Impact of AoE skills on item drops

Do skills that can affect multiple foes at once cause a reduction in items dropped by enemies? There has been quite a bit of debate about this in the past, and many players have reported some first-hand experience which seems to indicate that the item drops from solo farming are reduced when AoE skills are employed. I also have witnessed this behavior first-hand, so I think it is very likely that AoE skills do reduce item drops. But its hard to understand exactly how this works or how much it reduces drops since I don't have access to the game code.

Why is this important? For starters, if you are considering farming an area, and there are multiple builds available for farming it, the better option might be the build that doesn't require any AoE skills to kill the foes. Players tend to be really focused on maximizing killing speed, but what farmers should really be concerned with is maximizing the item drops. Due to the various nerfs that ANet has implemented, farming builds featuring faster killing via AoE may actually cuts drops enough to make it less profitable than using slightly slower solo farming builds that don't use AoE skills.

However, without some kind of in-game data to back up this claim, that's just a theory. Fortunately, it's rather easy to do some simple experiments on this to try and determine whether or not certain things do or do not affect item drops. Here are a few possibilities that should be considered and ways to try to test them:

Theory #1: Including any AoE skills on your bar will reduce item drops
To test this out, I suggest taking a build that doesn't need an AoE skill for killing monsters which has 1 optional skill slot. Try a few farm runs with that skill being a single target skill, and then a few runs with that slot being an AoE skill. Don't activate the skill, just have it in the skillbar and do some farm runs. Various weapon-based AoE skills and spell-based AoE skills should be tested to determine if all of them behave similarly. Is there a notable difference in drops when the AoE skill is included compared to when it is not?

Theory #2 Activating any AoE skills during combat will reduce item drops
Try builds from #1 but this time actually use the AoE skills while farming. Do the same number of foes produce approximately the same number of drops when using the AoE skill compared to when no AoE skill was used?

If #2 is true, but #1 is false, then it would imply that it is the AoE skill activation, rather the the AoE skill inclusion that causes the item drop reduction. This could be an important distinction in the case of builds that require an AoE skill to reach a specific area, but can then farm desired foes without it.

Theory #3 Killing multiple enemies too quickly will reduce item drops
This will require some kind of build that can alternate between killing multiple foes in a very short time vs. killing them more slowly. How fast is deemed "too quickly"? For a starting point, consider more than 1 kill per second. Also, this needs to be tested without any AoE skills in order to properly isolate the AoE effect from the killing speed. However, w/o AoE skills are there any builds that can realistically kill 2 or more foes in under 1 second? It might be possible by alternating between targets and then finishing them off very close together - for example try to line up multiple degen-induced deaths or a spike-induced death + a degen-induced death. When multiple foes die at nearly the same time, does it seem to cause reduced item drops?

If #1 & #2 turn out to be false, but #3 is true, then it would imply that AoE skills are not the culprit, but rather it is the impact of killing too many enemies too quickly that causes the item drop reduction. In that case, AoE skills could still be used, but an alternate technique might be required in order to ensure that the foes die one-by-one over a slightly longer period of time.

For good data, these experiments would need to be performed over several runs, by several different players. However, even with limited first-hand observations, some basic trends may begin to emerge.

Please feel free to try some of these experiments yourself, or suggest other ways to test whether or not AoE skills have an impact on item drops.

I did that already with Vaettir, using sliver armor and crystal wave.
Absolutely no difference. Always 3..10 golds, 2..6 trophies, and 0..3 other rare stuff every 40 kills.

Well, found this quote on wiki:

I guess you can try to verify that?

i think there was a post on the screenshots (or necro) section about that, it was made with a 55 necro using spoil victor and spiteful spirit

and the results were notorious: killing 1 by 1 increases drops

you can try it with the e/me vaettir build, you can wipe the mob by crystal/teinais wave everything and then you can try the sliver method

Its must matter of preception.

If you AOE foes to get instant kill of whole aggro, you get one unit of 'satisfaction' from drops.

If you kill foes with simple-target damage one by one, you get several units of 'satisfaction', roughly one per drop and it will feel you got more.

Some recent data I have was collected a couple nights ago while hydra farming in Skyward reach. Using a W/Mo build w/o any AoE, a single run killing most hydras in the zone obtained an avg of 20 claws per run. Meanwhile, some other players in my guild using different builds with AoE were only getting 2 to 3 claws per run.

One possibility could be that some kind of anti-farming code had kicked in. However, each player had just started farming hydras, so that seems very unlikely.

Instead, this would seem to imply that the AoE skills nerf drops, or at least collectable drops. However, the other players were also reporting fewer drops overall, and when we compared final merch tallies, I was usually obtaining about 2x their value, excluding the claws. With the claws factored in (via selling to players), my haul was worth closer to 10x what they were getting with the AoE builds. Meanwhile, my overall zone clearing rate seemed to be only a tad bit slower than theirs.

In the past I've noticed similar behavior when using different builds to farm the same area - killing stuff with AoE seemed to be cutting my drops compared to the amount I would get w/o AoE.

I suppose it is also possible that certain areas or certain types of foes could exhibit different behaviors regarding this AoE vs. drops behavior.

One other note - It is possible that Sliver Armor may be tagged as an AoE-type skill. This is why the testing would need to be done with a variety of different skills.

