Curse

tmakinen · Mar 07, 2008, 10:44 AM // 10:44

NB: because of typesetting requirements, this guide is published as a PDF document.

Have you already maxed all the easy and relatively grindless titles but still need more? You know that Allegiance is free but requires a lot of grind, and that Sweet Tooth is grindless but fairly expensive. Browsing through the remaining options you start to wonder how much actual gold is needed for maxing Treasure Hunting and exactly how it intertwines with maxing Lucky or Wisdom? Furthermore, what's the difference between running in NM or in HM? Could chest running turn in an actual profit?

In order to answer these and other related questions we must find out drop probabilities of different types of items and estimate how much value items really have since the given merchant value may be grossly misleading. These numbers have not been adequately covered anywhere and thus a field experiment was conducted to obtain decent estimates. Please find the answers and more from Title Maxer's Guide to the Chest Running Economy (with tables, figures, equations and professional typesetting

) by Valet Parking (almost r6 KoaBD).

Arduin · Mar 12, 2008, 01:07 PM // 13:07

Aw man....no color pictures

Quote:

One chest opened every two minutes
appears to be a very feasible rate, which turns into 333 hours or 14 days of
continuous chest running, or twice as long as an Incorrigible Ale-hound.

Oh my...

tmakinen · Mar 12, 2008, 02:40 PM // 14:40

I could as well mention one additional piece of information not given in the report. The collected data is consistent with the hypothesis that the merchant value v of an item is calculated by

v = 100 + 20 X(0.5) for grapes and
v = 200 + 20 X(0.25) for golds,

where X(a) is a random variable pulled from the exponential distribution with the argument a (probability density function f(x; a) = a exp(-ax)). The value doesn't correlate with any other properties of the item, and is the same for weapons and armor alike. It is, of course, possible that some other distribution like gamma is actually used but much more data would be needed for statistical analysis between different distributions.

It's A Me · Mar 12, 2008, 03:32 PM // 15:32

Nice, although i must admit i had trouble with mathemetics as that isnt exactly my strong point.

Charlotte the Harlot · Mar 27, 2008, 06:03 AM // 06:03

Could be useful I'm not to into tracking all those variables tho.

Luminarus · Mar 27, 2008, 06:39 AM // 06:39

Are you sure the numbers are right? Because:

Quote:

... [In Normal Mode]Depending on the selling strategy this will set the player back by 2419400 g for no sell, 1679200 g for easy sell or 418900 g for hard sell, respectively, provided
that 1250 g lockpicks are used. For Hard Mode ... at the expense
of 5773500 g, 2443200 g or 53000 g, respectively. Thus, roughly speaking,
Normal Mode is better for those who are not interested in trading or want to
go for maxed Lucky, and Hard Mode is better for keen traders and those who
try to max Wisdom.

If thats the case, i think im gonna go for max treasure hunter

Ekelon · Mar 27, 2008, 05:00 PM // 17:00

Quote:

One chest opened every two minutes
appears to be a very feasible rate, which turns into 333 hours or 14 days of
continuous chest running, or twice as long as an Incorrigible Ale-hound.

If this is the case, then maxing the treasure hunter title takes roughly the same amount of time as maxing out Kurzick title (which takes roughly 14 days). If you do kurzick title though, you earn 1.5 million gold from accepting the quest 25,000 times.

VOTD · Mar 28, 2008, 01:58 PM // 13:58

u can max your treasure title in less then 8 days if u know what build to use and were to use it. it take me 60 mins to gain 50-55 in my treasure title

Mohnzh · Mar 28, 2008, 02:27 PM // 14:27

Nice analysis. I'm sure there are pro-runners that can get better returns or do it quicker, but this is a good "standard" for expectations. Would you mind posting what explorables you used for these tests?

Wahoo · Apr 16, 2008, 09:49 PM // 21:49

I've got to tell you, this article was a refreshing change from the stuff I usually see on these forums. I've got to give you credit for saving me some time...I had started running similar calculations earlier this week before I stumbled on this thread.

Are you a statistician by any chance?

Ambuu · Apr 16, 2008, 10:58 PM // 22:58

Very interesting guide!

The Meth · Apr 17, 2008, 12:40 AM // 00:40

I've been chest running on and off recently, and it is possible to get an average of 1 min per chest in whitman's folly, so that can shorten the time considerably. With time spent zoning and allowing for bad chest spawns, I estimate an average of 3.5 mins for each 3 chest run, which is significantly lower then your 2 mins per chest.

