Curse

speedy21589 · Dec 28, 2006, 04:13 AM // 04:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nechtan Thaumaturge

Agreed.

Also, I wanted to mention one other thing suggested by your analysis: an Aatxe-only run. If you could clear the chamber and perhaps kill some of the outlying Aatxes in about the same amount of time that a Smite-only run takes, you'd have an equally profitable run. The battles will tend to be longer, but since you don't need to run anywhere or wait for the Coldfire Nights to clear, it might just be possible. The Aatxes can be picked off in groups of three easily enough, so scattering isn't a grave issue, and without Smite Hex to worry about, you can lay on the hexes with impunity. Mind you, survival isn't trivial, and you still have to worry about interrupts, but perhaps there is a suitable Monk, Necromancer, or Mesmer build out there for this sort of thing.

Well, if you just want to kill aatxes, the old 55 N/Mo build works wonders, if you keep those groups small. To get all 16 I believe you'd still have to kill the groups of graspings, though, which adds to your run time.

The only thing is, in runs where I've only killed aatxes (by which I mean, I died before I could get to smites), I typically don't make as much money from merchant fodder to cover the 1k entrance fee. In other words, for pure ecto drops, it might be equally fast to kill aatxes or smites, but in terms of getting raw plat from selling drops, I think smites win simply because there are more of them. (That's assuming run times for both are the same).

And there is usually a phantom chest in the ice wastes, which could drop something decent (although I've never gotten anything good).

Nechtan Thaumaturge · Dec 28, 2006, 04:42 AM // 04:42

Good point. I definitely neglected the contribution of merchant drops. The only way around that concern would be to kill the extra Aatxes by the Terrorwebs and Behemoths, which might take a prohibitively long time.

the storm · Dec 28, 2006, 05:41 AM // 05:41

Fastest Axates Only farm = ? (IMO, seems a waste to pay 1k and only clear the 1st room

)
Fastest Solo Axates + Smite farm = Echo Trapper
Fastest Solo Smite Only farm = Vengeful Farm

Thats about right in my opinion, the axates + smite farm is still slow with the trapper and there are faster ways to Duo (55, Famine for example). But if you insist on soloing thats probably your best bet to go with. I personally use Vengeful Farm because it goes much quicker. But hey, if you have the time to use trapper, go for it

.

PS: The Trapper can also clear most other parts of the Underworld as well where as you can only clear the Ice Wastes with Vengeful.

Bloodied Blade · Dec 28, 2006, 06:22 AM // 06:22

If you just want cash and ectos for FoW armor, Rt/Me soloer is the fastest thing out there because nothing can match the overall speed (to beat it you'd need around a 30min aataxe + smite run, which is pretty much impossible now). The R/Me famine can get to around 20-25min, but takes luck to do (and you usually have to ignore the last 1-2 groups of smites), and very good positioning skill.

I hate probability calculating...

A Leprechaun · Dec 28, 2006, 09:06 AM // 09:06

I only have a warrior, a mesmer and a necro at level 20 at the moment, what would my options be for farming the UW? would it be worth my time to level up a ritualist? or just get on with trying with my existing characters? I have a pre-searing ranger who i was going to develop into a trapper, would this be my best option?

Feedback please, cheers.

~A Leprechaun~

speedy21589 · Dec 28, 2006, 01:54 PM // 13:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by A Leprechaun

I only have a warrior, a mesmer and a necro at level 20 at the moment, what would my options be for farming the UW? would it be worth my time to level up a ritualist? or just get on with trying with my existing characters? I have a pre-searing ranger who i was going to develop into a trapper, would this be my best option?

Feedback please, cheers.

~A Leprechaun~

The warrior solo uw build is pretty much just for the challenge, as its pretty slow.

With a mesmer i think you could run 55 Illusionary Weaponry, with a scythe; again, its fairly slow.

Necro used to be the fastest aatxe + smite solo, until the newest aoe nerf. You could still solo aatxes with a 55 N/Mo using SS, but smites are tricky if they are in groups of 4 and especially in groups of 5.

If you intend to solo both aatxes and smites in one run, build a trapper. If you want to speed run smites, build a rit.

