Skalla, Dungeon Drop patterns, and the future of Glamor

With the talk of them potentially adding a system to make glamor less inventory intensive we come to the inevitable collectathon to have all the glamor gear. This, obviously, means a lot of dungeon grinding. However, there's honestly an upper limit that's considered reasonable for grinding gear and well... Currently there's nothing in place to help that.

The most egregious example is Skalla. The gear only drops from its namesake, despite being in a pool with other dungeons for Expert. This means if you want to farm it, you need to specificly queue for it instead of just throwing yourself into expert. Minor point, but worth noting. The real issues is two fold.

The first is that Chest/Pants only drop from the final boss. With 30 items in the pool and 1 drop per boss that's only a 4% chance, more or less, that you get the item you want. 4%. So, some napkin math puts it at like 25 runs to get 1 piece. 25 dungeon runs, at about 20 minutes each. That's over 8 hours of straight dungeon grinding on average to get 1 piece you're after. It's a little unreasonable.

There are a lot of ways to fix this. The most obvious is just use the system from leveling dungeons and throw gear at people. That'd be fine. The other is to let chest/pants drop from other parts of the dungeons, maybe the chests throughout that usually drop rings or belts, or just to increase the number of drops in the final boss' table so there's 1 chest and 1 pants per kill.

People are going to run these dungeons for expert anyways, can we let glamour not be so time intensive? It's really counter productive, given that it's 315 gear and you can freely get full 320 from omega. The gear has zero use except for Glamor, we all know this.

As someone who happily runs old content forever to farm item appearances in other MMOs... No, we don't need anything to "fix" how to obtain gear. In a system that allows for collecting of appearances (which I am STILL not convinced SE will ever implement, but they are allowed to surprise me), that activity is a source of longevity for the game. Making it so that everyone ends up with all the appearances within a finite amount of time harms that longevity benefit.

ARR: Gear pieces dropped from specific bosses spread out over 2 or 3 dungeons. In 24 man raids, this was also a thing, sans World of Darkness, where they made it the random drop we have now to keep people from getting a piece and dropping (or not getting it and dropping) from the instance.

While it's an annoying grind at best, it's for glamour and collectors. There's no reason to go out and get every piece of gear for the sake of looking good (though some will). Just as you said, the gear has no use otherwise, really, so there's not much of an incentive for them to change it. Especially with dungeons that will be run a bunch, you'll eventually get all of the pieces over time.

Glamour is the true endgame.
So, why shouldn't it be time consuming, if it doesn't need skill for most of the part?
/s

Sometimes I wish it came under the form of achievement. Run Skalla 50 times and you get the whole set without stats. Same thing with other dungeons. In the same motif as achievement gear, you can't sell/convert/trade for seals, etc.

I have ran this dungeon numerous times and have yet to see the tank chest drop

It's pretty obvious there are tactics in play to get players to run things over and over again.
This us good because it keeps the queues moving for new players.

They won't fix what isn't broken.

They'll keep the current drop system because, first it's less work, and secondly, if they add a glamour book, players trying to farm glamour will become frustrated and start asking the possibility to buy "glamour unlock" on mogstation.

And the devs will add it. And everyone will be happy.

And later, they'll sell lootbox for "glamour unlock".

I ran the drowned city for a week straight. Not even joking. I ran nothing but that specific dungeon. I had occasional tank ques and healer ques from friends but sitting in dps que most of the time. Just for caster glamour. I saw the top once which obviously was my last run of it cuz i was able to get it. That means i had sets of every other gear before i even saw a topfor caster. It doesn't need to be a set drop but itd be nice if it was a random drop built around your party makeup instead. If melee drop melee, if ranged ranged, ect. I saw probably 50 nin belts drop at the first chest. Its kinda ridiculous to have to run content a hundred times and not see what you've been looking for, at least make it more geared toward what the party make up is.

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Originally Posted by TheFanciestBard

With 30 items in the pool and 1 drop per boss that's only a 4% chance, more or less, that you get the item you want. 4%. So, some napkin math puts it at like 25 runs to get 1 piece.

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I just... I can't let this go! If there are 30 items in the pool and 1 drop per boss, the number of runs you're looking for is 30 to get 1 piece.

Anyway, if you fully math out the probabilities, it's actually even worse than that. Here are a few data points:

After 4 runs, you have roughly a 1/8 chance of getting a specific drop (12.7%)
After 9 runs, you have a little better than 1/4 chance (26.3%)
After 21 runs, you have a 50/50 chance (50.9% specifically)
After 42 runs, there's still a 1/4 chance you haven't seen the drop (75.9% chance of success)
To get to a 90% chance of success, you need 68 runs
For 95%, 89 runs
For 99%, 137 runs
For 100%... infinity runs!

