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.

#3 is true. See linked thread. Results can be repeated, and my own experience has shown that increasing killing speed decreases drops. There may be something like a merchant value/time figure that determines whether a loot scaled drop is assigned or simply vanishes, but that is simple conjecture on my part with no basis in fact.

There is definitely something to theory #3.

You can test it almost everywhere, killing a large group often yields only very few drops at all, while killing them one by one gives you a drop almost for every mob.

Now I would like to know if green and gold drops are exempt from this phenomenon?

I've heard of the theory of AoE/fast killing of multiple groups to drop less for a long time now, and I still think it's true.

I've experienced it lots of times too, often when I solo UW.
I've been using builds to kill 1-2 groups at a time, usually gets me average ecto and a few whites.
Builds which you rack up 4+ groups, there usually is 1 or no white drop at all and ecto make themselves rare.
Then not long ago I used a build where I killed each Smite on it's own in a group, and if you've just followed what I've said, you'll have guessed that I got several ectos. Although that run was really too long, so I think the best way is AoE, but don't tank more than 2 groups.

AoE on one group is the best way imo.

Well killing many foes fast seems to affect the drop rate. I have verified that on my different farms. Of course I can't be sure but I haven't been falsified yet.

For instance: Raptor farming. I go out to kill all the raptors as fast as I can and useually get around 4-6 items. Then I try killing them 1 group by 1 which useually gives around 8-15 items. And as such it goes on no matter how many times I try.

Hydra farming: If I pull as many hydras as I can and kill them all at once: 10-15 items throughout entire skywards reach. If I go slowly: At least first bag full.

However I have not been able to verify whether it affects gold drops as well, since it has always been completely random for me.

Tried today with 600/smite. One NM run yielded me all the 10 claws I needed, and I got another 6 in HM before dying to rubberband and lag. I'm not sure if it's keyed to you overfarming it, but the number of people who run in and out of the instance killing hydras shouldn't affect it.

Bolded for emphasis. Me overfarming it? Highly unlikely. I got 1 claw total. Last night I tried again and also got 1 claw (but did only 1 run HM). Ended up buying the claws. That was on a char that was unused for over 6 months and not even any other char on my account had gone anywhere near prophecies (except for LA). I think my necro is hexed for life with 'crappy drops'.

Anyway, back on topic. Doesn't 'sync zoning' simply proves all of the OP theories wrong?
Sync zoning is something any gw2x user can try to reproduce and was confirmed multiple times.
Sync zoning also proves my 'crappy drops' hex theory wrong (unless I can't sync and others can). It would mean that I lied or that I simply had bad luck while zoning.

The drops work exactly the same way as Soul Reaping does now. There is a limit to amount of drops that will drop over a certain period of time.

For example, say the cap is 3 drops every 5 seconds. If you kill 100 enemies at once with AoE, you'll get 3 drops. if you kill 3 enemies every 5 seconds, you're more likely to get closer to 100 drops (although sometimes mobs simply drop nothing).

You can probably find out exactly what the number is by doing repeated farms of mountain trolls, using AoE methods and single methods.

This is correct.

The TLDR version is: There is a cap on vendor-sale-value/time on drops. Whenever you get a drop that puts you at or over the cap, loot scale will kick in and prevent you from getting any more non-exempt drops until enough time has elapsed that you are under the cap again.

This is not correct. The unimportant lesson from the synch experiments is that the seed for the PRNG is derived from the time when you enter a zone. That shouldn't be any surprise to anyone with even a basic education in computer programming. The important lesson to be learned from the synch experiments is that **something** is causing a slight variance in what should be identical drops. The explanation in the link above explains where that variance comes from, and does so in a way that is consistent with all of the data gathered in the synch experiments, and others as well.

I tried this on spiders a week back. I balled them up and killed them with AoE and I got a total of 4 drops from them. Did it again with the same bar killing one by one, almost every spider dropped an item.

The sync-zoning theory is almost certainly sample choice fallacy, which is something you see a lot regarding MMO loot. I remember many years ago players got this into their head about WoW loot, and once the idea caught fire, there was no putting it out until a full investigation was done.

The theories people have made up for Guild Wars regarding sync zoning assume things such as, the game has a personalized random number generator that is seeded when you enter the zone, so that if two people "sync enter" different instances of the same zone at the "exact same time" they will get the same drops. However, I will show that this also makes a lot of other assumptions.

If you think about it for a moment, you will see some big holes in the argument. First, you aren't going to be able to "sync enter" with someone on the granularity of any of the system timers, which is in at least milliseconds (e.g. GetTickCount()), which are what is typically used to seed random number generators.

Second, there is no good reason for the game to constantly re-seed its random number generators. If you have one random number generator per thread (not per process, otherwise you will just cause contention), then you seed them when the server process starts up, and not again after that. And in fact, the more unrelated game-related things you use those per-thread random number generators for, the more "randomized" they become. So your combat swings, loot drops, etc. would be interspersed with other things the game is doing (that reside on the same server box).

If the Guild Wars server is as efficiently coded as the client seems to be, it is high unlikely to be wastefully allocating one thread per instance. It is probably using I/O completion ports instead, if it is on the Windows platform (maybe it's not), so you would then have one random number generator per thread.

Third, even if you assumed that two players entered the zone at the exact same millisecond, AND that the game has a per-zone random number generator just for you, you would then have to be identical characters, and behave identically to your partner in every way. You would have to agro the mobs in the exact same way, from the same direction and distance. If you were playing a necro, and he was playing a monk, you will be using different types of abilities, using the random number generator a different number of times for the encounters. The mobs would die at different rates, and use different skills on you. By the time you're looking at loot drops, you have exercised the random number generator a different number of times from your partner.

