Chests & keys: rant or praise

Tell me that this is just me:

I have now spent about 10k on keys, specifically Shiverpeak keys. I have been wandering the South Shiverpeaks for some time and used all of those keys. My return has been about 1k, an ROI of -90% seems hardly acceptable. Included in my loot has only been purple items, not a single gold item, runes I have already unlocked that only sell for 25g. I understand they have tried to make more gold sinks, such as the fee for entering a new guild. But, gee if I am going out of my way after killing a mob to hunt down and open a chest I should at least get rewarded for it. Additionally the notes say that keys drop of monsters. I have yet to see a single key drop, what is the deal with that.

So my question is am I on crack? Are other people having this same issue? Is this actually an issue or are keys in fact 100% worthless?...

Its not crack Indy....def PcP lol.....but i havent seen a key drop yet either....just have to be patient....IMO i think they put alot of the chests in to leave an updated element for the people who havent reached the end reaches of the game. Ive bought cheap keys and recieved a gold item before...since i dont have a massive amount of money or godly weapons so it helped me anyway

Keys do drop from monsters, I was in a group last night in Sorrow's Furnace and saw a Mine's Key drop for one of my party members. It's the only one I've ever seen though...
On a side note, when I first bought the keys I thought they'd work for all or at least more than one chest! Boy was I disappointed for 600g...

I got a miners key last night in the furnace, and yes they are a waste because of the green drops from bosses now and with the falling prices of gold and purple because of the demand of greens IMO they are a waste but if your a newbie they are good again IMO.

I have had 2 keys drop for me in grenths in a group of henchies (which is a part of the shiverpeaks, so a shiverpeak key i received). Off the two chests I have opened I received one max dmg gold bow with lightening and 10% dmg vs undead and a sup rune of ranger marsmanship.

maybe i have good luck?

Shmash!

I tried my first key last night in the shiverpeaks (paid 600 gold for 1) and all I got was a lousy rune of minor illusion magic (worth 25 gold). Don't feel bad the suckiness goes around.

you all know you should sell those minors and majors to the mechant before you salvage them you get more then 25 gold just id the armor then sell no salvage.

I've gotten keys at loot from trolls and griffons in the shiverpeaks and the desert. But I agree, I won't be buying keys any time soon...

My first key usage got me a monk superior rune of healing prayers. I got very lucky .

try using them in grenths if you want something nice, i did and i am happy. prolly same applies to furnace

Shmash!

I have spent a bunch on 6 keys and have only got stuff for my second profession and the section with NO attribute points! The stuff is not useable by me and from the market seems that no one else wants it..and the merchant who sold you a 600 or 700g key will only pay 60g if that much for the stuff.

I have been using them only in Sorrow's Furnace.

When soloing I see that my chances (~60%) of getting a gold item seems to be better then when I am in a group (~40%). I have already gotten over 12 gold items from various chests. Not all them are good and rarely do they sell for the price of the key....but that is not the point.

Keys are like gambling. You are hoping to get a good weapon for yourself. A majority of the time you get stuff for another class. Hopefully you have multiple characters. If not, I think they are trying to encourage you to make more characters! A lot of those items would sell for more than the price of the key, if you sold them to others! I know I would have bought some of my 12 items for more than the price of the 12 keys, so for me the gamble has payed off!

I've had the same experience. I won't waste any more money on keys.

Don't buy keys, hunt for them. Because technically, if each Key cost 750g (shiverpeak) then every item you get from using a key should yield 750+ gold, but that is not the case. We spend 750g per key only to open a chest once, and recieve a mediocre item that would sell for 120g at merchant, or if you're lucky 500g with some player... there's no source of income but a sheer chance at gambling for that "uber" item.

2 keys have dropped for me so far, so they do drop. However it would be nice if Merchants could buy stuff back for a decent price. Right now it's not really worth the headache of trying to sell some of the drops if you bought a key cause you're never gonna get your investment back half of the time.

I buy keys get item from chest and sell them to other people just for the cost of the key.
last night i got a max gold hammer and sold it for 2k that is a small profit and i dont think i nailed anyone with that price.
I do agree the keys are over priced but what can we do other then not buy them?

side note i sold a +30 health hammer upgrade for 600 just the price of the key.

From another forum.

i have had 2 Kryta keys drop and one Ascalon key so far

I've had 0 key's drop for me yet... and I dread getting a key because of my past luck with chest's and henchies...

does anyone know if you use a key on a chest and have a henchie party.. are you guaranteed to get the/a drop from the chest or will the henchies have their fair share at em?