EDIT: And just for reference, after the originally quoted 25 runs, you have a 57.2% chance to have seen your drop at least once. After 30 runs, 63.8%.

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Originally Posted by Alma_karma

Its kinda ridiculous to have to run content a hundred times and not see what you've been looking for, at least make it more geared toward what the party make up is.

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A lot of people run those things to gear up alt classes. I won't burn creation on something I don't play that much, and I've grown sick of omega, so having a near full MNK set waiting when I finally brought it up to 70 was hella sweet for me. Which is likely why, for all the complaints over time, they haven't already implemented something like what you're asking.

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Originally Posted by Alma_karma

at least make it more geared toward what the party make up is.

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This needs to happen for all content.

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Originally Posted by BillyKaplan

A lot of people run those things to gear up alt classes. I won't burn creation on something I don't play that much, and I've grown sick of omega, so having a near full MNK set waiting when I finally brought it up to 70 was hella sweet for me. Which is likely why, for all the complaints over time, they haven't already implemented something like what you're asking.

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This ^ I gear multiple classes, and dungeon gear the ones I use the least. Having everything drop is nice. However, I've seen enough DRG stuff for a lifetime in that dungeon.....

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Originally Posted by TheFanciestBard

The first is that Chest/Pants only drop from the final boss. With 30 items in the pool and 1 drop per boss that's only a 4% chance, more or less, that you get the item you want. 4%. So, some napkin math puts it at like 25 runs to get 1 piece. 25 dungeon runs, at about 20 minutes each. That's over 8 hours of straight dungeon grinding on average to get 1 piece you're after. It's a little unreasonable.

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First off each chest and pants has a 1 in 14 chance (7%) of dropping from the final boss of Skalla, each belt and boots have a 1 in 14 to drop from the first and the head and hands have a 1 in 14 chance of dropping from the 2nd boss. The loot pool is much smaller than you think.

5 runs gives you a ~25.7% chance of seeing a certain piece.
10 runs gives you a ~52% chance of seeing a certain piece.
25 runs gives you a ~84% chance of seeing a certain piece.

You are blaming what is a pretty fair drop chance because of bad luck.

Well, yes, glamour is true endgame, so some glamour is (kinda) hard to obtain. Why not? It's more fun this way, not like the Shisui dungeon that promised you a guaranteed drop and after a week everyone and their aunt wondered around Limsa in Shisui full set. Boooring.
(Actually, Skalla is pretty easy. 20-25 runs and you have your full set. You can do it while watching Netflix on your second screen, come on.)

While I understand the frustration of that one piece of gear not dropping, I don't think the current system needs to be changed. Its serves as an incentive to keep doing a dungeon. Things would get boring alot faster if you got everything you wanted from a dungeon quickly and then only do it arbitrarily for the daily roulettes.

I agree with someone that would suggest that removing the RNG entirely would probably be bad (since if blurs expectation and gives players sort of gambling/chance/hope feeling), or that building systems that pushes it too early on the RNG scale, but I would disagree with people that encourage the extremes of RNG.

For example if you had an event at 50% chance (these are bad example numbers lol), and for whatever reason it took 10,000 times (pretty much impossible) that'd not be "RNG working as intended, please look forward to 10.1k".. that'd be rage inducing lol (at that number it'd probably also be something in the system isn't working though, serious lottery event). Of course at 50% having something extreme happen would be like "6th time in a row failure" which isn't too awful. But as the % get lower extremes can start to look pretty damn scary haha (where you might see 1-1000+ with less of an impossibility).

So I like the token system on top of the chance drop that we've seen, to that effect I was wondering if a player customized token might be a viable long term solution (viable for SE and players). Maybe this could be a continuous and fairly non-expensive solution? A key item or system that SE allows the player to store two variables, one binding to a location and one that records successful completions of said location. This means SE doesn't need to create a new token for every content, SE doesn't need to remember an ever growing list of content variables, nor players physical item tokens, and instead only need to give players two variables associated with an item/system (could add more, but still a lot less than remembering every dungeon).

An orb, or a phylactery, of fate that collects essence of the place over time and can be used to forge items for you (after necessary input is given). Change location resets the essence collected.

Empty Orb, 0.

Imbue to the Snurble Zone.

Orb Of Plush Fuzzy, 0.

Complete the zone, +1. Maybe add special point bonuses like full clear +1, +1 if completed synced. The later ideas is just a thought to reward players for queue'ing/doing the content as devs intended/challenged, but certainly not required.

Super coat of Camate Snurblizes, 30 points to seal fate. Orb's charge is consumed (by 30) but is still there for you to collect more essence or change location where it is imbued to.

