roll*
500 experience and 300 gold. Woo hoo.
