Our view on map drop rates

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artemis42 wrote:

He says we don't run hard enough maps? Where does that leave solo players? I thought this game was solo friendly, but apparently I was wrong.

It is solo friendly but not solo faceroll.

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DestroTheGod wrote:

I don't know what the exact number would be, but I think 30% is a pretty solid safe number for a magic (transmuted) map.

That's simply not true. May I ask how many maps you ran overall? I've had plenty of 69+ maps with well over 50% and no map drops in quite a few of them. It's not exactly science to figure out that and which mods are good.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

To get more experience and better crafting gear

Also, not my vision.

Fair enough. Still a completely unsatisfying and broken vision of an endgame in my book.

I'm level 83 and it's near impossible lately for map drops above 68. I've tried pack size, map size, maze, and harder maps. Really a pain leveling up using low level maps solo.

I am lvl82 and running out of maps the second time.

I only play temporal chains, no mana/life reg, reduced mana/life reg, 30% increased dmg, %packsize, %rare monsters, maze, increased area etc. maps.

1.
first story: in the beginning my map drops went decently, not been very lucky tho. Had supply of 20 maps +/-. After all I had one lvl73 map left and about 8 maps 66-68. I made the 73 map 20% many hard mods 104% Quantity. It dropped me 1 (ONE) lvl 66 map (thanks for spending 6-7 chaos, 4chisels and 73 map). So after this I played my lvl68 maps and I got no map drops or a lvl66/67 map drop. When I was at about 4-5 maps left (lvl 66-67) I bought a bunch of lvl68 maps in chat. I played them and managed to stabilize map amount (all low maps tho, about 15 lvl66 maps).

- I managed to get back to 15 lvl66 maps and about 5 lvl67 maps

2.
I then played systematically ALL lvl66 maps first (blue, quantity 30-55, hard mods only). Then I played all my lvl67 maps with the same method when lvl66 dropped I played it instantly to switch back to lvl 67 again.

I managed to get 8 68 maps out of the whole procedure which I all alched/chaosed and some of them chiseled. (all lvl66 and lvl67 maps played, only 68 maps left, nothing else (no single 69).

3.
playing now the 68 maps. Got from the first 4 maps (all maps yellow 80%+ Quality) exactly one map lvl66 map in total (ONE LVL66 map from 4x68 maps 70%Q+).
the 5th map granted me another 68 maps and one 66 map.

So I am now down to 2x66 maps and 4x68 maps. I tried everything, chisels, all kinds of mods. I just am not able to stack up a few maps to proceed. High quantity high difficulty maps I create and play drop me nothing, a lvl 66 map or very few times a map of the same level at maximum.


The tendency is clear and obvious. Soon: Game Over!
If I can't get the maps that I need to proceed playing (as well numbers of maps as higher lvl maps than 66-68) I can not continue to play the game.



So is this meant to be like this?

Basically it is at this point.

I'm pretty sure that maps aren't the only thing they want to have for endgame, but still increasing the numbers and decreasing them again later would be unsatisfying.

The point is that maps alone are not very satisfying as a solution for endgame content. But improving this to make you play maps forever would propably not be the best solution. I think they actually want you to run out of maps every once in a while, and there is the problem, the replacement for situations like this has yet to be implemented.

I very easy solution would be the reimplementation of the maelstrom of chaos, or a similar system. A funny solution would be to create your own boss. Add an altar which you have to equip with a rare item in every slot. If you do so the altar spawns a boss and a dungeon around him which uses the stats of the equipment you provided him. The better the items are the better the loot, but the stronger your enemies. The level of the area would be determined from the average level of the provided items. I think something similar was already suggested and the same thread has seen an answer from GGG mentioning that they are not done with the endgame. So maps suffer the same problems as some other areas in the game, it is just not finished yet. You could use bandaid fixes for this, but again it would be bad to reduce the map-drops again later and would result in a lot of complains again.

