Pub 105 - Treasure Map Update Release 3

Abbarosh

Abbarosh said:

Bilbo said:

Abbarosh said:

Uriah_Heep said:

Abbarosh said:

Just think it needs tweaking 

Be careful.  Asking for that is what got this whole mess started

Mainly aimed at the supposed level 5 map tbh mate , the loots the same pretty much as level 3 and 4 from what I have tested.

The quality may be the same but isn't there a quantity difference between the new lvl 3, 4 and 5

no mate 36 items in both teh level 4 and 5's as these are only ones I have been testing 

Yeah my bad i had some hoard maps in my set aswell still think 36 is a bit low useally have 90 odd in a chest at least go half of that 

Arroth_Thaiel

Tim said:

Actually I find that an annoying bug as I find it hard to keep track of which gump is for which map. Personal preference thing I guess.

Yeah, I'm just wondering now if it will get "fixed" and every time we cross a server boundary (like recalling/gating to the t-map spot) the backpack will refresh and the map will have to be re-opened.

Also, I normally have 3 or 4 maps at once in my pack and I open them all and arrange them left to right in the order I want to do them. If they start closing every time I drag one, that will suck for me. Oh well, I'll figure something else out. 

MissE

So checking in the loot to the hoard and trove chests has NOT been improved and it is going live ? 

Pawain

MissE said:

So checking in the loot to the hoard and trove chests has NOT been improved and it is going live ? 

On the Next stage Live shards now. Origin Baja etc.  It is done.

Soon the rest will discover this change to T Hunting since most do not read the Forums.

MissE

Tanager

For what it is worth, I think the mods on the gear is in fact improved. The trade off for higher frequency of higher intensity mods was less quantity and more challenge, at least for the group level maps. A level 2 map might actually have gear I might use now. I never had any expectation of Roof quality gear from treasure chests.

I keep reading posts that equate higher level chests with better quality. People seem to be stuck on Hoard maps. Hoard and Trove chests are NOT the best. It takes a while to solo one because it is (and always was) intended as group play. Hoard is the same as Cache, except in quantity. However, you can do 5 caches chests in the same time for more quantity of gear and other loot than a single hoard map, and in that extra quantity have a higher chance of getting an item with a usable combination of mods.

The only people who are losing out, in my opinion, are the folks who took every single item out of the chests to unravel. If we ask @Kyronix nicely, maybe the Devs might consider adding the three unraveled materials to the artisan loot table.

Otherwise, tho, I am happy being able to target specific pinks and blues, resources, and deco. The new imbuable gear and deco is lovely. In the grand scheme of things, this revamp is opening up the treasure hunting profession to a greater number of players, and adding incentive for them to farm and dig up maps of all levels. In the grand scheme of things, that is good for UO.

TimSt

Will map drop rates be increased during the Forgotten Treasures event time frame?  I killed close to a 100 raptors last night and got only 1 map out of it.  At that rate people could get discouraged.

Margrette

TimSt said:

Will map drop rates be increased during the Forgotten Treasures event time frame?  I killed close to a 100 raptors last night and got only 1 map out of it.  At that rate people could get discouraged.

I have wasted a lot of time in the last two months trying to get maps on Origin in anticipation of testing this publish.  The drop rate is ludicrous and so very discouraging.

Violet

Margrette said:

I have wasted a lot of time in the last two months trying to get maps on Origin in anticipation of testing this publish.  The drop rate is ludicrous and so very discouraging.

We transfered over a full Davies locker we put together for testing to Baja before the patch hit.  If youhave a thunter over on Baja, let us know and we can get you some maps.

TimSt

TimSt said:

Will map drop rates be increased during the Forgotten Treasures event time frame?  I killed close to a 100 raptors last night and got only 1 map out of it.  At that rate people could get discouraged.

75 raptors at 1840 luck produced no maps.  Either the RNG continues to hate me or the map drop rate is really low.

Arron

TimSt said:

Tim said:

I could be wrong but didn't Kyronix say cartography Talismans only worked for making maps not decoding or digging Treasure Maps.

They are talking about a new item, legendary mapmaker's glasses.  The glasses use the head slot instead of the talisman slot.  To avoid confusion they might want to rename them to legendary map reader's glasses.