Just my thoughts.

Xethrion · Dec 28, 2006, 03:04 PM // 15:04

Want to point out that it might be worthwhile for you to level a rit up, since your ranger is only in pre-searing.

Note that the skill you need to cap however, is at the very latter parts of either Kurzick or Luxon territory, just before Unwaking. So you're going to have to follow the storyline for quite a bit before you can get your rit up and ready. I'd suggest taking Kurzick if you don't already have a char there, just to craft the focus from Vasburg

schmoky · Dec 28, 2006, 09:18 PM // 21:18

what is with an IW mo/me or me/mo with a scythe ???

Firey Archer · Dec 28, 2006, 09:34 PM // 21:34

Here is the link to Avarre's IW build.

Link

MMSDome · Dec 29, 2006, 12:38 AM // 00:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sean22190

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Build:A...ility_Assassin

Takes some work, but you'll get the hang of it.

can you tank 3 aatxes at a time though?

Saphon the Patient · Dec 29, 2006, 12:53 AM // 00:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xethrion

To do some number crunching, there are exactly 16 aatxes that you can kill before the smites, each with a 4.1 % chance of dropping ecto.

Therefore if you kill all, the chance of you getting an ecto is 16*4.1 (correct me someone, if this calculation is wrong), which is 65.6%.

Just to note that this method of calculation is incorrect, as someone else has previously pointed out.

The probability of getting at least one ecto from N aatxes, each with a probability of 0.041 of dropping an ecto, is derived as follows :

P(>0 Ectos) = 1 - [ ( 1 - 0.041 )^N ]

( If you prefer this in terms of a percentage, then multiply by 100 at the end of the calculation )

With N = 16, this is approximately 0.4882 ( or 48.82% if you prefer ).

So you would have a "roughly one in two" chance of getting an ecto from the Aatxes at the start of the underworld.

This method can be extended to give the probability of there being 2 or more drops and so on as follows.

P(>r Ectos) = 1 - P(0 Ectos) - P(1 Ecto) - ... - P(r Ectos)

Where ( using N as above )

P(1 Ecto) = N * ( 0.959^N-1 ) * 0.041 ... Think 16 different choices of which aatxe drops the ecto.

P(2 Ectos) = N * ( N - 1 ) * ( 0.959^N-2 ) * ( 0.041^2 ) * ( 1/2 )
... Think 16 choices for the first Aatxe to drop the ecto and 15 for the second, assuming no double drops, meanwhile noting that this counts each possibility twice.

P(k Ectos) = [ N! / k! ( N - k )! ] * ( 0.959^(N-k) ) * ( 0.041^k )

So using this method one can determine the probability of getting at least r ectos from the group of aatxes, at the start.

Finally one can use this method to work out the probability of getting at least r ectos from the UW if you complete both the initial aatxes and the smite crawlers.

The probability of getting at least 1 ecto from the whole run is :

1 - ( P(0 Ectos from Aatxes)*P(0 Ectos from Smites) )
= 1 - [ 0.959^16 * 0.983^38 ] = 0.733 ... i.e. a 73.3% chance.

The probability of getting at least 2 ectos is as follows :

1 - ( P(0 Ectos from Aatxes)*P(<2 Ectos from smites) + P(1 Ecto from Aatxes)*P(0 Ectos from smites) )
= 1 - [ ( 0.959^16 * ( ( 38 * 0.983^37 * 0.017 ) + ( 0.983^38 ) ) ) + ( ( 16 * 0.959^15 * 0.041 ) * ( 0.983^38 ) ) ]
= 1 - [ 0.4420781 + 0.1824806 ]
= 0.3754 to 4dp. ... i.e. approximately a 37.54% chance of getting 2 or more ectos from the run.

The others can similarly be worked out and I tabulate the first 3 as follows :

Minumum Number of Ectos -> Probability :
1 -> 73.3%
2 -> 37.54%
3 -> 14.09%

On the basis of this one can estimate ( since the probability of getting 4 or more is quite negligible ) the expected return per run of farming as being :

( 0.3576 * 1 ) + ( 0.2345 * 2 ) + ( 0.1409 * 3 ) = 1.2493 Ectos per run on average.

