loot

Windsward Outer Amrine Temple Farm

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday we had a patch to the game that introduced the Turkulon event and it might have impacted drop rates on these bosses. My friend Vern was trying to farm Putris and having no luck, but I joined him out there and started getting drops within no time. So I am not sure if Vern is just unlucky or if the 590 items are a bit rarer than they were previously. I just wanted to give you a heads-up as you venture forth to farm gear, that it might take longer than expected or that drop chances might go up if you are in a group. Today’s farm is pretty simple and involves the level 24 elite named Kar-El the Gate Keeper that guards the giant blue door at the outdoor portion of the Amrine Temple complex. There are only two drops available on the loot table, but they seemed to drop quicker than some of the camps but your mileage may vary.

The easiest port to get to this encounter is to go straight north from the Amrine Temple Expedition teleport and then loop along the top of the Amrine Complex and enter from the north. This will allow you to ascend to the top of the temple area where this boss spawns. I tried to come in from the Windsward side which is also doable, but it involved running around a lot until I could find a place to ascend. While you are set up there you might end up needing to clear a half dozen random ancient spawns that also appear on this top tier of the temple. The boss itself has the standard five to six-minute respawn timer, with the occasional random instant respawn behavior that most encounters seem to have.

I came out here to add a Fire Staff to my repertoire of 590 weapons for every possible type. However, there is also a pretty decent focus necklace that might be a solid pickup for healers. The necklace for me at least seemed to be more common than the Fire Staff as I got five of them to drop before getting my first staff. Again your mileage may vary because the game seems to “stick” on a single drop when farming these 590 items. You might have the opposite scenario of getting nothing but Fire Staves. Unfortunately, there seems to be nothing much else of note on the drop table other than these two items.

This farm was pretty straightforward and seemed to have better drop chances than Scratchy for example. It took me a little less than two hours to farm up both items and then move on to the next farm. I will admit though Vern gave me a bit of a heart attack yesterday making me think that after all of this work, they had done something to remove the 590 drops. While I have not verified all of the camps since the patch, I can verify that Putris and Red Claw are both still dropping so it is highly likely that everything is as well.

I still have several more of these, so I might break my own rule and post on Saturday just to churn through them and get them out the door. Again I have collected all of these into a category on the blog where you can find all of my Loot Farm guides for New World. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.

Reekwater Mosswater Bourg Farm

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Good Morning Friends! I still have a large stack of these camps to go through and this morning we are going to introduce a pretty enjoyable one. If you are Syndicate faction and have done all of your promotion quests, you will recognize this location because this is where Lost Alchemist Krockes spawns. However, he is not really who we are focused on because all of the good stuff actually drops from his pet alligator named Putris. Krockes also has a good drop on his table, but the vast majority of what we care about is sitting on the gator… but we will be killing both each time. The only real interruptions out here will be from other folks farming for drops or for syndicate players trying to complete the quest. Please let them do so and if you find them wandering around aimlessly… maybe send them a tell to let them know it is about to spawn again.

This is located due west of Reekwater town, and is on the border of Windsward… but entering in from that direction will just mean you have to clear away more encounters as the density of mobs is thickest along that edge. If you were being very careful you could honestly probably avoid fighting anything on your way to Krockes and Putris. There are a good number of spawns along the road however and if you stray off the path there is at least one of those silver-colored alpha wolves. Both encounters drop a piece of tradeskill gear, so it is actually fairly likely that you might encounter someone else farming with you. As always this is a good opportunity to group up and make a new friend as you while away the hours of farming for that drop you need. Krockes drops Obsidian Gypsum so he is a pretty easy way to farm your daily three.

