A few questions about the "special" items (Lucky weekend)

Okay, so I started doing some research and logging all my runs on farming Shamrock ale, but I need some more information about:

- Whether Hard Mode increases these drops (Four-Leaf Clover and Shamrock Ale)
- Whether party size (ie. 7 heroes instead of solo) decreases these drops

Wiki says the "Special event items" are exempt from loot scaling. What I would do if they were unaffected is I would take a full party and go HM instead of NM, or fasten up my NM run that way (my run usually takes 20min as my SoS is slow, this would decrease the time to about 5mins).

Thank you for your answers. If I get anything valuable from my logs I'll post it here.

Doing kilroy in HM for the amount it takes to get 1337k exp with double exp scrolls I got 151 clovers and 151 ales

Judging from the amount of dwarven and aged dwarven ales I have it were about 40 runs.
1 run about 10 minutes when all goes well so about 400 minutes total

That makes it 0.75 lucky drops per minute, probably a bit less
Runs look like this:
- kill everything until first boss
- pick up drops
- kill end boss
- town/merching (not included in time)


Don't know if this is of any help.

Sadly I don't have EotN or Proph yet, will buy the soon. But my questions are related to the drop percentage, not where should I farm them. But yeah, thank you, I will do the kilroy run as soon as I get EotN to get Survivor.

EDIT: Another note, just did a NM run with full heroes, while I averaged 7-8 ales and 4 clover per run before solo, I got only 1 ale with heroes, so it is somehow affected by loot scaling, either by how fast you kill or by party size. Another option is that I was just unlucky.

This is something thats always brought up at special drop events and i dont think there has ever been an actual answer thats been proved.
Its stated that mode doesnt affect event drops - true but you will find that drop farming comes into 2 modes , 1st is nm for speed and ease of farm - eg time how long it takes to solo plains of jarin nm and then try hm ( heros will be usually used tho a few professions can solo ) - nm is a way lot faster and due to being exempt from loot scaling will yield more drops an hr than hm.
Next part is big gray area that not even texmod could remove - its a question that unless anet states 100% and gives away all their secrets ( never happen ) we have something that cant be proved 100%.Heros/Hench are treated like other party members and get loot asigned - but if you are farming err say vaetires solo and you get say 10 event drops a run ( its only you in the instance so all drops are assigned to you ) but add heros and have in drop range you will get small amount of event drops and its not down to loot scaling but something we forget - drops get randomly assigned if theres 2+ party members so where before you have say 1/1 chance ( 1 drop has 1 chance for you ) 7 heros mean you have a 1 in 8 chance of a drop - and the games internal chance die rolls for both you and the heros and probably the same will apply with event drops.
Another factor - do players a few years ago recall it being easy to farm stuff like totbags , they used to drop quite easily and then anet changed the droprate for event items making it lower ( not to be confused with lootscaling ) .
Even these days i see a raptor farmer or a diff solo farmer on guru asking if drops have been nerfed on an event as they seem to get less event drops .
See its a big gray area - it even gets bigger when you add in the rate of kills as well - in a nutshell some events are like one of those dodgy offers that seem so gd ( you get something for free ) at the start then you realise your being conned. ( get a free parker pen when you buy xxx life insurance - wow lol ) .
Personally in my experiance i find h/h will steal everything off you - even necro heros steal your corpse given the chance :P

For what it's worth, yesterday I played a Nightfall mission in NM with 7 heroes (Venta Cemetery) and picked up one four-leaf clover and one ale. I don't think the heroes were taking drops.

Yes, I know the part about heroes taking a part of drops, I just thought that that's what we call loot scaling (at least one of the effects of it). Here's my current research:

This is the run I am doing in NM, this takes advantage of the hidden groups (A thing I'm not sure yet is if the hidden groups are actually hidden and have a drop preassigned, or if they spawn then and they get the drops assigned at that moment). It takes about 15mins and it avarages 7-8 Shamrock Ales and 4 Four-Leaf Clovers. I have yet to count all the enemies. I started the experiment to calculate the average Ale drop and to see if it is effective to continue or if it's a waste of time. I expanded the research a bit:
I will do 15-25 runs solo to calculate the average of that. Then I will do same amount runs using 7 heroes and flag them back a bit so that the kill rate will be the same and see what happens. Next I will do the exact amount of full force runs, quick clears with all the heroes. This should give me good statistics to compare.

A few findings right now:
- The event drops occurred quite a few times almost one after another, I got 4 ales in about a single minute.
- This occured somewhere midway or near-end of my run, but I have gotten a few Ales at my start.

I'm using a SoS build which I tweaked minorly. I will probably split this research into a separate topic.

HardMode does not effect the drop rate of special weekend drops as they are white items, and hardmode doesn't affect whites.
larger party size nets more drops, but less per person. so having 7 heros will mean drops will also go to heros and you cannot get them.

From my experience everything has a % chance to drop an item. What the actual drop rate is I don't really know, but I can do some runs and post my results per run.

The ales and clovers do seem to fall in about a 50/50 ratio though.

Here are the results from a quick 5 run sample:

Clovers Ales Golds
7 4 0
3 8 3
4 7 2
5 1 1
2 3 2

The above results are from killing 60 enemies solo on hardmode.

It shouldn't make a difference about nm and hm.
yes you would get more drops solo.

Also the best exp farm right now is Vaettirs HM solo. Its 48,000 experience in 1 minute. That's with lightbringer though. Got me r3 in 1 hour.