Skalla, Dungeon Drop patterns, and the future of Glamor

[TheFanciestBard]

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.

[Naunet]

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.

[JunseiKei]

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.

[Legion88]

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

[SenorPatty]

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.

[Derio]

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

[Canadane]

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.

[Genz]

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".

[Alma_karma]

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.

[Talraen]

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.

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%.