All told it is a really great general camp especially for Dexterity-focused builds given you can pick up a Greatsword, Rapier, and Spear that are all drift compatible with that lifestyle. For those of you on Team Strength, then there isn’t much at all that is going to interest you. I do really like the Void Gauntlet overall since I tend to go down the tree that it is buffing. However, one thing I have noticed is it is like AGS over-compensated and puts twice as many Void Gauntlets, Greatswords, and Blunderbusses out in the world than they did other weapon types. Let’s dive into a rundown of the notable drops:

Another interesting side effect of this camp is you are very likely to walk away with a bag full of various legendary crafting materials. I think I farmed this for around four hours to get all of the drops. I saw 1 rapier, 1 greatsword, 3 void gauntlets, 5 spears, and around a dozen different legendary materials. You will also walk away with stacks of the highest-tier potions, which is admittedly one of the positives of the farmer lifestyle. I really need to track down a Strength-Based spear, but so far I have yet to find one… at least not from a farmable camp like this.

I believe I have six more of these waiting in the wings now, pending I don’t find any new ones to run off into the world and document. As always I have collected these in a Loot Farms category here on the blog, and I think my plan once completed is to add something to the Game Tools page that breaks the information out by weapon type. As always if you know any great spots that I have not visited that drop level 590 gear, please drop me a line below.

Edengrove Tadeas Stronghold Farm

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Good Morning Friends! Today we continue this mission to document gear farms in New World with one located near Valor Hold in Edengrove. Again this entire mission is to present some options for new to 60 players to go out and farm up some of the 590 named items that won’t degrade in level when you use them. This camp in particular is a little bit on the tougher side because it involves three spawns that are a challenge to split up. The one that drops what we need is Taedas an Angry Earth shaman-type creature, but spawning with it is a prowler melee type and an archer ranged type Angry Earth. Essentially breaking this spawn will always be a bit of a challenge, but in theory, if you can drag out your initial kill so that you leave yourself some breathing room between kills, it will make subsequent loops easier on you as they won’t ALL be spawning in at the same time. All three encounters should spawn in at level 57, which is doable for a reasonably geared level 60 solo.

This one is pretty close to the Valor Hold stronghold in Edengrove, which is the southernmost of the two outposts. You can get there by exiting the west side of town and hugging the eastern bank of the lake until you reach a set of ruins called Taedas Stronghold. The first part of your journey will have a lot of very aggro boars, but then will quickly transition into peaceful ones and the occasional random Angry Earth mob. If you hug the mountainside of the shoreline you can avoid most of these. Sadly there isn’t really anything interesting resource-wise to be gathered along the way other than boar hides. As you get closer to the ruins there will be an increased density of Angry Earth and breaking into the camp will involve clearing two sets of prowler/archer spawns. One interesting thing of note, there is an empty room that you can crawl into on the south side of the ruins if you need to take a break while farming.

It was really at this farm that I began to understand the extent of my madness. In order to verify these drops I wanted to make sure that I was able to get all of them. As I said in my last post, the New World Databases have been notoriously wrong about drops and still have things listed that have not dropped in a number of patches. This means that in many cases I have to spend an extreme amount of time doing the same kill over and over. I think on this camp it took me about four hours to see all of the drops in the rotation but during that time I got 4 of the Life Staff, 1 Void Gauntlet, and 1 Hammer which was the last thing I managed to pick up before dipping. Let’s take a look at the notable drops:

As I said above I spent about four hours at this camp and during that time I saw six drops off the 590 loot table. Four of those were the staff, and I got a single hammer and void gauntlet. This is not going to be a fast way to get gear unless you are exceedingly lucky, but it is predictable and can be farmed without a group. This again can be taken all of the ways to 625 with the use of Umbral Shards and the upgrade mechanic for gear level 590 or higher. Tadeas also has a chance of dropping legendary crafting materials, but during my four-hour stint, I did not see any drop. You will also get a lot of high-level potions and assorted crafting materials that drop from Angry Earth in general. It is a bit of a boring farm especially due to the low-lighting conditions within the temple itself, but if you need any of the items above it is worth your time.

