Darkstone Chest Run - 10 keys (6 platinum) Results

Certain chests give better drops.

Hint: the longer and more work it takes to get to a chest, the better the drops will be.

Examples: Superior Healing Rune, Gold Sephis Axe 1/1 try at each chest.

I always get lots of rares on ember, best thing to do is to run at the white mantle area, get alot of rare white scythes and other white mantle weapons + armors

i love chests. im a gambler and its the only gambling in the game. plus i love those so close to perfect items. gold shadow shield req 8 str. +44 health while in stance. oh so close but its good enough. and then theres the other items that are PERFECT except that is a axe with medium req. like 10. and mods to elem skills....

This is my first post in weeks Some chests give you gold items so I only ever opened chests if it had already dropped a gold item for someone else in the group. I'm not sure whether or not this makes a big difference to the quality of the item.

I think this is a very important point. Who else has experience with it?

I've never been a key buyer, and rarely group with anybody other than my wife, so I only have a single data point. That one was favorable -- golds for both my wife and me, and another gold the next time we found it. (Grenth's Footprint -- I fear it was the one that was removed a couple of days later.)

I used to be a chest farm inside SF. I usually don't open the chests unless someone else did it and got a gold item. Out of all my chests run, i got about 4 golds and tons of purples. I did get a near perfect halfmoon once from a SF chest. But now a day, i rarely farm for chests.

Well, now I have to go do it too. Will let you know.

Keys are a marginally profitable enterprise, if you understand what you are doing.

A. Don't open every chest. Have a different person do it each time. Lets say you do a B/P group through the new tombs. 8 players, all have multiple keys. Each takes turns trying a chest (this is best with a non-pug where you do this over and over). When one person opens and gets a gold, all will. You are now getting 7 out of 8 or 8 out of 8 gold drops for your keys. Accordingly, I merch everything less then godly, otherwise my storage would have so many golds waiting for sale I would have to stop playing.

B. ID everything. Unided golds are hard to sell and (assuming you don't test out the mods) you are gambling against yourself. My favorite are drops like a bad staff with a 20% enchant mod. This turns a key into 40 plat very quickly.

C. Repeat. I have opened HUNDREDS of chests. I would guess 40% or 30% is a good estimate of gold drops. However, ten keys is too small a sample. Do this long enough and you will see a profit (if you follow my first two points).

you should be able to make up 6k on the mods, and then turn a profit on remaining at merchant if nowhere else but... the main concern i've found is time invested to sell the tiems which noone likes to do and it takes a while.

I like reading studies like this.

I've done 30+ keys. But one drop made me 100k+ and that made up for all the loses plus some. So at the moment, even though I'm sure I'm reaching 50-60 in Shiverpeak keys, I feel I still have made more, and its just from that one drop.

Salvaging upgrades helps a lot in making your money back, but most things are just junk and should just be merchanted.

you do know that if you get a purple on one map the rest on that same map are gunna be purple until you zone?

Chest runs @ Hells Precipice can produce good rewards. :x

And FoW, of course.


Edit2: LOL @ Trylo. Nice joke.

I think the Chests inside the Tombs(not HA) always drop rare weapons. I brought a key for each lvl, each chest droped gold.

Incorrect. Many a UW run (that'd be the OLD underworld, for your B/P guys ) we've had multiple chest spawns, mixed purple and gold.

Shiverpeaks: same.

Perdition: same.

FoW: Not tested, but no reason for it to be different

Please get your facts straight

insight +4 still sells for 1-2.5k no? and you got 3 to try for on staves?

Chest farming is much better with a FULL party. This spreads out the cost of testing each chest among 8 people. So instead of spending 10 keys, testing 10 chests, you test 1-2 and use the rest on Rare chests only because your other party members test it. If someone opens a rare chest, thats 8 rares right there.

I jsut did it alone, 10 keys, about 5 runs through ember avg about 4 min each... 4 gold, 6 purple, not bad tho... just salvage the mods and come a little above even

Indeed. Easiest way is to take turns, even go down the party list as to whom is going to use their key next. Then only one person loses the cost of a key if it's a purple chest but everybody benefits if it's gold.

Chests just plain suck until you reach the south shiverpeaks and later. There's no point at all in buying keys before then.

And I got a superior absorption from a chest in Abadon's Mouth, so chest drops can be very profitable. It somewhat made up for having to do that godforsaken mission 7 tmes just to cap Restore Condition. Somewhat.

I have a feeling that chest are going to be completely nerfed or keys removed.

Bots are becoming more sophisticated. Some believe that they are able to make a team of bots now for farming. If they can cordinate a running team they will be able to alternate keys till they hit a gold chest. Then you can get a gold for each character per chest.

This could potentially be very bad.

Yea and which were those ? Nothing I seen that you could sell for more than a couple a K, IF you want to sit in Droks, or LA and fight the spam(for hours most likeley, and then, quite possibly no luck), anything under perfect aint worth squat(maybe one off perfect fort or enchant mods, but not a +4 insight) so if your thinking those +4 insightfuls are jewels, so sad too bad, have fun trying to sell a +4 for more than 500g. Keys are for gamblers, they are gold sinks and nothing else really, go look at the auction its flooded with all kinds of nearly perfect merchant junk.