Can mess around with it of course, like instead of successful attempts it is number of chests items passed on (pass X items, get one specific), and the system could be incorporated into other things like relic quests/special items to rejuvenate a specific zone, squadron HNM events where you buy a token with the dungeon currency and then run it again to spawn, even sacrificing items to the orb from said content to increase it's charge (although you might see people mad that you're gobbling items they wanted, so perhaps not the best idea lol). This is just to show that you could fiddle around with it, not "do it exactly how I described or else" ;P.

Key point here though is that you have to do the content still and the cost of items to be roughly around where RNG is starting to be a nuisance (if you imagine targeting a single item, what rate the devs would like that item to be near?). So there is still activity in the gifting contents for things (reasonably at least). Might want to give player's two or so orbs though rather than just one so they can have two different location's charge their fate's (can't stack a single location)- so players don't feel pigeon holed into farming one place at a time (also keeping in mind it doesn't work for content that is considered current, since this orb effectively gives you an extra loot drop every 10-30 or whatever x runs - although SE could incorporate it to current content with additional loot tweaks to the current system).

Bit of an issue arises for content that has a token already though, if the orb worked you could buy a weapon with tokens and then also with a charged orb.

For this reason I'd suggest that either orbs don't work for token'd content (pretty easy solution, the game already provides a token), or perhaps pay specific attention to the delay at which these contents become orb'able (and consider once they're orb'able they're super easy to farm lol). Had a write up for a third that replaces primal token system (saves inventory/UI space), but felt like players would mess up too much "damnit, forgot to set my orb for this farm party" and .. yeah nvm.. lol.

The idea here is that each dungeon doesn't get it's own currency so you're not going to have 100 currencies now and 200 in 3 years, and it isn't really designed to be primary method (RNG should be your friend, but if it really isn't then fine). Besides the obvious that SE may give you more than one orb (msq, vet reward, w.e) they could consider a similar concept for materia, like one orb that grows based on exp earned and while it costs a lot more you can choose which materia it forms (and of course SE won't give you a bunch, they're unique).

Key item these babies though please lol (and track them in the token page, they're a limited quantity so it's reasonable to have X slots allowed in there).

tl;dr Players get a few unique items that behave as tokens of your choice, while not asking SE to make every content have a unique tracking token variable on your character it still allows you to have one in essence (for most content at least, edit: I assume without other loot changes a definite no for the most recent content that then fades into the orbs once older). Nothing wrong with farming, or even a bit of being unlucky (suffering can lead to greater joy, weirdly lol), but I think true extremes are .. well extreme and unnecessary. I believe token + rng is nice, as the RNG allows you to be mysterious, hopeful, a bit of a mind game, small amounts of pain, and the token can be the anti-rear inflammation cream we all want (most of us, I think, at least).

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Originally Posted by Ultimatecalibur

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The drop rate is not additive for non-leveling dungeons. It is 7% chance to get the piece across the board.

72 runs to get healer top from Saint Mocianne's (never outrolled, just literally never showed up), 40 runs for casting top from Saint Mocianne's (again, never outrolled, just never showed up) and 28 runs for tank top from Saint Mocianne's (AGAIN. Never outrolled. Never showed up). But we did get 48 scouting tops while doing it so that was nice. /s

I hate Saint Mocianne's so much.

It would be nice if the RNG gave a larger chance for gear to show up if the class is in the party. Nothing major. Maybe bump it up to 15% or so. So... you know. You don't get 48 scouting tops.

It's been like this since version 1. I kid you not I ran ifrit 68 times before I got my first weapon to drop back when they were bis and went directly into your inventory, and even then it was for a job I didn't play. Another 20 kills and I had all the weapons...

I told my LS I was over the fight and if I didn't get a weapon I was done, so over it I could spit and then it rained weapons down on me. Funny that its still like this, I refuse to do primals anymore because of the bad rng of whistles and ignore dungeon sets altogether when it comes to glamour.

So doubtful anything will change after nearly 8 years of players complaining about the drop system.

It would be nice if the dungeon chests gave us more than accessories in skalla at least.

Anyone who talks about longevity of content being an issue here, I want you to consider the following: Roulettes and even rarer non gear drops (minions and mounts).

I remember in ARR I had the whole battle mage set minus the robe and I would skip quarn and just run Brayflox to have a better chance to get said item. Every time it dropped another mage was there to out roll me. I leveled all the mage classes in ARR. I finally got the damn robe a year later during HW on my last run I needed on my AST before becoming lvl 37. Glamour woes are a real thing in this game... But honestly I'd rather square make it so I can store special gear in a wardrobe so I don't have to clog up my retainers with glamour gear. I have gear from ARR that I will never let go of bc I do not want to grind for it ever again.

If we had a glamour log things would be easier because every time you got loot the appearance would be saved forever. There would be no need to go back for gear you may have once owned and thrown away.

running Skalla for 3 weeks still don't drop BRD armor :(