I have at least two more of these documented so far, and plan on trying a few more spots over the weekend so expect to see this series continue at least into next week. Do you know any great spots that I should check out? Drop me a line below.

Loot Problems

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Shocking to no one I spent the majority of my weekend playing Anthem again.  It was a bizarre weekend for those of us who spent both Friday night and Saturday playing because some things happened.  Firstly the the 1.0.3 patch that we were expecting to land on the 12th launched a bit early on the 9th around 7 am, meaning when I woke up for the day I had a significant patch to download.  However Friday night…  they did the thing where they accidentally set the loot drops too high and we were getting Masterworks left and right.  Once again the community thought this was intentional…  because ultimately it is what we have been clamoring for all this time.  However with the launch of the patch it was rolled back…  and it has been a bit hard to separate the good of the patch with the bad of having loot nerfed again.

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Anthem has a loot problem, namely that it is way too stingy with Masterworks but more importantly too stingy with Legendaries.  All told I have gotten 4 Legendary drops in what is now 164 hours worth of play time.  Dividing that out it is me seeing a Legendary drop every 41 hours of play time.  There are folks out there who have racked up similar hours and have yet to see a single one.  It was the futile hope of the player base that when we removed Whites and Greens from dropping in post 30 content… that it would have a positive effect of skewing the number of Masterworks and Legendaries we would get.  However as some testing has shown…  essentially every green and white drop was replaced by a purple…  which is awesome if you are just getting started but more disenchant fodder once you enter the hunt for Orange and Lime (that’s what I am deciding to call legendary green).  There is an interesting post that was up on the reddit over the weekend…  where a player farmed 200 drops with +95 luck before and after the patch, linking to the original thread but going to post the data here for reference.

Pre-Patch Numbers

  • Common: 17 items at 8.5%
  • Uncommon: 24 items at 12%
  • Rare: 34 items at 17%
  • Epic: 102 items at 51%
  • Masterwork: 21 items at 10.5%
  • Legendary: 2 items at 1%

Post-Patch Numbers

  • Rare: 28 items at 14%
  • Epic: 163 items at 81.5%
  • Masterwork: 7 items at 3.5%
  • Legendary: 2 items at 1%

The original poster went to the trouble of documenting all of their loot with screenshots, but accounting for randomness it does appear that the Common and Uncommon slots are now just Epic items, which again is great for people getting a start in the game but bad for anyone who has collected a set of epic gear which now happens frighteningly fast under the current loot environment.

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All of that said… I am still enjoying myself and have managed to cobble together gear for three different javelins at this point.  I will probably be starting on the Storm at some point soon once I have spent a bit more time fine tuning the Interceptor.  Right now I have something that I would call a proper build on both the Ranger and the Colossus, and I will be farming content until I reach that point on the Interceptor as well.  How I am getting there…  is because I am exploiting the fact that Strongholds drop a guaranteed ability and Legendary contracts drop a guaranteed component.  While I only have three legendary contracts available to me each day, it seems that Quickplay on Grandmaster 1 difficulty tends to place you into a Legendary Contract more often than not…  and doing this nets you a guaranteed component as well.  Stronghold Quickplay similarly nets you a guaranteed ability drop…  however in my experience this is bugged out the vast majority of the time and not really worth your effort.

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Now I realize there are a lot of players out there that have been having issues with the game nonstop since release.  However for the most part I had not…  until this weekend when I started heavily relying on Quickplay.  That functionality seems to be far more buggy than the rest of the game, and I am wondering if the majority of the issues that players have been encountering have revolved around trying to do this abbreviated path to loot.  Normal Quickplay seemed to stick me in far fewer bugged out instances than it did before the patch, however when something went wrong… it went REALLY wrong often times causing me to have to either go through a loop of being bounced back to the loading screen like the above screenshot… or having to hard kill the client.  Starting Missions, Contracts, Strongholds and Freeplay myself all resulted in predictably smooth gameplay…   however any time I dared to mess with Quickplay I was effectively playing with fire.

