Geode's Drop Rate......

[RAIST]

Sigh. The point of citing the weather forecast site was not to illustrate its effectiveness. It was to illustrate the imbalance of fire versus other weathers. How about this. Do you believe that the frequency of fire weather is perfectly balanced (equal) to the others? If not, it should be increased, regardless of how many zones get the weather, regardless of seasonal climate patterns and regardless of weather forecasting web sites.

more or less, yes WHEN IT IS IN SEASON. The point of the site is to watch and actually see how often it really pops versus all these claims about how rare it is. Case in point....it has been out of season for roughly 24 hours. It popped twice last night in Cape Terrigan---windsday and lightsday, two hours in between. Guess what....Fire is forecast for Altepa for darksday/firesday, roughly 8.5 hours after I last saw it pop in Terrigan. Also.. Light is forecast for Darksday for an off-season cycle. That's another one... it pops on a pattern as well, roughly a 4 week window 4 times a year where it's frequency is ramped up.

The point of the site is a tool to help you track the pattern so you can actually see and plan for the increased frequency if that is how you want to do your trials.

As for balance.....the imbalance is NOT in the weather cycles. The imbalance is in the drop rates when the required conditions are present. If there in fact is a hard 5 minute cool down between drops, then you are limited to no more than 11 or 12 drops in a given game day. This window comes around roughly 3 times a day, and you have at least a 1/8 chance of hitting this window each time you log in for 1 hour. Regardless of the weather factor coming in to play, you have 45 game days throughout the game year that you can guarantee the conditions exist for any given element (one day per game week, you always know conditions exist for a particular geode). With perfect timing and kill rate, that means at best you can guarantee up to 495 to 540 time slices for a geode to drop in a 14.4 day window (1game year).

The point is, there are TONS of opportunity for a geode to drop in this game. All of the windows can be tracked and planned for in some fashion or another. The problem is, that even when all the stars and moon align properly and you have created the PERFECT opportunity to farm.....you can still walk away with only one rock for an hour of trying.

The problem is the DROP RATES. NOT the frequency of the windows of opportunity, but the actual success rate for acquisition when that window opens. At least you have a means to determine ahead of time when those windows will open. That is half the battle won, the other part we have no control over. At least we can tell if it is a good time to farm or not. The part we can not predict/plan for is what SE needs to fix first.....DROP RATES.

[Zinato]

A quick note I wanted to make, the entire situation could be solved outright if day of the week geodes/rites were increased in drop rate, or if a situation where weather is absent (abyssea) geodes do not fall on a timer. For example location A: Altepa Desert earth weather = 5 minutes per geode ~20% drop rate. location B: Abyssea - La theine (or a currently unweathered area) Drop rate increased to ~10-15% (over the ~2% it is now) no timer for these areas. I fully understand why they want weather to hold more valuable results, after all SE loves the R.N.G. even still weather is unbalanced, days are not. To add to that days come once every 8 hours, and artificial timers is a way SE likes to do things. In other words a player could A) play the weather game and farm only during weather (which could yield results much faster) or they can play the days and get ~12 max per game hour. Either way the artificial wall stays in place. Perhaps, they could just make drops static 10% or w/e in abyssea accounting for faster kills and lack of weather. This wouldn't be unbalanced as abyssea can't physically have weather and adjusting drop rates is likely as time consuming as weather patterns for abyssea. (and less detrimental to kill day/weather trials) I think order of issue is #1 Day drops are too low, #2 5 minute timer is BS, especially if rites/geodes share it, #3 if all else fails then weather patterns should be looked at, and even then abyssea should see the first changes. (after all abyssea could have odd weather given its situation common fire weather in abyssea altepa wouldn't be far fetched)

Also, in the mean time a word of advice. It's rather easy to acquire needed geodes by offering trades 1:1, 2:1 and so on, many players doing wind trials will gladly share flame/soil geodes if it means finishing trials faster. (That's how I did my 3 fire weapons, and 4/6 Earth ones)

[Septimus]

Personally, I would be happy if they added Geodes/Avatarites to the rewards for doing the Avatar quests. While 10,000 gil each is nice, I would trek out everyday if I could put in work towards my Magian weapons.

I am not sure what would be a decent number for a reward, 5 Geodes 1 or 3 Avatarites? And if people would be worried about the market being flooded, maybe the ones from the Avatar quests could be new items with an "Ex" tag so that people could only use them for trials or to craft themselves. Also, I would guess that only the celestial avatar quests should have the geodes, since there are three dark avatars that could be spammed for ultra-hardcore grinding action.

[Gippo]

necro bump for a good cause. SE, Please adjust fire weather frequency or increase drop rate on flame geodes...

[Komori]

What Gippo said, please. Doing the first four trials for thunder staff I got like seven thunder geodes. Not even all of those were due to weather; I got decent drops on the day. Flame Geodes? Not a chance, your lucky to see one flame geode every three months with how small their drop rate seems to be in comparison to all other geodes. The only other geode I find hard to get is soil (earth) but the rest drop like candy.

[SharMarali]

The only real problem is the utter lack of fire weather. Flames geodes have gone up to 50k ea and it's not a matter of damand.

This. A thousand times, this. We need zones that have fire weather more often than once in a blue moon.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

70k right now, 3.85m per trial.
In 1175 kills for a fire trial, I got 5.

[wish12oz]

no @ the OP

[Camiie]

When it's easier/cheaper/faster to make a 90 Empyrean than a 99 Elemental weapon you know damn well something is screwed up. The bar for the fire based trials is set too high. It shouldn't be any more trouble to make a fire weapon than it is any other element.

[Kysaiana]

It'd be nice if they would up the drop rate on day to at least match that of weather. The rarity of heatwaves, the large amount of people doing fire-path weapons, and the huge demand for pyrosoul rings has upped the price of flame geodes to 60-70k on a good day on Siren. Light weather is equally if not more rare than fire weather, but at least there's the option of getting them in nyzul isle. All the other weathers are pretty common, I have no idea why garudites are so expensive when they're so easy to farm, I suppose the demand for them is just that high.

Speaking of avatar-ites, it's kind of annoying they take up the same drop space as geodes on higher level monsters, this adds to rarity of the already scarce flame geodes since most of the monsters people fight will drop ifritites more often than not on firesday. Maybe if avatarites could be synthed into gems it would alleviate some of the demand for fire geodes.