I don't think they are any carto glasses with +28 on them or am I wrong. The Carto Talisman do not help in digging up or finding chests. They are used for insribing Spelll Scrolls and Rune and Spell Books.

Mariah

Arron said:

TimSt said:

Tim said:

I could be wrong but didn't Kyronix say cartography Talismans only worked for making maps not decoding or digging Treasure Maps.

They are talking about a new item, legendary mapmaker's glasses.  The glasses use the head slot instead of the talisman slot.  To avoid confusion they might want to rename them to legendary map reader's glasses.

I don't think they are any carto glasses with +28 on them or am I wrong. The Carto Talisman do not help in digging up or finding chests. They are used for insribing Spelll Scrolls and Rune and Spell Books.

The talisman used in inscribing spell scrolls and books would be an inscription talisman

The cartography talisman works for writing maps and making the tattered wall map and map of Eodon.

Legendary mapmaker's glasses have a range of +1 to +5 and help determine the quality of the chest, rusty, metal or golden.

Tanager

Are there any items (deco, skills for SoA/SoT, utility, etc) besides essences that are exclusive to Tur Mer chests?

Margrette

Tanager said:

Are there any items (deco, skills for SoA/SoT, utility, etc) besides essences that are exclusive to Tur Mer chests?

In the randomly generated items category, I've noticed gargoyle glasses in some Ter Mur artisan chests.  Plus maybe at some point there will be cloth and leather wing armor with properties on them in mage and ranger chests.  

Tanager

Ty, that sounds interesting!

MissE

My problem is NOT with the armor weapon items in trove and hoard chests.   Sure I was a person who took pretty much all items to unravel, but I can live with less items. MY problem is that in about 2 weeks alacrity scrolls will be tossed on the ground due to over supply (current indigenous/diabolic chests spawn about 3 alacrity scrolls in around 10 chests, now you will get between 20 and 40 in ten chests)  THAT is a fact.   All hoard chests have 4 items of paper (either alacrity, transcendence or tmap) On the ones I tested I got around 25-30 in ten chests. Trove ones add another bit so 5 pieces of paper per chest generally speaking 3 alacrity's etc. 

Given that alacrity scrolls are used by new players or players retraining they are really not that great a loot item for vets unless they were using them for sale.  The market for them will disappear in 2-3 weeks of this going live and you won't be able to give them away.  So by the time you take out gold/gems/alacrity the ONLY thing you are gonna get out of these party chests is perhaps a transcendance scroll which again is ONLY of use if you are newbie, training or using them to sell and the chance of a tmap, for more of the same so ditto again to the value of this if the chests themselves are not worth the effort. 

After those bits of paper, there is generally NO other loot.  Nada, you don't get mana orbs, pardons, essences, marties, sash's, shields, vines, all the stuff you USED to get out of ONE chest.  Sure you can go dig up supply chests for the chance of an orb, or regs or bits of wood etc but who wants to go fight lichs?  Any 'surprise' as to what you get in a chest is well and truely gone.  They took the loot you used to be lucky to get in ONE chest and split it over having to do around 4 chests to get the same 'drop' rate and those chests are the low level ones that we used to toss away as they are boring as hell to do.  Sure they were great for those learning tmapping but the 'fun' was involved in the challenge of the level 6/7 maps.  That has now been killed. If you want a mana orb go do what was a level 2 chest, lot of fun ....... NOT.  

We used to get ALL the above out of ONE chests with a bit of challenge to it.  I Have done ingenious maps where in one chest I got a mana orb, pardon, alacrity scroll, essences, a mib, a runed sash 20 arti level items, the standard gold regs and gems.   Tmapping has now officially been borked as they have NOT listened to those of us who were telling them what we used to get. 