At 8k per ecto, and 1k cost per run, assuming no further drops, this would give a profit per run, on average of 8994 gp.

Of course in practice, this could be higher due to drops of gold and other saleable objects.

One could safely assume that there would be a potential profit per run, over the course of sufficiently many runs, of at least 9k per run.

speedy21589 · Dec 29, 2006, 02:28 AM // 02:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Saphon the Patient

One could safely assume that there would be a potential profit per run, over the course of sufficiently many runs, of at least 9k per run.

Probabilities would get even more tricky, I think, with the possibility of triggering the "anti-farming" code.

Also, using your formulas and ecto probabilties, I got the chance of at least one ecto from 38 smites to be ~47.9%, which is still about the same as the chance of at least one ecto from 16 aatxes.

OMGsplosion · Dec 29, 2006, 02:54 AM // 02:54

Just wondering also has anyone tried to farm the UW as a 55/SV/AS monk with a famine ranger hero? Does that work?

Saphon the Patient · Dec 29, 2006, 09:38 AM // 09:38

Yep - anti-farming code would mess things up.

I guess there is the possibility of tricking the game by farming multiple places intermittently and using the fastest build for each place, so as to avoid the code kicking in. Presumably it works on the basis of repetitive behaviour.

schmoky · Dec 31, 2006, 12:16 AM // 00:16

can someone maybe post a solo trapping and solo rt build with video

?

ColaManiac · Dec 31, 2006, 01:07 AM // 01:07

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10096512 well here is echo trapping build for atxes and smites...
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s....php?p=1672525 and here is trapping build for smites only...

schmoky · Jan 03, 2007, 03:30 PM // 15:30

can maybe someone post a rt solo smiters build?

pls
and anybody know a warrior/rt build for smiters+chaos+necros???

gabrial heart · Jan 03, 2007, 04:10 PM // 16:10

There are quite a few builds that work in some sort of half arsed way, but the fastest is the spirt bond/smiter 2 man for the better part of uw and has a pretty decent utility, meaning you can do more areas with it then just a smite run. No worries with the nightmares either. 55/ss/sv still works too, but the aggro is a lot more touchy then it used to be.

The smiter 2 man is posted on both gwshack and on wiki i believe and is fairly popular. Add an ss necro or a non-aoe fire or lighting ele to knock down the time to about half. Most of the other builds lack the ability to do certain parts or are just downright slow and trying. The other builds, like trapping require more people, IMO, to really make them worth much. The solo builds, any of the ones I've tried are not only slow, but sometimes downright impossible to repeat with any success, the rt/me is one example fo that.

I get 2-4 ecto within 15-20 minutes clearing everything from the chamber and the smite area. Not taking into account any anti-farming code or doing the run over and over. After awhile you're very lucky to get 1 drop unless you go farther into it.

gabrial heart · Jan 03, 2007, 04:46 PM // 16:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Saphon the Patient

Just to note that this method of calculation is incorrect, as someone else has previously pointed out.

*Snip!*

One could safely assume that there would be a potential profit per run, over the course of sufficiently many runs, of at least 9k per run.

In my experience that calc is off too. Typically i break even on runs with a few times just making a tad bit more then what it costs to go down. Yes, the potential is there to come out with an ecto, but many runs turn up short. Sometimes i can walk out with 2-3 ectos, but it's pretty rare anymore. Maybe spread over several runs it might average out to 4k per run, but that might be after 10 runs.

Crazyvietguy · Jan 04, 2007, 02:48 AM // 02:48

To be truthfully correct all smites and aataxes are independent when it comes to drops. Meaning (if the anti farming code didnt rule the world) you could potentially get one ecto from every smite. Although the chances of that are millions to 1.

So far like everyone has said VwK farming is the fastest solo smite farm thats been publicized. IW Me/Mo is painfully slow but can solo everything. Trappers can easily solo the first room and most can do smites as well.. however that is slow also.

SO the moral to this story is be creative and make your own builds so the public can use them