I know that when I 600/smited Gates of Kryta for Decayed Orr Emblems, I regularly got more drops (and better drops) than my boyfriend, who was killing more things at one shot with Earth AoE.

Welcome to Loot Scaling. What really matters isn't whether you are using AoE, but the amount of time that elapses between deaths of mobs. If your AoE has a tendency to kill everything at nearly the same time, then it is going to cut into your "trash" drops (most whites, gold coins) - rare stuff like purples/golds, skill tomes, rare mats etc. are unaffected. A number of people like me have already run controlled studies that demonstrate this.

The other thing that matters is mob size. If you're killing just 5 foes it hardly matters how. But with 20+ you will notice the difference. People most often report how jipped they are in Urgoz for example. I'm not sure where the "effective" breakpoint is here. Another complicating factor is party size, large parties are not hit quite as strongly by LS as small parties, but it's still there.

Another thing to consider is time efficiency. Slaughtering things faster with AoE might cheat you out of some trash drops, but the faster kill speed lets you make as much or more gold per time. If on the other hand you are doing some farm where it takes a minute or two for your AoE to kick in and then kills everything at once, you might wish to reconsider if you want the white drops.

Generally I'm a fan of sliver armor builds, which offer fast killing speed in many places and stagger kills about as efficiently as you can.

^This, but in more verbose format:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10329475

If you kill things with a aoe build in 3min you get less drops but if you kill them in 15min by just letting them attack you and then kill them with aoe drops are better. Drops are time bound.

Thanks for that link. This suggests that kill speed (~Theory #3) is likely the root cause of what my guild and I have been encountering.

In my personal experience, AoE did kill the drop levels by a noticeable number. I've read arguments in favor and against it, in particular in farming guides/sections but it's difficult to say. There were even some comparisons based on extensive tests with result tables IIRC as the one mentioned above.

Many people who keg farm, myself included as i used to keg farm, will tell you that killing all foes at once does nothing. It is purely random. One time i killed the north group of 30 or so foes, and I got 12 golds and 2 black dyes from one group. Insane drops, but that is because they are random. The reason that it is random instead of aoe effects drops or single target effects drops is because then people would exploit that part of the game in order to get the most drops possible.

Drops are random.
They have tried to be proven to an equation or theory, but after many attempts, people always say that it is unclear.
There is no pure way to know just how many drops you will get, and people that think they know are stupid, and people tat spend hundreds of hours trying to figure it out are wasting their time

personally i believe that killing stuff all at once decrease's your drops IMO like in UWSC for example i do wastes often and at the end dryders i've found that if you sliver then instead of rad field them all i get more drops happens almost every time i go

Killing speed does affect any drops that are not rare. That is why Hardmode speedfarming is best. Your targeted drops are those rare items. However, a slight kink that I found, I use aoe degeneration and VWK to farm the tengu north of Seitung Harbor and never had a problem with drop quantity. I do this in NM simply to get feathers and average about 100 a run (15 min) . They are not rare by the system and neither is the trophies that salvage to feathers. I think Noob Islands have their own loot scaling due to expected party size so Solo farming there hasn't the same effect as elsewhere. It seems Loot scaling is triggered in time packets and all kills in that packet are considered "a lump kill" to be divided amoung the expected party size. So if your gonna speed farm NM the best spots for that is noob areas with smaller expected party sizes.

Wasn't there a test that if you enter at the correct same time you get the same drops? try to do this test and get 1 with some kind of AoE and 1 without? For me, I don't think it matters its just luck.

There was a thread about syncing while entering an area. A necro and a monk would sync and once successful both got *almost exactly* the same drops. Same drops, with same mods, same chests, etc. except an off chance for 1 item being not exactly the same. What that proves is that it doesn't matter how you kill em, drops are assigned the moment you walk into an area and they can be sync'd.

Wether or not a character has a 'get bad drops flag' is another story (unlikely but still possible). Maybe also on repeated entries your drops get worse (AFC?), maybe overfarmed areas (they can keep logs about kills per zone per day/hour for example) are flagged to decrease the drop quality. Yesterday I tried to get the thropies for the traveler, did 3 wipes of the hydras. Got 1 gold item, no purples, no cyans, a handfull of white and a handfull of coin drops. I think the area is overfarmed right now and won't drop claws anymore.

I believe its all about the speed of killing things, if you aggro a mob of vaettris, and some how kill them one by one, you will probably get way more drops then killing them with budger.

But at the end of the day, its time vs speed. You could choose to kill vaettris one by one, by using a perma-form dagger build, and maybe get a gold from every 3 (so 10 in the first mob) but have it take 30 seconds per kill (15 minutes per side)

or get 0-7 golds in 2 minutes doing both side budgerway.

I also think the 3th theory is a fact. When farming raptors on a warrior the difference in drops using the hundred blade build and the Rt build is pretty noticable.

With the hundred Blades build you'll see gold weapon drops with the various trophies and gold pouches.

The Rt build kills them a lot slower and you get a lot more variation in drops. The gold weapon amount is about the same but the other drops are much higher then with the insta kill build.

Hmm, interesting.

I saw "sync zoning" research, but has anyone bothered to run those experiments too?
Also, were drop researches proofed against sample-choice fallacy?

Anyhow, my personal tidbit: I have suspicion that drops are more dependent on distance from portal then anything else. Mobs close to outpost portal have intentionally poor loot tables, mobs further in explorable seems to have better drops.