I wish they had left it alone. I do NOT see that anything has been improved unless you are a newbie thunter.  I am betting that within about 3mths noone will be doing high level tmaps at all.  I believe tmapping has gone the way of despise dungeon, refinements, the wreck of ararat, the eodon chain quests, and has now become a niche thing that you will do only when you are after something specific like you want some crafting alacrty's or what not so go do a hoard artisan chest. Rest of the time it will be left alone. On top of that I also doubt it is worth doing ANYTHING but the artisan chests if you are doing any lower level chests going on what my testing has so far thrown up. Sad

Tanager

Not many will be doing the high level maps because most t-hunters are solo and they will eventually begin to grasp that the ''high level'' maps do not need to be done. Those are for groups, or solo players looking for more challenge. There is no advantage to it, save tamables. Almost everything in UO is a niche thing; there really are not many things that everyone does all the time. Variety is the spice of life. A lil something one day, a lil something another day. In fact, if everyone did try to cram into the same places all the time, people would begin complaining.

As for the value of scrolls, yes - they will go down in value. It will be easier, cheaper, and faster to train skills in UO. IMO this is good. Peerless materials will decrease as well. I think this is also good, as farming Travesty and Mel 20 times just to get enough materials to craft a single Pendant is tedious. But essences are going to skyrocket. Artifacts will go up also; currently common things like Burgler's Bandana, etc are going to become scarse. Things change and markets fluctuate.

While you may be only interested in artisan chests, I personally enjoy the deco items and a few of the utility items that are to be found in other packages. Mana phasing orbs, etc. In fact, that is the beauty of this revamp... we can both specifically go after what interests us.

And the gold/gem boost is fantastic.

jelinidas

MissE said:

My problem is NOT with the armor weapon items in trove and hoard chests.   Sure I was a person who took pretty much all items to unravel, but I can live with less items. MY problem is that in about 2 weeks alacrity scrolls will be tossed on the ground due to over supply (current indigenous/diabolic chests spawn about 3 alacrity scrolls in around 10 chests, now you will get between 20 and 40 in ten chests)  THAT is a fact.   All hoard chests have 4 items of paper (either alacrity, transcendence or tmap) On the ones I tested I got around 25-30 in ten chests. Trove ones add another bit so 5 pieces of paper per chest generally speaking 3 alacrity's etc. 

Given that alacrity scrolls are used by new players or players retraining they are really not that great a loot item for vets unless they were using them for sale.  The market for them will disappear in 2-3 weeks of this going live and you won't be able to give them away.  So by the time you take out gold/gems/alacrity the ONLY thing you are gonna get out of these party chests is perhaps a transcendance scroll which again is ONLY of use if you are newbie, training or using them to sell and the chance of a tmap, for more of the same so ditto again to the value of this if the chests themselves are not worth the effort. 

After those bits of paper, there is generally NO other loot.  Nada, you don't get mana orbs, pardons, essences, marties, sash's, shields, vines, all the stuff you USED to get out of ONE chest.  Sure you can go dig up supply chests for the chance of an orb, or regs or bits of wood etc but who wants to go fight lichs?  Any 'surprise' as to what you get in a chest is well and truely gone.  They took the loot you used to be lucky to get in ONE chest and split it over having to do around 4 chests to get the same 'drop' rate and those chests are the low level ones that we used to toss away as they are boring as hell to do.  Sure they were great for those learning tmapping but the 'fun' was involved in the challenge of the level 6/7 maps.  That has now been killed. If you want a mana orb go do what was a level 2 chest, lot of fun ....... NOT.  

We used to get ALL the above out of ONE chests with a bit of challenge to it.  I Have done ingenious maps where in one chest I got a mana orb, pardon, alacrity scroll, essences, a mib, a runed sash 20 arti level items, the standard gold regs and gems.   Tmapping has now officially been borked as they have NOT listened to those of us who were telling them what we used to get. 

I wish they had left it alone. I do NOT see that anything has been improved unless you are a newbie thunter.  I am betting that within about 3mths noone will be doing high level tmaps at all.  I believe tmapping has gone the way of despise dungeon, refinements, the wreck of ararat, the eodon chain quests, and has now become a niche thing that you will do only when you are after something specific like you want some crafting alacrty's or what not so go do a hoard artisan chest. Rest of the time it will be left alone. On top of that I also doubt it is worth doing ANYTHING but the artisan chests if you are doing any lower level chests going on what my testing has so far thrown up. Sad

Spot on. Frankly I gave up trying to say this but I completely agree. Call it what you want, but its a nerf in my book. Sad

jaytin

Agreed 

MissE

Sorry Tanager there is just so much wrong with what you just said lol  The only shard these changes will be good on is actually siege where you play, due to the alacrity scrolls and transcendence scrolls,  and the gold and gems for sure, on siege you can't buy gems so for imbuing that is a huge boost.  You are looking at two totally different economies. 