You could then say "OK, maybe the game's combat and AI use a totally separate random number generator from the mob and chest drops." But there is no good reason to design the game that way, the point of random number generators is to be as random as possible. Or, you could say "Well, maybe the loot for every mob in the zone is pre-calculated first and assigned to mobs, before anything else happens", and maybe that part at least is true, although you still have the other issues.

Player "proofs" that random number generators are not random almost always turn out to be selection bias. There are some notable counterexamples though, that are due to game bugs, such as the Wi flag, and Warhammer Online's contribution rating.

note: I am just talking about the concept of sync-joining to "game the random number generator" to get identical loot, not loot drop rate scaling (there is abundant evidence that the latter does exist).

Actually, I assumed this:

If instance creation is expensive process, devs could opt for prototype/cache pattern. Instance is created infrequently, stored to cache and if someone enters it, they get copy or clone of stored instance (something much cheaper to do).

In this case, it would be well possible to sync to "same" instance with some luck.

nobody uses tick count. everyone uses seconds, at the very most. making syncing rather easy. seeding is almost instantaneous. it's a recursive -linear- function. meaning it can be done instantly, dozens of time, for almost no cpu cycles whatsoever. there are many good reasons to reseed - better randomization for one. it doesn't need to open a thread. . . it's simply a function call. since the random number generator generates predictably. . . it doesn't matter if you're a monk, a necro, or a cell phone. if you cast SS, SoJ, or favorite_five. the numbers are already generated.

"the default measurement of time, for most API's is seconds. the current time is actually the total amount of seconds that have passed since midnight of january 1st, 1970. the is pre-made, and included in time.h standard library. to get the time, you use a predefined class. a class is a collection of data. when your character is created is based on that as well.

int player_loot_seed = srand( time() ) ;

the resolution is SECONDS. time returns a class time_t. srand takes a time_t class. so if you zone in at the same second - which is well within most server lags, it's synched. it has to be the same second, obviously, not just within 1 second. "

instancing is not expensive. each enemy is probably a few bytes at most, creating their placement requires a struct reference and an origin.

on another note, AOE may seem to have less drops. it seems possible that drop rates are tied to the amount of times a character has farmed that area. so the more you enter, the less you get. aoe SEEMS to generate less drops because aoe results in faster farms, and consequently, more instances of the area being farmed. killing 1 by 1 will hit this farm flag later, resulting in what appear to be more drops.

Anyone who did keg farm and sliver farm can tell that the #3 is the right option. When 20 foes die at the same time , calculations are limited and tend to be applied to all of em. Sometimes i get nothing but a non-loot scaled drop and sometimes i get 7 golds , 5 drops , and money. As far as i can see , experience is the proof . Dont get me wrong , i believe in "luck" , Fate , coincidence , whatever you may call it but when happens 90% of the time .... its like a "rule" to me. So ...

Long post but soz , i dont think so. Drops are decided when zoning , even the chest ones , and i really believe they are assigned to mobs so it doesnt matter the order you kill em. Check this farming post by 2 bros , same house, same farm , diff profs and diff skill bar.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10225077

for me , they prove that "theory" you mentioned.

Did anyone trustworthy actually duplicate their test?

Regardless of that, there is no doubt that loot is generated per-area. There used to be bug with chests stacking stackables (in 8 man party, someone would bet two elite tomes, last person would get nothing from chest), proving that look 'bag' was already generated.

Sorry, but "LOLNO". This is game development. Everyone uses milliseconds. They do, because they need to track sub-second events. Hell, I have not seen used flat seconds in last 4 years, everything is in ms. Regardless of that:

Reseeding will *not* give you more random numbers. It will give you honorable mention in dailywtf.
Seeding from result of random is thing worthy of dailywtf submit.

Btw: Any autoattack would invoke random number call. it would. hence, even exactly same build would result in different sequence because player is gonna be autoattacked different amount of times per mob.

There is huge performance between lots of calls needed to init big structures from configuration and just doing memcopy.

Did anyone trustworthy actually PROOF that thread is fake ? . How can i know you or anyone is trustworthy ?

My point is not the "drops are generated when you zone" matter , is that is possible to sync it . Anyway , whay are you SO sure that they ALWAYS use milisecs in EVERY seed ? maybe zoning is an exception. I highly doubt that ppl in that thread synched it to milisec level

once i got 2 r9 vspears from a HM slayers chest

pics or never happened

In my experience, it's not an issue of killing all of them at once (or close to it) but more how long it takes you to kill once you zone. My prime example is from farming bandits in pre - there are 8 bandits and if I run there directly after coming out of Ashford Abbey and us an AOE skill to kill them I get very few drops. However, if I zone from the Abbey and just sit there for a couple of minutes (let the wolf walk around until it's not visible on radar) and then run and kill them with the same skills (and just as quickly) I get a drop from every one just about every time.

It may work differently in pre, but I wouldn't think the underlying code would be that much different.

You have independently rediscovered the entry effect Because drop values in pre are so low, once you sweat off the initial malus the drops won't trigger the cutoff level regardless of how fast you kill.

In my opinion the loot scaling mechanism is currently adequately understood. Those who claim otherwise just haven't bothered to go through all the evidence.

I had never heard of the entry effect. It does explain quite a lot of things and proves wrong quite a lot of theories when put together with the sync zoning experiments.

nobody uses milliseconds for seeding random numbers. a few odd functions may need it, but that hardly applies to the topic. silly undergrads =)