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Another byproduct of the patch is that overall Javelin power feels like it has increased, and a side effect of that is that none of the lower difficulty ranks seem to be anywhere near as populated as they were.  Thalen reported issues getting full groups on normal difficulty as he was playing through the story and leveling, and I personally experienced a challenge getting groups at hard difficulty when I was attempting to finish getting the epics on my Interceptor.  So one of two things has happened… either the average player has released that they can now crush Grandmaster 1 thanks to the power scaling, or more likely a lot of players have just stopped messing with the game out of frustration over various issues.  Neither case is great for the game as a whole because it makes it harder and harder to onboard a supply of new players.  Grace will be starting up this week and I will be curious to see how that experience is as a new player and whether or not the matchmaking is as quick as it was for the rest of us that started out.  Side note since I have done this pretty much every week, throwing out a screenshot of the Alliance contribution screen…  I have yet to hit the hard cap for the week.

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One final screenshot of note…  since I played a bit of Warframe this weekend…  I am pretty sure these two chests in the hanger area are a nod to that game.  Anyone has played much Warframe will notice that they have a lot of lockers scattered throughout the ships that look suspiciously similar to these.  Also oddly enough playing a lot of Anthem has somehow made Warframe feel more manageable?  I was not nearly as motion sick playing it yesterday as I have been in the past, and the way too zoomed in perspective did not feel anywhere near as bad as it had after playing the whirling ball of death that is the Interceptor.  I still greatly prefer Anthem, but I have a feeling I could probably start to finally delve into Warframe if I so choose.

So where we are left is that Anthem needs to make a lot of changes quickly.  Chad Robertson the Head of Live Services chimed in over on twitter with some comments to this whole situation.  It spans several tweets so quoting rather than just pasting the thread for ease of consumption.

We appreciate all the feedback from the community on the game. We love the passion and share it. We’re not yet fully happy with the game’s loot behavior either. One of the downsides of moving so fast to improve is that we’re making changes to complex loot systems in several areas and it’s then harder to know how it’s performing. In the next few months, we’re expecting to make significant changes, but we’re starting with some incremental ones so we can better navigate that evolution. Our goal is to ensure the best possible player experience.

So while I appreciate this comment, because they are actually saying words in reference to problems…  which is a step above a lot of studios out there.  The biggest problem that I have with this comment is the fact that he mentions the time frame of “the next few months”.  I am not entirely certain that they have months…  and more likely have weeks to sort this out before players simply give up and file this game in the bin of “check back for year two” like so many of us did with Destiny.  We already see the signs in matchmaking of players dropping out of the system, which is a bad sign.  Additionally the temperature of the Reddit has shifted drastically over the last few days, which was a different situation than the inflammatory YouTube community…  they were positive and hopeful and I think were pinning their hopes on the patch from March 12th fixing a lot of the major issues…  namely with loot drops.  That however has drastically shifted to a community demanding fixes now, because Patch 1.0.3 did not deliver the solace they were hoping for.  While I am still playing the hell out of this game… I cannot say they are necessarily wrong in their frustrations.

There have been two situations where supposedly accidental loot changes have “fixed” the game.  In both times the game felt so much better because it didn’t feel bad when you got another Masterwork with crappy rolls, because you knew another one was right around the corner.  The unbridled excitement of actually seeing a legendary drop, and knowing that this wasn’t a once in a career thing…  made you care less about also getting crappy rolls on it too.  Loot needs to flow like water Diablo 3 style so you can pick through the dross and cobble together something resembling a proper build.  Nothing is more frustrating than getting a bunch of abilities you don’t care about… when you have a specific style of play that you enjoy on your character…  but feel forced to use the Masterworks because the item level increase makes them just flat out superior to using a proper build.  All of this felt less of the case when the loot was accidentally generous…  and the players will not be satisfied until we get something resembling that state again.