HM drying up?

Has anyone else noticed that valuable drops in HM are drying up? When HM first came out, I used to get some gold drops and a lot of purples. Lately its all whites with the occasional blue. The thing is, this is not the first time that I have noticed this. The same thing happened when Nightfall was first released. I played the whole game in a threesome with my wife and brother and heroes. We got a lot of nice drops when the game was new, but lately nothing. The first couple of nights in DOA, the chests dropped me 2 gloom shields, several shadow weapons, igneous weapons, etc... after a few days all I got were those wing wands. So... I suppose that some fanboy types, or anet plants will come on and say it is luck, but I have seen too many examples otherwise. Do they sweeten the drops early on to get us into something then lower the rate? anet giveth and anet taketh away?

I have also noticed this...best I can figure is they have a system of diminishing returns set up. I have also heard the same thing happening to the chests scattered around NF. My first couple hard runs in the desolation I was dropping at the minimum 3-4 golds per zone...now I am extremely fortunate to get a purple. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of this being a new form of anti-farm code...it would certainly discourage repeated zone clearing by way of worse and worse drops every time. Would be interested to see if others have had a similar outcome.

I haven't had similar outcome. I still get about 2 golds per mish and several purples.

Ive been getting nothing but whites/blues from killing mobs while I was looking for cupcakes. This is solo farming hard mode. Loot scaling seems to have turned Hard mode drops into normal mode drops.

Vanquishing an area at the start of HM yielded about 3-5 golds per area, now I'm down to 0-1...So it seems like the drops are getting worse over time

I hate to say it because I know they keep denying it, but this behavior is in keeping with the idea that the more people in an area the worse the drops get.

it does seem they may have "tweaked" the drops a little bit since the release of HM.

ABSOLUTELY

Take your pick:

Either they lied to us about removing "antifarm" code, or they suddenly said "Holy crap, we're being looser than a vegas street walker", and turned the tap off.

Either way, they are messing around with us.

Nothing unexpected here.

Then again, getting one gold every 2 minutes was a bit much.

Hard mode is way too easy to solo farm, not to mention bottable, and now the only thing they can do, is adjust the loot tables.

Yeup yeup. The only golds I've been getting are from chests.

Didn't they say that they fixed this...?

yes, I have noticed the drops getting worse as I redo an area.....at first I was getting golds, tomes and lots of loot.....last night I got 10 items...none purple, 1 light blue and no golds....and almost no gold coins either (my first 20 kills netted me NOTHING......)
(I am using the same group of people I do each time.....so the only thing that has changed is the time I have spent redoing the areas.---I also went and did some missions, capped a few skills, finished some quests in hopes that that would 'reset' any farming codes still in place.)

yes, I believe that they might have said they changed it, but the code may not have been changed (correctly, completely---whatever)....either way I think the code is still working for anti-farming.

I used to be lucky to get a gold at all previously. Now I get several per area, sometimes a green, great runes. All in all 100% more than I used to. But then again, my account used to be cursed before hard mode. I am convinced.

I agree, 55ing the minos outside of Ice Tooth with an SS used to yield pretty good results 4+golds, a few tomes, 2 chests or so plus 2-3k. Now its 2k max...1 chest, maybe a gold drop...So Im sure there is still some kind of anti farming for HM

It's absolutely tapering off, no doubt in my mind.

The first weekend, I vanquished several areas in Elona, and my head was spinning because of the sheer amount of rares dropping all over the place. One area, Vehjin Mines, I vanquished with just heroes/henchies, and ended up with ELEVEN rares. (Five of them we're chest drops, but still!) I added almost a hundred to my Wisdom track that weekend.

Last weekend, I did a few Vabbi areas with a four people/four hero team, and we were happy to end up with a single rare each per area. Plenty of cupcakes though.

I vanquished 2 zones yesterday with Heroes and hench and didnt get a SINGLE GOLD DROP from the 2 zones (Fahrunur, First city & Cliffs of Dohjok). I opened four locked chests and 3 of them gave me purples & lost 3 picks in the process. I was very unimpressed with this and I'm sure some one will come out of the woodwork and tell me about my bad luck. Myself, I think Anet botched some things in HM this weekend.

I've noticed drops tend to be best around the Wintersday holiday, and also better when things are first issued or there are celebrations/holidays in-game. With the anniversary weekend and recent HM release it wouldn't surprise me at all if drops have been better the last week or so, and they're now at a lower rate where they'll stay until the next event or release.

Understand that I am by no means a fan of the loot changes made in the recent update, a quick perusal of the threads on that topic will quickly show this. However, there is one point you should consider before making a total decision on this. Was your experience with poor drop rates in HM limited to this last event weekend? If so, remember that event drops (such as cupcakes in this case) can have an impact on other item drops. I'd suggest that now that the event is over, you go and try those areas again. If they still turn up the same poor results, then the complaint is valid and it looks like we have a problem.

The real joke is that right now, drops are better in normal mode.

I just spent 45 mins, killed well over 135 monsters in hard mode. Not one gold drop. I didn't even fill the first 20 slots in my backpack with other drops. "improved loot in hard mode", my ass.....

I think thats about right.

I noticed that the hard mode chest purple % is way up over the last couple of days. It's not hard to infer that, if my experience is representative, that anet might have great chest drops for a little while to get the community used to the idea of paying 1.5k for a key and then reverting the chance back to normal after a while.

Drops were effected by this weekends cupcakes no question, but the weekend I was working hard on was the initial release of Hard Mode. I was using the HM Desolation to max out my Sunspear title...the drops went from incredible to basically the same as normal mode...maybe a slight increase in chance for a rare. I had tried it this past week (before 2nd b-day) and the scaling was identical no matter where I went. I am of the mind to say I think they looked at what happened during initial release, freaked, and then scaled back the drops. I've yet to run a Vanquish on a zone this week. I'd say its worth a look considering there are no events running in the near future.