I ask because before the update I seem to have not gotten anything from a chest 95% of the time.. pfft! Would hate to spend money on a key (or find one) use it and get nothing from it...

It's your key, and the item that drops (and there always is a drop) is assigned to you. Everyone in the party that has a key gets to loot the chest one time.

Personally, the ROI on the keys is roughly break even. The earlier post referencing a comment that this gives the player an opportunity to find a good item for unlock or their own use is quite pertinent.

I've seen keys drop for Ascalon (I've actually gotten more keys than chests!), Shiverpeak, and a Miner's key in the GF area.

In comparison to time spent throughout the entire game versus the 1 1/2 hr spent in new quests.....far more rare drops now and THEY at least have mods!!!!

My first chest opening experience netted a rare item - so don't go griping about it because it's random and beats the hell out of opening a chest to get no drops or less than worthless drops.

Great! I always hated chest's because I hardly ever got any drops from them or if anything dropped it was a piddly amount of gold that I'd have been lucky to get 2 gold from once shared!

*pokes tongue out at Henchies* no more will you steal my loot!

I personaly love this new system,it's like playing the lottery,Ive gotten several gold items,unlocked about 10 runes since yesterday,right on Anet!

The OP is just unlucky. I've bought and opened about 50 keys/chests and I've gotten 2 really uber cool items with perfect mods, about 5 or 6 items that are good enough that I could sell them for about 8-10k each and the rest were worth less than the keys themselves. But selling the good items for 10k each paid for the keys and then some, plus I recouped a little cash from selling the worthless items to the merchants, and I came out ahead with 2 perfect items. It was worth it to me. I'll continue to buy the keys.

Ok the cost of the keys are too much for people like me that have not much gold to spare! I tried and got only one gold and two purple items and not very good.
Just for fun, you go in Ascalon and buy them for 50 gold but what will you do with the usless items you'll find? Give them away for free to low lvl characters players!

Chests are a popular discussion topic these days. Some of you enjoy this new form of gambling, some of you simply hate chests for various reasons. Some of you think perfect rares drop too often, and some of you think that buying keys is stupid because of the low drop rate. In an effort to keep the discussion healthy, I'll close some sterile threads and start a new one (based on various posts from previous threads).

Please keep posting about chests & keys, but try to be constructive. You have the right to think and to say that chests are good or that chests are bad. But always keep cool and be nice. You can tell ANet did something good and not sound like a fanboy, and you can talk of balance/design/content weaknesses without being rude, cynical, condescending or worse.

You don't have to behave like an orc to be heard.

Be positive. It doesn't hurt.



CHESTS & KEYS: THE FACTS

Chests can drop:
- Junk items (purple or gold)
- Runes: from minor to superior
- Max items with decent/good mods (like wands with energy while above 50%)
- Good/max components you can salvage
- The merchant value of these items is always inferior to the value of the key used (barring a handful of superior runes)
- Keys also drop from monsters, you are not forced to buy them

On the player market, you can sell a few chest items for a very good amount of gold, but most chest items are not even worth trading away. You can get very sweet items (I got a couple of those), as well as a buttload of junk (I got that too). With the general increase of item drops in GF/SF, the highend items may become easier to get.

CHESTS & KEYS: THE CONSEQUENCE

Chests are a new form of gambling. They convert excess gold into rare items. This should help suck a lot of 'dead' gold out of the economy, as it gets gambled into random rare drops. Remember that people will often pay 5k for an unided max rare regardless of type. Chests are significantly cheaper than that, and much faster and easier.

Chests are used as:
- A gold sink (yes, they were *designed* to make you spent your gold on a gamble)
- A way to ensure the best items/components drop at a decent ratio to the 'standard' player (read: non-farmer), so as to keep inflation under control.

ANet can tweak the global chest drop rate, and they can implement hidden auto-nerfs of your own drops (drop quality decreasing slowly if you're a gambleholic). It's a server change, so they can do it on the fly, without the need to streamline a patch. Therefore ANet can either inject more good items to balance out farming activities, or make this gamble less/more exciting than monster farming.

PREVIOUS CHEST THREADS (CLOSED)

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=58916
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=57684
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=57027
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=57230
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=57158

Because of the chests, you may find rare items hard to sell by text. But in the future when they release the auction house, you should be able to sell anything if you slap the right price on it.

And that is why I am not worried about the economy.

