Darkstone Chest Run - 10 keys (6 platinum) Results

i do tombs runs a lot and never buy keys, they are a total waste of gold especially for those of us who hate selling to players and cant be bothered wasting time spamming wts for hours

I like phantom and obsidian chests.. least you have a chance to get something worth a few hundred thousand- outside of those 2 =\ not much

I was lucky i got a 120k item from a chest, but havent sold it yet and a tip never open the first chest you see its mostly purple lo

Chests are a gamble of course, however if you get lucky it's so worth it. I was one of the lucky ones and probably spent around 20k on darkstone keys, and made a total profit of over a million gold.

I never buy Darkstone key's, i buy Minor Key's for SF and Shiverpeek key's

Dam, i think you're the one who tried to sell me a zelous axe haft for 5k. I think the price is somewhere 1k. GOOD math

Garaunteed not me, never sold an upgrade to this day. If anything, I sold 6 chaos axes. and thats it.
Ive bought a couple zealous mods for a sword and axe, and got raped doing so. Dont point fingers, you'll get burned.

BAD accusation.

Hey I'm glad most of you got a kick out of this thread. I was up very early in the morning and was bored and decided to do this on a whim. Korea had favor.

There were few constructive posts, and then there was a lot of posts I knew people would try to take the opportunity to voice what they believed and lash out. Let's get to it.

Very good point. Even if I had found that one rare item, the inherent value wouldn't be astronomically high if I sold it to the merchant. Not like there is a "Rare Item Trader" around. This was just a quick experiment to compare some values some would not think to compare, to get a different perspective. For many reasons which I stated in another thread, selling to players these weapons I found in the chests isn't such a good idea. If some would like me to elaborate, I will. To summarize, it would be hard to find a buyer, and you would be wasting your time.

[Others have pointed this out later on in the thread, but I quoted yours because it was the first and short.]

This is another good way to go about chests, probably THE only good way to go about them. I did this solo, because it was early and I did not want to have to deal with fighting mobs of monsters with a team to get to certain chests. I know chest parties probably rez each other in case of danger, or have some tactic, but for this quickie, I just wanted some fast solo results. But yes, chest farming is best done with full party. G1.

I knew someone would reply with that, and that is why I added that first sentence disclaimer, and mentioned it again later on.

To be honest, I have only recently started playing the Monk profession, and still don't fully grasp the importance of caster mods, and since most chest drops consist of caster items, I don't know their worth. My downfall, I know.
And yes, obviously selling the items back to the merchant is the worst-case scenario, but in many cases that is what a lot of people end up doing for the reason that some items are worthless drops/mods. For me, I can't be bothered to sit and sell. I know at least the maximum limit of many mods so I know to salvage something, but having that stastical data there does not imply that I sell solely to the merchant to make a profit. That would be ridiculous. I wanted to make match up with the price of the key with the value of the item from the merchant. Who knows, maybe they'll change the price of the key to be less in the future, although that is doubtful. If a certain type of chest has a great chance to drop something "godly", then it will probably have a higher price tag, which is probably why the price of Obsidian Keys are so high.

I am thinking of selling all of these items for 600g each, but I am afraid too many people would contact me and I will have to deny all those that didn't PM fast enough. I don't plan to profit on these, but if you would like to tip me for what you think it's worth, I would appreciate it.

Alcazanar, do I know you? Certainly I don't think you know me well enough to make such a flaming comment. I will make it a note to put you on my "people to ignore" list when browsing these forums. I had wish the moderators had done something about you; people with your attitude are a cancer to forums like these. Look up the word "tact" in the dictionary.

If not conclusive, I'm glad you found it "fun". I had a sort of fun doing it, although compiling all the screenshots(photo editing), and typing it all up was pretty bland. I am also eagered to see more drop results.

I never set out to disprove otherwise. What I believe is that in order to capitalize from these chests, you will need to go "all-in", or none at all. I am not about to go "all-in", and I believe casual players should not either. I like to think of these chests are for those players too rich with gold to know what to do with; I'd say the 10% of the GW population that is overflowing with gold. But, that is just my opinion.

Good to know, I suppose. I eagerly await GW "Auction houses".

I agree.
I agree.
Go for it. Those Drakes are fast as heck! And there were times I thought I would be Shadowstriked to death.



I am also very interested in the future state of these keys. I would really like to get the word out that they are "gold-sinks" really, unless you are devoted to it 100%.

SUMMARY :

• If you want to gamble on chests, you need 'risk-it-all' mentality to come out in the end, and even then you don't know how much you will need to spend to hit it. You could go bankrupt. -o.0- It makes sense; the more times you run into GOLD chests, the higher your chance at hitting the probability.
• Chest farming in groups is more productive than alone.
• Be prepared to spend some time to sell your items to other players to lessen the net loss. Or else you will take a big hit.
• More CLASS PROFESSIONS makes it much harder to get the item you want.
• The price of the key is related to the maximum possible drop value. Higher investment, higher loss/reward.

I am sort of tempted to spend 60plat on 100 keys and do a complete solo trial, or even a trial with a group, but I think I've had my fill with keys, and I'm not sure there is anything godly from the Darkstone chests that I really want. I'm sticking with the safer method, and that is farming (but then again I was bored with that in the first place which is why I did this,... FPE couldn't come sooner).