Maps are so much harder, almost impossible, to maintain in solo play. Harder mods = more maps and more loot. And since groups can handle harder mods so much easier, grouping is almost mandatory for map progression in my experience.

so for what reasons would I alch/chaos/chisel my maps if they anyway not even drop maps then?

Might the reason for low map drops be that I am over 10 lvls ahead of the monsterlevel of the maps that I am playing??

my last lvl73 map that I had with quality 104% was the perfect example. It gave me one lvl66 map drop(blue). So not worth the trouble I guess.




I did grouping until I ran out of maps. I identified grouping for the reason honestly.
I played in groups of 4-6 players from lvl 76-81. After all my map amout decreased more and more. When I was left with this one 73 map and bunch of 66-68 maps I decided to continue alone. I can play all hard mods alone, it just takes longer. I did whole level up from 81-82 alone on 66-68 maps. 66 map gives me 1-1.5% progress. 68 map about 3% progress (depending on mods).

As player number doesnt matter for map drops, I thought it was best to continue alone to see 100% confirmed all mapdrops (no ninjas possible etc.). It just confirmed the situation from group play for me.



btw: just some lvl76 guy msged me he has 60+ maps. Another friend showed me a screenshot of one chest tab full of maps recently. I dont even need an extra tab for my maps. It never where more than 20 and they are in my orbs tab!

It doesnt seem to be fun this way.

How can it be true that other players tell they get 1-2 map drops on average from maps while I played about 60-80 maps from lvl81 to 82 and am not able to sustain a decent map amount?

Honestly I'm done with maps for the most part, it'd actually kind of boring to be honest because of the drop rates, I hate playing the same tier 1 maps over and over.


It should be a progression system, you do X amount of tier 1 maps to get to tier two maps, etc. to keep it interesting let it still be based on rng, but once you've found and done X amount of tier 1 maps tier 2 has a chance to drop.

Now the progression could also be based on IIQ of maps say you need a total of 250% iiq from all your maps combined to get to tier 2, then 500, then 1000, etc.

This will give an explicit reason to do insanely hard iiq maps so you can have a chance of progressing faster.


Make higher tier maps inaccessible to some one who hasn't made it to tier 2.

So public map groups can be tier 1 maps, etc.

I am playing currently 76% quality lvl68 map:

temporal chains, 20% elemental reflect, +44% monster pack size, many totems, patches or burning grounds.

The whole map granted me 1 (one) lvl69 map after all. The first lvl69 map that I see since the last 60 maps (lvl 66-68) that I played. Honestly a map like this what I played should give me smth like 2-4 maps indeed. I dont see what is wrong with the affixes, I wont use 10 chaos on a lvl68 map to get all and only the hardest affixes alltogether on it. I think its definitely enaugh difficulty in this map to get me 2-3 maps. Instead I can call myself lucky that I was able to sustain my total map number at 5 (2x66, 2x68 1x69) and that it was not a lvl66 map that dropped out of it but a lvl 69 map. Problem is I will get only 1-2 maps from the next 2-3 maps that I am gonna play. So soon game over anyway. Countdown is running. gg no re?

edit: made the next map to this: quantity not that great but more rare and magic monsters. Lets see if it helps ?_?

used alchemy, 2 chaos and 2 chisels. High enaugh costs for a crappy lvl 69 map not to reroll it another 10+ times. I wont pay exalted guys for playing a 5 to 10 minutes map that drops me a few chances and alterations.

edit:

what I have done so far (just as a summary if anybody is interested)
this lvl69 map -> +71map +69map
lvl69map -> +67map
lvl71map -> +70map +69map +67map
---
another lvl68 map (71%Q) -> 0 maps (had that map before, not from current map drops)
---
lvl70map -> 2xlvl69 map
lvl69map -> lvl66 + lvl67 map

stop for now, demotivating.

I have 2 toons, a lvl 83 fp witch and a level 81 power siphon witch and never played a 72 map

Btw im out of maps again :D