Hope this fits the thread criteria, it's not really pos or neg, but it's also not a rant/flame

Did some experiments over the weekend. Spent 60k on keys (yes 100 of them) and kept all the items I got. A lot of gold items came out and some upgrades off the purple drops, but overall I came out with items of total value < 60k.

Chests are a gold sink, no two ways about it.

Personally I love GW in terms of the tech, character and combat systems but the heavy lean towards nerfing all grind and farming will push me away from it prematurely. I have racked up 500 hours play and 4 characters, and I really feel like there is nothing left to do anymore except tred the same paths I have done before, with no hope of getting anything other than (essentially meaningless) experience (meaningless because by level 20 [+10] I have unlocked all the skills I am actually ever going to use for a given class).

Not ranting or moaning here, Just kinda wistfully imagining another version of GW where farming, or item hunting as I prefer to call it, was a more accepted part of the game and recognised as something a lot of people want to do.

I don't buy keys anymore, I did, it is a fun gamble but not really worth it unless you get something real good. However will use ones that drop for me or sell them at lower than merchant prces.

I do buy one key, the key for the Underworld chests when I go in only because I have heard some people got Crystaline swords from them, I dont know how true that is but if it is, that is worth a gamble.

before there was complaining on chests harvest... now we have a new problem and that is more seriouse than the first one we did have....

if you are a warrior you can get money more easly and you can harvest keys more easly and have bigger chance to get good items without much effort. instead of all having equal chests harvesting for all, now others that is not warriors must work their ass of to get money for keys, and in most cases there is just crap to find in these chests, this is not fair.....

Well, I once came face to face with a chest in SF that had 'MY Perfect WEAPON' only I had no key to open it. I vowed right there that I will always have spare keys just in case...

Seriously though, I did a few runs out of the war camp with a full henchie team and at the end of each run, after i replenished my stock of keys and sold most of the crap items to the merch, I was sort 2k on the average from when I started. In each run I opened at least 5 chests, sometimes more. I'm not counting the time I got a superior healing or the times I unlocked items or weapons I ended up keeping.

I don't think that's such a bad deal. Especially since i can recover my 2k (or more) with a 10 min run on my favorite farming spot

Ahhh...farm for gold to support chest runs.... what's wrong with this picture??
Well nothing for me. I have fun doing both.

Sent.-

Can you justify that? How exactly can a warrior get more gold more quickly than other classes? OK so farming griffons at Augury will make you a bit, but all classes can farm certain areas, and any class can get a team of 4+ henchies and go farm sorrows, grenths, or any of the numerous other profitable areas, i just dont agree with what appears to be the suggestion that the warriors in the game are on average better off than other classes. Support it with reasoning or drop it...

OT: Like the Monk, currently the Ele with ER, someone posted some good Warrior solo builds so many want them to be next on the nerfing block is all.

Looks like someone is going to need to go to gamblaholic anonymous

I'm leaning the direction of what Pain Killa was saying. While I do understand the need for a gold sink and this does appear to be a very effective one,I do not like the idea of them making the "rare items" as common as they are doing with this. I and I know many others who very much like the trading aspect of the game and trying to collect the perfect and rarest items feel as if that part of the game is being removed from us because others complained loudly enough that we had made a 15>50 req7 longsword to expensive for everyone in the game to get. My response to that is that everyone can't drive a Ferrari and it is not necessary for them to have one to get to work. I thought that the collectors with the perfect stat weapons were going to make sure that the "casual" gamers had access to the best weapons without having to work for them. I am willing to spend the time and come up with creative ways to make the money to get the things that I want and were supposed to be "rare" and that has been taken away from alot of people who enjoyed doing that as well so that everyone can have a Ferrari. Maybe I'm way off base here but would like to hear more opinions from the power collectors as well. What say you Nef?

How do you figure that is has reduced chest farmers? If anything it has multiplied them by incredible amounts. Go take a look at the sell forums at the people selling UNided Gold Items with 30 or 40 golds in there auction. They must be called golds now because rare just doesn't seem appropriate anymore.

How could you have possibly known that it had your perfect weapon in it?

Point taken, but eventually will people continue to buy these items when they can go out for a tenth of the price and "gamble" for them?

I think he was being ironic...

i havent bought any items off of anyone since the keys have come out. I love to gamble, i like to take a risk and see what i can get. i think its a great idea for a gold sink

Rant CHESTS AND KEYS SUCK.
Before it was a random drop from chests that distributed to all. Now you pay 450 - 650 for a key that I have yet to get a decent drop out of. After dumping over 5k in keys and getting no return. I dont use anymore. I would rather risk killing monsters for a drop than a stupid chest.