Any chance we can have HP Bayld become more available?

[Jadey]

Yes, the VW drop rate is bad. But comparatively, the (solo) HPB grind is much, much, much worse. I'll explain.

If you wanted to farm all of the bayld necessary to get an Ergon solo, that's 130,990,000 bayld (actually closer to 129,600,000 if you consider Runje kicksbacks, but whatever.) To farm that solo at 60,000 bayld/hour, assuming no competition at reives driving your hourly rate down, that would take you 2,183 hours. We'll round that down to an even 2,000 since you're bound to get HPB drops and maybe take time off to do your assignments in the 80 days or so you're going to be grinding reives.

Let's also assume that a typical Uptala x12 run takes about two hours to pick up members, gather, trade, kill, clear chests, re-up stones and the like. FFXIDB pegs the HMPouch drop rate at 6%, so in the same amount of time it takes you to farm that bayld solo, you get to kill 12,000 Uptalas. On average, someone doing this many would expect about 720 pouches to drop from those 12,000 kills. At an average of 9 plates per pouch, you now have 6,480 plates - enough to finish four empyrean weapon stages and sell the rest at 150k to get the rift* needed to 99 at least one. Or if you sold them all at 150k instead you'd have 972 million gil - pretty good compared to the bayld grinder who ended up with less than 400 million worth of HPB at the going 30k/each rate on many servers.

Given the averages, it should take just under 2800 Uptalas to finish your plates without buying any, or almost five times faster than a solo Ergon. Even if you bump up the Uptala gather time to 3 hours per run, you would still finish over three times faster than a solo bayld grinder. You may not see progress every day! That's how random chest drops work! And always remember that the average pouch you get has the same value as over seven hours of nonstop bayld farming.

Think of it this way - there are plenty of instances where linkshells have taken the time to run mass Voidwatch farms to gear up a LS BRD with a 99 harp. Without buying anything a dedicated shell can finish plates for harp in ~2 weeks running 3 hours of Uptala events a day. That same shell having each member farm bayld at an optimal 60k/hr (which would be all but impossible in the field due to the lack of quality farm spots that provide that number) for the same amount of time would get less than 35% of the necessary bayld.

The math and the averages say that despite runs where you brick on pouches, you will finish far, far faster than someone attempting an ergon. There's a reason Malithar's club took nearly two months from the introduction of the weapon to get his, during a period where you had hundreds of people running WKR right as they popped to get Paragons for their 115 gear and HPB was at its highest supply. It took me nearly three months. I don't think there's another Ergon on Quetz right now, and I'd be shocked if there were more than 50 across the entire server population. Those that have finished have done so because of donations from friends and shell members, aggressive buying of the massively supply constrained market, and farming to fill out the rest because of the lack of supply. As Malithar said, we'd love it if we didn't need to buy HPB from other people, or farm Salvage or Dynamis or Delve or Skirmish or Voidwatch (yes! I sold plates to buy HPB!) and could get some of the highest-tier items in the game at a casual pace and short timeframe. But that's not how the game works, or frankly has ever worked. The opportunity cost of getting any of these items yourself is intentionally high to pull you away from one singular method of gilmaking.

As an aside - I'd love to do a second Ergon someday. If your HPB farm is that effective, server transfer to Quetz and I'll set up a plate-for-HPB trade/buy up your HPB stock and we can both get what we're looking for!

Edit2: Since the dev team has taken a look at this thread - any chance of a method to Afterglow Ergons?