-[XGZ]

did a couple of the Fire Island missions today--8 keys, 4 gold + 4 purples

are you blind? Didnt you see what he got, nothing but merchant food that crap wont sell for anything.

oo how much for that Zelous Hand Axe?

ign = Smurf Default

thanks ^^

Yeah, it has to do with your character's seed so go with someone who has a better seed and let him/her open them first. Of course this only means you can choose the gold chests. I've done over 100 runs, last run was with 33 keys, 25 were purple and out of the golds over half of them were req 13 and nothing worthwhile selling to another person. I've known that char to have a bad seed though (my guildies and runningmates always tease me about it even and tell me to delete him or take another character).

Try keys on another character. Out of 4 of them you should have 2 or 3 with a decent seed, maybe even one with a good seed. Believe me that when you run with a character that has a good seed (or have one) you will definitely notice (most of the time as even with seeds there is still the bad times that come up with their algorithm).

I think they are more fun than anything else, i always take a couple when going on a UW or FoW run with a group, bit of entertainment really, rarely get good things, but i probably break even.

Nothing there is really worth the time to sell to players...I tend to agree with the OP. I mean if the mods were perfect but the time it takes to sell a 10/8 sundering or a +4 energy mod is annoying <-> inhibiting depending on your luck.

FoW chest runs have been fruitful for me...and its been fun!

I found a perfect fellblade and chaos axe but spent 90k on keys so i made about 400k as both are worth around 250k each

it took 60 keys (30-40 trips) before I found anything, but as I said it was fun you just have to be patient.

I usually get quite decent stuff out of Darkstone... a few are:

Super Fire
Rare Magmas (req10)
3/-1 +15% ench wingblade
+5>50 +18% blood recharge cesta

Are a few... i usually make far more than I spend from Darkstones (one of the better keys imho). Luck ftw!

This is offtopic but the table breaking images next to each other make this thread a pain to read.

Can you maybe add a line break please?

Plenty of purples come out of tombs chests, and rarely decent weapons.

Had you actualyl took the time and had you actualyl gotten some of those upgrades, you could have very well made your money back.

Zealous axe haft = 1-2k (normally althought price seems to be going up)
Staff wrapping armor +5 - 5k easy
Energy +4 insightful head - around 5k
Health +25 staff wrapping - i could see between 2-7k depending on your responses to this as advertised.

in all u might have made a profit. that is providing that you got those upgrades and found buyers for them. but trading = sux

but from the looks of it. you got hosed tommy! (MT DEW commercial reference ftw)

It seems to me that the real trick in being profitable with key runs is not to BUY the keys, but to FARM the keys. If you can afford it (and have nothing better to do ) alternate between farming with a 55 monk and a 55 necro until you have a bunch of keys, and then go off on a big chest farming run with a few other people (to avoid those pesky purple chests). Yes, its going to take a bit more time, but you make more money in the long run mes thinks.

I'll go on a run myself in a bit and post up the results for people to see later.

Reading this thread makes me wonder how many items of value end up getting sold to merchants because we hate trying to find human buyers. I hope Anet makes the auction-house a priority. It would totally revolutionize the in-game economy.

Then again, that is probably why it *isn't* a priority -- they may be afraid the bottom will drop out of the economy.

Unless I missed a recent update where anet changed their minds about it, it seems to me it was hinted at (by the frog I think?) that there would be auction houses coming in the near future (possibly the same time factions is released).

Probably very true. Personally, I don't have the space to save everything and wait for a buyer, nor do I have the patience to spam Lion's Arch all day. I do my best to post auctions on Guru, or try to hang on to valuable items, but as it is, I already have one level 20 character that is a pain to unload (only to load up another one) just to play and be able to pick up drops. With saving materials, ecto, shards, armor, etc, etc... it is impossible to wait for someone for everything.

At one point I had a very nice Earth Staff that got numerous price checks of around 60k. I held on to it for about 4-5 months before I finally got fed up with finding a buyer and just sold it to the merchant. Sometimes it's just not worth it.

Maybe this could contribute to XeNoGeArZ's experiment... As i had 6K to spend and some free time, i took my drok runner build to make the same chest run

Once again, 10 Keys running chests and picking the drops... Here are the results in order :

=== Chest n°1 ===


=== Chest n°2 ===


=== Chest n°3 ===


=== Chest n°4 ===


=== Chest n°5 ===


=== Chest n°6 ===


=== Chest n°7 ===


=== Chest n°8 ===


=== Chest n°9 ===


=== Chest n°10 ===


Overall results :
5 Golds / 5 Purples, as you can see, pretty bad drops
Total value of items (merchant price) = 1978 g
Total loss (Expense - benefit) = -4022 g (67%)

Personal notes :
2 mounths ago i did made some chests runs and stopped because there was hardly a chance to get some good drops from chests. This run was just for fun and to compare what i would get with what XeNoGeArZ dropped. IMO chests should be avoided at all costs, they're not gold sink, they're fool traps

the gold/purple seems about 50/50.

Something I'm curious about for both experiments, did you guys have favor when you tried it? Also curious about whether or not you guys might have set off the anti-farming script earlier with your warrior? I'm also curious to test how different locations might have different drops.

As soon as we have favor I'm going to take 10 shiverpeak keys and try mineral springs, I'll keep everyone posted.

Mhh i can't really recall about who had the favor when i did the run... For the anti farming script, i've not been farming much (3-4 minos runs in elona) in the last 24 hours, and not a single chest open in like a week.

I did 4 runs total, warping to town beetween each run to reset the chests. on the 2nd run i've visited all of the map to find 4 chests, the other runs i've opened the first 2 chests i found (mainly in the eastern-center zone of the map).

Hope this answers your questions