Where's Nicholas?

[salaboB]

Okay, can I give people some advice on this matter.
I'm assuming that a lot of you are blowing through mob groups very quickly. You're getting decent amounts of golds, but not much else.

Here's a clue. Do NOT agro more then one group. Loot scaling is in full effect here, and the more mobs you kill in a short span of time, the less of the white drops you'll end up getting.
Twice now, I've gone with two seprate people.
One had an agressive build like Lytha's. She was agroing 3 groups at a time, and blowing through them like hot knife through butter. But through the first run, we got ONE saph drop.
I told her to slow down, do one group at a time. She said that would make this to slow.
I said do you want to do 3 runs and no drops, or 1 run and many drops.
She listened, reluctantly at first as we did get some saph drops, but they were for me. Later on it started splitting up more evenly.
By the end of the run I had gotten 4, she got 4.

So my suggestion again to many of you, SLOW the F*** down, and stagger the groups and kills.

I'm sorry, that was just random luck. Going at normal speed, one run I got no essences. The next I got 1. The next I got 5. Then 1 again.

What you're confused about is the aoe-insta death loot reduction -- if you kill a mass of enemies in one shot (Do a bunch of AoE to all at once and kill them all at exactly the same time) the amount of drops you receive is massively reduced compared to normal. Simply killing them fast one after the other does not contribute to this.

[Kendel]

Honestly, I was thinking the opposite -- I wish Nicholas was collecting either ruby or diamond essences.

I have enough of both to get gifts for both accounts.

><

Nope i'm happy with Sapphire. 10 Sapphires to 1 Ruby to 0 Diamond... thats how completely screwed up my drops were.

And yes it does sound like your mistaking the old AoE style farming where your Ele would demolish the entire mob at the same time with the same spell to gradually after each other. When you get down to it, more than 3 melee'ers attacking you at once, they will usually scatter after a certain amount of damage, and with Ruby Djinns dealing far less damage in melee they tend to be the only ones left attacking you. They definatly don't die together and you can even assist with this by using EVAS/FH on them at different tiems.

[The Praetorian]

What you're confused about is the aoe-insta death loot reduction -- if you kill a mass of enemies in one shot (Do a bunch of AoE to all at once and kill them all at exactly the same time) the amount of drops you receive is massively reduced compared to normal. Simply killing them fast one after the other does not contribute to this.

There is a really good post on this on guru called "Drop rates - A synthesis", it shows that the more time you take between kills the more loot drops. Interesting stuff.

Still in this case I'd take faster kills (and thus more kills in the same time) over slower.

[biofrog]

I'm going to go ahead and state Taro Leaves will definitely come up at some point :-)

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Taro_Leaves

[sixshot]

I had trouble getting Sapphire Essences to drop for me after several runs. But this is just with me as cannon fodder warrior with Discord heroes. It was frustrating for me as I keep getting Essences for all the wrong type: Ruby and Diamond. After trying for about 1.5 days of repeated dives into Ahdashim, I gave up at 6 and bought the last 4 at 2k a pop. At that time, I was seeing buy/sell prices at 3k and up. So a bit of patience can go a long way.

But after getting my gifts, I went to my derv and crafted up a secondary armor for a 130 setup. In about 30 minutes time of trying and learning the build, I got 3 essences to spare, which I later gave to an alliance-mate. Compared to just me and my heroes, I would have earned those essences a lot faster and in an hour, instead of perhaps 5 or 6 hours. Loot scaling at work? Nah, I just have terrible luck...

[shadowhand]

Took me 3 relaxed runs with my elementalist. Glad it wasn't diamond essences, because I only got 3 of those in total.

Got about 10 ruby essences though. So all in all, quite profitable as 2 of the diamond essences salvaged to diamonds and I got 3 rubies from the ruby essences.

Horrible drops though, but I guess the treasure chest made up for it. Been more than a year since I took my ele to dasha vestibule for it last.

[Sjeng]

build please? :D

[shadowhand]

...just a bunch of water magic hexes and full henchmen and heroes. With 2 of the heroes being water eles as well. Nothing special.

[Sjeng]

Ah, i thought you solo'd it. sorry ;)

[Xplosiv]

It can be SOLOed with E/ME. I watched that :)