Ecto drop rates?

Regardless of your build, ecto drop rate is the same, Bladed Aatxes have a 4% chance to drop ectos, Smite Crawlers have a 2% chance to drop them. Build, time of day, frequency of farming, all have no effect on it. Im glad you said that - a lot of new players seem to think you get ectos anywhere in uw or a certain amount.
All foes that drop ectos have a small percentage and depending on the area that affects you chances - chaos plains has been said to be best area due to probably being the 1 area that spawns in total over 100 mindblades - more than anywhere where else for foes and 100 mindblades may get you a few ectos if your lucky.
Id say also to ask - whats your avg drops would be a poor question to ask but only because different players farm different areas - some farm chaos plains , some solo farm smites ( 2% drop chance and maybe 20ish in total ) .
Id hazzard a guess and say the chances are 0 - 5 depending on type of farm - and yes there are such things as dry runs with no ectos ( usually when ppl cry out on guru "ectos are nerfed!!!!" ) .
Also players love to brag gd drops an rarely mention the fact that 5 runs were dry and 6th gave them 3 ectos.
My rule is - ignore all player claims and see what farms you can do in uw , that way your expections are not governed by posts of i got 7 ectos doing uw , i dont go into uw expecting to get any ectos and if i get 1 or 2 im happy.
Fow armor = 105 ectos - 1 or 2 ectos a run could take quite a few runs - easily 50 upwards and getting 50 runs with ectos in each is asking for extreme luck .Ive done very little uw for months - had a few months break an did 2 runs which were dryer than a desert and that was over 3 months ago now and i bet if i went in and did 2 runs id be lucky to get 1 - 2 ectos lol.
A gd indecation of ectos coming into the market is the price - when anet a few yrs bk buffed sf everyone went sin crazy and ectos flowed out from uw and the market price dropped like mad - i think it hit the lowest ive seen and players were selling for 3.5k * almost 1/2 of what its now ) .

Regardless of your build, ecto drop rate is the same, Bladed Aatxes have a 4% chance to drop ectos, Smite Crawlers have a 2% chance to drop them. Build, time of day, frequency of farming, all have no effect on it. Im pretty sure ive read dev notes about Frequency of Farming having an effect

Im pretty sure ive read dev notes about Frequency of Farming having an effect That's around 2005-07...you are right but you're a few years late.

I've been thinking about adding FOW armor to my hall of monuments but I'm not sure I can manage the time investment of farming UW/FoW and I don't have a lot of plat.

I've seen some posts about 5 drops an hour being high for UW runs. On average how many drop per run and per hour do you get?

Gut feeling estimates are great especially since I imagine there are quite a few regular ecto farmers in this subforum.
umm honestly, I've been playing for a little over 4 years and the best way i've found (atleast in recent times) is simply to speedclear UW at either latenight on American servers (assuming you live in the America's) or ~noon on Asian servers (once again assuming you live in the America's) the reason is because of less activity which results in significantly increased drop-rates (in effect almost doubling them, though there are obviously exceptions and its more of a guideline) another option is to simply play through the campaign numerous times and save up... the final option however is just do a shitload of DoA Runs and get a few dozen armbraces trade them for ecto and then bob's ur uncle fanny's ur aunt and u have obby armor (I put mine on me Rit and dyed it red goes with her hair good lol)
looks nice eh?

I find the antidotal evidence when a little effort of recording can estimate precisly what the rates are. On several occations on ledge farming in Tombs where you kill Terrorwebs and Banished Horsemen, I gather data to estimate the rate and also determine the confidence interval of that estimate.

Assuming a bernulli process so the rate follows a binomial distribution with independent trial for each creature I estimated the following:
N = 530 (overall sample size of deaths)
x = 14 (number of successes, ecto drops)

Test and CI for One Proportion
Sample X N Sample p 95% CI
1 14 530 0.026415 (0.014515, 0.043923)

So this shows the drop rate is 0.0264, just over 2.5%, and the 95% confidence interval suggests that it is no higher than 0.0439 and no lower than 0.0145.

If folks honestly provide the number of kills and the number of ectos gathered we can estimate the drop rate. As far as time goes, the faster you kill the faster you will get ecto. Or just check wiki for each uw foe as ive seen the drop rates for ectos listed there :P