Map drop nerfed again?

You guys that are getting good or decent drops POST 2.02, can you tell us what you are doing exactly? Just looking for the method to the madness (not that there is prb any).

Thanks in advance!

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kolyaboo wrote:

You guys that are getting good or decent drops POST 2.02, can you tell us what you are doing exactly? Just looking for the method to the madness (not that there is prb any).

Thanks in advance!

ambush zana craft -> blue monster pack every box

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kolyaboo wrote:

You guys that are getting good or decent drops POST 2.02, can you tell us what you are doing exactly? Just looking for the method to the madness (not that there is prb any).

Thanks in advance!

That's the problem, nothing particulary different than rest of you -alchs and chisels if I have them, that's all. Mayby it's true that in 75-77 range drop is better and 78+ worse?

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kolyaboo wrote:

You guys that are getting good or decent drops POST 2.02, can you tell us what you are doing exactly? Just looking for the method to the madness (not that there is prb any).

Thanks in advance!

74-75 Alch and go
76+ chisel and alch

Yeah, doing the same as Nasreth and skuadak. Between my two mains I run most map mods, only avoiding temp chains and blood magic, and kill and cull most bosses, maybe avoiding Piety and Dom on certain mods. Chisel mostly 77+ and sometimes 76's, depending on the availability of chisels. Also transmute my 73s and 74s to get an unid map for a third toon to run.

I usually use up most of the portals to vendor my loot so my alchemy is in good supply while I get a constant -- if irregular -- supply of chisels from the hammer/map recipe. I find it helps not to sink currency into maps and just run generally and let the law of averages help.

In my experience, the main 'secret' to consistently having high-level maps to run, is to have a large pool of maps. I have one stash tab reserved for maps, and I always have about 120 maps of all kinds of levels (really all, from lvl 82 Core maps to lvl 68 Dungeon). I'm currently running mainly lvl 77-80 maps (the lower level ones get turned into chisels, or vendored for higher level maps).

I fully chisel and alch my maps. I might occasionally spend a chaos to get more favorable mods, but since I play self-found, I don't have a lot of currency to spend. If I had, then I'd probably get "Ambush" for the high-level maps, and then craft the strongboxes for magic packs. Well, I _do_ craft strongboxes when I find them, but I don't have the currency for "Ambush".

The reason why I'm stressing the importance of a large map pool, is that (in my experience) the map drop chance isn't a simple normal distribution. The variance seems to be too high for that. If map drops were normally distributed, then you'd mostly get an average number of map drops per run. That's not how it seems to work, though. I'm often getting zero maps. I'm also getting occasionally _showered_ with maps (6-8 maps from a single run), more often than a normal distribution would predict.

Hence, my impression is that drops are run through a two-tier system. First the map's loot drop table gets randomly adjusted when you enter the map, and then the individual drops are rolled on that adjusted table. Occasionally you'll get a map that has a much higher drop rate for maps than usual. (And occasionally you'll get a map that has a much higher drop rate for divination cards, or uniques, than usual.)

This means that in order to sustain high-level maps, you need to have a large enough map pool to go through the low-yield maps, until you get one that has a high map yield.

Please be aware, _none_ of this is based on actual statistical data. It's based on my own impressions from playing, and those can be misleading. I could very well be completely wrong (though, by working on my assumptions, I did always have high-level maps to run, prior to 2.0.2 and afterwards). If anyone wants to collect the data and run actual statistical tests on it, I'd be interested in the results.

By "increased map drop rate" they really mean "increased it by 0.01%".

pls do not tell the secrets , after that GGG will nerf it to the ground like it was with Domination Mode , now monsters don't drop maps anymore.... the same will be with ambush i can bet on it !

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zeldzioszka wrote:

pls do not tell the secrets , after that GGG will nerf it to the ground like it was with Domination Mode , now monsters don't drop maps anymore.... the same will be with ambush i can bet on it !

It doesn't matter if secrets are told or not. You can just tell from how I gave the ambush answer. People skipped right over it thinking it was a troll post.

If someone has a secret feel free to tell me in game. LOL

Yes, I'm doing the same things you guys are but I haven't exploited Zana mods yet, but that will be changing this weekend (would have already but i have had horrid isp issues).

I agree with Psyringe, however. I have only few maps in warbands but don't have any higher lvl chars there to worry about it.