Why are my drops so abysmal?

I've been playing GW since June 2005 and have all 4 releases and all the way through I've noticed that the quality of my drops has been significantly lower than others I've played with, and I'd like to know why - here's some details and examples:

Completed Prophecies with 4 characters, Factions with 3 and Nightfall with 5.

I don't farm or repeatedly re-do areas or chest run, so shouldn't have any anti-farming flags and have logged nearly 4700 hours of playing time across all characters/chapters, yet in all that time I've yet to see a decent rare weapon drop, had less than 6 black dyes drop and never seen a white one, my ranger has never had an ecto drop even though been to the UW numerous times (in fact only had 22 ecto drop in 25 month's - shards in FoW have been better - just, but even so my last trip saw me get 0 while the other 7 got 4-6 each). I took 5 characters through nightfall and got a total of 3 greens and ancient/margonite chests produced an average of 1 gold every 12 chests. I thought with Eye my luck might change but having got past the Heart of the Shiverpeaks quest/dungeon I've had 3 golds from 47 chests opened (and they were crap) and not seen an onyx yet.

Any ideas why this could be? My only idea is that I have standard releases not CE's. Any other ideas? I know drops and chests are random but even with bad luck the law of averages should have seen it better than this surely.

CE doesn't affect drops at all. So you might just be having extremely bad luck.

Its how it works, i guess. Its now 10 months since i started playing and i havent yet had a superior vigor rune drop, and had only 1 major vigor. The number of drops with +30 hp or 15^50 mods is also very, very low. I dont farm/grind because its boring. I dont do chest runs because its simply not profitable, the majority of chest loot is worth less than the key you need for it. The main way i earn money - sell the HUGE amount of junk loot the game produces to npc-s. Over time you save enough for an armor upgrade or whatever...

Nightfalls treasure chests produce good stuff, however, in adition to cash. Even in istan.
see http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Treasure_Chest

I have the same bad luck unfortunately.

ditto. i have the same bad luck...never had a decent gold worth selling, and never ever had a green drop for me

Yep, I visit around 8-10 of them on a monthly basis with 5 characters but even with them I get the odd purple, non-max gold or worthless gold - for some reason when I do get golds they have non-max mods and are usually for mesmer, paragon, assassin or monk - the 4 professions I don't play so they end up at a merchant.

It’s purely down to luck.

Spin around 24 times singing your favourite hymn, stop, spit and then throw salt over your shoulder, may help!





If that works I want 10% commission

Same bad luck here. It's been a long time since I had
a Major Vigor. Only got 2-3 superior vigor overall.

And I can't farm my way since loot scaling.
And it's hard to find someone to buy your stuff.

I won't buy GW:EN until they remove the loot
scaling or give the player a suitable way to make
money.

HM is not the answer I'm searching for.

Welcome to the Unlucky Club. There are plenty of us here with you! I've had to purchase every single piece of equipment on every one of my characters because i've never had anything 'special' drop for me in two years.

Someone has to balance out those guys and girls who come home from one UW run with 8 ectos, or gets two R9 elemental blades, or a Gwen minipet - too bad it's us. :P

Just bad, or very bad luck. I can go on about 5 HM farming runs and not even get a grape drop.

What concerns me even more is that i read someone where about this farming code and how it flags you. Now i dont farm, i have never gone into a area, killed all, rinsed and repeated. I occassionaly go a trap the UW and i usually chest run, mainly in NM in the jade sea area.

Becasue of the farming code and getting scared of getting flagged i remember reading somewhere on here that there are certain things you can do you help 'clear' the flags, eg do 'harder' missions eg. unwaking waters, shiro etc etc, so i find myself doing this regulary to make sure i have no farminf flags, and low and behold this doesnt help!!

I don't really consider my luck good or bad but I have noticed a couple of time over the last 2 years where the overall drops seem to be a little better and within a week they go right back to being terrible. And by the way the loot drops in GW:EN are down right horrific considering this is supposed to be high end content. I am not even taking issue with the number of golds, purples or "gasp" green items (what are those again?). I take issue with the high percentage of non-max items I am getting. Why are non-max items allowed to drop in GW:EN?

Well, I guess there's some other way to remove this "anti farming flag". Or just plain bad luck.

Yes, the non-max drops in the so called High End Content are getting quite annoying, but I believe that ArenaNet will do something about this.

"You're just lucky, I guess"

What class are you? I have done hundreds of runs to different places with many different parties, and on average, monks seem to get the fewest decent drops. The Sulfurous Wastes is the easiest place to keep track of this, since everyone does the same thing there and should be getting the same drops. Not to mention, you can get many runs a day in there. On average, my monk gets 2 purple drops per run. Most other players average the same in golds. It's not just me either, most other monks in my party typically get fewer than one gold per run. This is in HM, so there will usually be at least 5 gold drops for a 4 person party. Necros also seem to be getting fewer drops there recently. ANet really must want people to give up on monking completely.

ive only done like 6 dungeons and gotten a couple onyx and couple diamonds from the chest at the end. not sure if that is luck, but 4 gems so far from 6 chests seems like pretty good % to drop to me. and believe me, gems are not an everyday item for me ._. you'll probably be better off doing these dungeons if you're lookin for diamonds and onyx.

This is all speculation. I would like to see some solid evidence of this. Making some arbitrary observations about a few people doing runs in the desolation doesn't count as proof. You make it sound like anyone who does the sulferous wastes wurm runs are entitled to at least 4 or 5 gold drops. Not true, I've gone days without seeing anything, and I've also had 6 golds drop in one run. It means nothing, because it's random. It's not that you are being punished by the game, it's just the luck of the draw(or maybe a higher power doesn't like you :P).

My most used and favorite professions are Ranger and Warrior, but I also have an Ele, Necro and Dervish - never played as a monk, assassin, paragon, mesmer or rit.

u can thank lootfarm for that

I am a math teacher, so I do know how statistics work. No one person should ever be entitled to a large number of gold drops, but if a large number of gold drops come and they are fairly well distributed over members who are not monks then that seems like a bit of an oddity. I tracked my chest drops pretty well over my runs which lasted around a week, and they were about in line with party data. Actual drops however were far lower as far as rare and semi-rare drops go. White drops were consistent as well. Oddly, rare crafting materials dropped with a high frequency for casters, specifically monks. I managed at least one rare salvage drop per 4 runs, considerably higher than any other class. Unfortunately, I was not often partied with another monk, so it can't be said whether that trend would have been upheld for them as well.

I plan to go back and get some fresh data over the next month or so. If I find anything out of the ordinary, I will definitely post about it.