Impact of AoE skills on item drops

Back when I did UW ecto farming with an Assassin, I used 2 different builds. One was a point-blank AOE, and the other was made to quickly kill one enemy at a time. Since ectos aren't loot scaled, their drop rate remained constant. But piles of gold, trophies, and white/blue/purple/gold items almost never dropped when I used the AOE build. However, I'd guess 20% or more of the enemies I'd kill would drop something if I used the one-at-a-time build.

I tried to reproduce the sync research and I could not, even when mob spawns looked the same with my buddy, drops were not the same (not even close). I find this suprising as to me it actually makes sense that server time is used as a seed to generate the varients in zone creation. However, this has nothing to do with which of the items generated in the loot tables will drop for you.

Drops rate is determined by rate of kill, it has been proven time and again and is infinately repeatable by anyone who chooses to try it. If you kill things faster than about one every 30 seconds then the drop rates start falling.

Here is the same build killing the same things fast and slow.

Fast kills
Slow Kills

Repeat as many times as you like, you always get got 2-4 each time you kill fast, and 10-13 each time you kill slow.

This effect also happens in full parties. I regularly HM speed cleared Urgoz in 40+ minutes with my guild, when you do this you never fill your inventory, but take over an hour to do it and you need multiple salvage kits to handle the drops. Full party of 12 (3 or 4 players rest hero)

As for the portal? No, it's not distance from portal, it's time to first kill. Again, very easy to prove, just enter a zone and kill a mob, you get no drops. But zonwe in and wait 2 minutes and then kill the same mob and you get normal drops.

It is also incorrect to refer to AoE in this. The sync entry thread made this mistake. AoE has no effect on drops other than that type of damage is likely to have a faster rate of kill. In the sync test, the type of AoE used also had a very slow kill rate, hence the similarity of drops.

Thanks for posting that again, I spent ages trying to find it Did you post a more comprehensive time theory at some point too?

I also find it dissapointing that Anet have not been open and honest about the way loot is allocated.

Usually they are very good at coming forward with information about their game.

I feather farm. When I kill a bunch simultaneously, less drops. When I kill individually, there are a lot more drops. It did not change the rarity of the drops though.

So is it the speed with which you kill or the number of creatures you kill over time that effects drops?

Get some data and do a significance test...

You're looking at it from an efficiency standpoint. Try looking at it from a "don't give the user any data they can use to game your loot system" standpoint and the reasons behind those design decisions will become more clear.

It is the gold-from-the-merchant value of your drops over time.

We don't know what the limit is, but presume for the sake of demonstration that it is, say, 1g/sec. Assume that you enter a zone and immediately kill a monster which drops a sword with a 100g vendor value. Loot scale will then kick in and prevent you from getting any non-exempt drops until you've been in the zone for 100 sec. Shortly after reaching 100 sec, you should get your next drop. Assume it's a 20g collector trophy item. Loot scale will kick in again until you've been in the zone for 120 sec. If you get an exempt drop while loot scale is active, it will extend loot scale's duration.

(I've simplified out the entry effect in the explanation above. For those who want a full understanding: The loot scale system is initialized with a "dummy" drop when you first zone in. So you will always start out a zone with loot scale active as if you had just gotten a random item. Presumably this is intended to prevent farming with bots that farm till they activate loot scale, then zone out and repeat. Credit to tmakinen for the research.)