The numbers for gold and purple drop rate seem to correlate with what I observe. About 1/3rd gold drop rate in normal and 2/3rds in hard.

shru · Apr 17, 2008, 03:33 AM // 03:33

Very nice guide with a heap of useful information. I can see this being of great use to those deciding which titles to finish off for their GWAMM.
But on that note I have a chest run that nets an average of a chest every 30-50seconds (tested with 100 lockpicks in HM) which can theoreticly net you 10k chests in 4-6 days of continuous running. Most of the skins are crap, but being inscribable, it offers a decent return rate of trade quality mods. The run is simple enough that I've seen macros for it, so it's definately a viable option for a quick max title.

Edit: Sorry about not including the area, it's not like I own it or anything.
I do my runs outside boreal station. There's almost always a chest (out of over 300 runs one hasn't spawned maybe 5% of the time) and a posability for two. The run is best done with an assassin or a Mesmer echo chaining dash with dwarven stability up, but I used my ranger with dash+escape to decent effect. It's a simple run, go past the two norn into the wurm area and check for chests here and across the bridge to your right, pop any chests there then proceed down to the second spawn of wurms and check for chests.
Quick run, nearly no enemies, 1-2 chests, lots of dolyak prod staffs and highlander blades.

The Meth · Apr 17, 2008, 03:51 AM // 03:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by shru

Very nice guide with a heap of useful information. I can see this being of great use to those deciding which titles to finish off for their GWAMM.
But on that note I have a chest run that nets an average of a chest every 30-50seconds (tested with 100 lockpicks in HM) which can theoreticly net you 10k chests in 4-6 days of continuous running. Most of the skins are crap, but being inscribable, it offers a decent return rate of trade quality mods. The run is simple enough that I've seen macros for it, so it's definately a viable option for a quick max title.

Please do share, I care little for the drops and just want to finish up another title. A 30 second chest run would be awesome.

Blue Banner · Apr 17, 2008, 04:00 AM // 04:00

So I'm at over 7000 chests opened so far. My chest running spot has been Kilroy's Punchout Extravaganza. You don't fight a thing. You just run (with Kilroy's gracious 50% speed buff) until the room before the circular battle. There's usually 1 chest along the way (never more than 1), and the run takes anywhere between 30 sec and 60 sec to do not counting the time spent in town.

I also like this run because you get both weapon and armor drops. Armor drops are good for the survivor runes, radiant runes, a vigor here and there, and so forth. I'm too lazy to go to town to sell my items to people, so selling runes is a nice way to make a good return on some of the picks.

Loli Krasivaya · Apr 17, 2008, 04:16 AM // 04:16

Amazing.

I really respect the effort you put into this. I was thinking about going for treasure hunter/wisdom and this was exactly what I was wanting to know.

Thanks!

lazyrussian · Apr 17, 2008, 06:00 PM // 18:00

Someone typed this up in LaTeX

You've now gotten my attention!
Thanks for the guide

arual · Apr 17, 2008, 07:40 PM // 19:40

I've opened around 200+ HM chests with lockpicks whilst doing SS/LB point farming in the Remains of Salahja (or however it is spelt). In the past the low req skins sold for higher amounts of gold (ie. a req9 Scythe used to sell for ~6-10k whilst now your looking at ~2k if your lucky) so it was easier to make profit, especially factoring in all the Elite Tomes I found. Not very time efficient on it's own but considering that those players going for lots of Max Titles will do SS/LB that farming anyway it helps make up a portion of the chests required for Max Treasure Hunter.

Oh and it's efficient to sell your Elite Tomes (because a the alternative CapSig costs 1k) but better to use your normal Tomes because the alternative option buying a skill costs 1k (unless you have no skills to buy).

tmakinen · Apr 18, 2008, 06:37 AM // 06:37

I tried the Boreal Station run last night, and it is indeed extremely fast and easy (although Mountain Aloes spike pretty hard if you wander to the other side of the chasm to open their chest as well). However, the chests don't seem to drop armor pieces. Also, opening about 100 chests in HM didn't produce a single tome, regular or elite, and this is a much more worrying issue since tomes represent a large portion of the return on investment of chest running. Arguably, since Snow Wurms don't have any skills, associated chests might have a significantly reduced tome drop rate. 100 tries is still inconclusive, so I'd like to ask whether anybody who's done the run long enough could give an estimate of tome drop probability for those chests.

Personally, I favor The Mirror of Lyss, east side from Honur Hill to Dzagonur Bastion. There's usually 1-2 chests on the way, and some additional perks including Serpentine Reavers and Jeweled Daggers (with a "Measure for Measure" inscription the daggers have about 80% chance of salvaging into a ruby or sapphire, and maybe 5% chance of getting two gemstones from one pair). I'm definitely getting my money back at this point, but the ongoing deflation will make maxing Treasure Hunter that much harder in the long run if ANet doesn't radically adjust the economy.

cataphract · Apr 23, 2008, 01:01 PM // 13:01

I've opened a little over 500 chests outside Boreal Station and didn't get any armors nor tomes. Lots of Dolyak Prod staves, though.