For production shards it will kill off tmapping within a few months as there will be no fun in it.  I ploughed through 15 supply chests just to get ONE mana orb, talk about how to bore the crap out of people, the last time I spent hours killing lichs and ogrelords was about 14 years ago and I seriously do not want to revisit those for 'fun'.    Sad thing is I can't do the high level chests (hoard and troves) and get a mana orb included or any decent resources/regs/ingredients. They have totally borked the chest loot. What we all hoped to be a boost to tmapping has turned into a nerf.  All I will get from those is a few items, and a scroll/tmap some gold and gems.

The above is what I kept out of 10 Ingenious maps (ie all the KEEPER ITEMS) either for myself or vendors, this does NOT include the stuff I took to unravel which amounted to 158 relic frags, 100 enchanted essence and some magic residue.  Nor the 10,000 clean up points I got off the maps (now also halved) and the clean up points I got from all the refinements as show below, that was the stuff I hauled home as the additional take from those same ten chests.  (ignore the leather and scales above as that was off the spawn)

Having looked at the above haul this is NOW what I will get from 10 hoard maps.

So ok they give you between 12-19k more gold per chests.  All ingenious chests give 30k. The bags are 'cute' but they are new, in about 2 months they will be junked in the bin as how many bags are you going to want, they will be no more use than any bag or backpack from the provisioner. They are in every chest so will be another tossed item. 

They hold more gems, great on siege where you can't buy them but on production shards I can buy 500 of each gem for 375k (ie 4500 gems from the provisioner).  I sell ONE of those mana orbs on production which will get me that, or sell ONE pardon etc, or one candelabra of souls. So gems while nice to get if you are an imbuer are not why most tmappers do chests. 

So the gold and gems are hardly worth a party going to do this much better off farming miasma for gold or doing spawns or even farming solen or doing the mini spawns in the abyss. 

Next you are gonna get the 4 bits of paper.  (alacrity/trans scroll/tmap) they are now standard in every hoard chest as shown.  They will not be worth a brass razzoo once this goes for a month or so, how many alacritys are going to be needed considering 80% of players on prodo are 5+ year vets?  I got 1 alacrity in those 10 ingenious maps, (which was pretty poor as I reckon I would generally get around 3 but the rng wasn't playing nice) however now ............. from 1 on that 10 ingenious sampling to 25 on the sampling of 10 hoard chests.   This isn't gonna 'just make them cheaper' it is going to totally destroy any value in this item at all. So again, HOW can you now call it 'loot' when it has become valueless?

In the 10 x Ingenious I got:

Special items:

• 60 essences of various sorts
• 2 mana orbs
• 10 mini artifacts
• 6 skeleton keys
• 2 creeping vines
• 3 recipes (one rare scrappers)
• between 200-400 of each reagent
• 3 tasty treats.

Loot Items

• 17 KEEPER items (armor/weaps)
• 148 items to unravel and I ONLY picked up arti level stuff and left magic level.
  

these 10 maps were also not very nice on the rng for me, normally I would expect to get about 3 alacrity scrolls and at least 2 forged pardons.  That 10 sampling was pretty below avg.

In the hoards I got:

Special Items

• 1 hourglass
• 1 skull tile deed
• 1 ancient weapon

Loot items

• 5 KEEPER items (armor/weaps)
• 36 items to unravel (arti level only)

What is a party actually going to 'split' given that on those 10 hoard chests above in the case of 7 of them there wasn't even ONE special item to loot?  Party chests lmao you wouldn't dare bore your friends taking them on a hunt where that was all you were gonna get.

So all in all this is a MAJOR NERF.  If they had just added the 'new' loot to the existing tmaps it would of been BETTER.  Instead it is WORSE by a long way, not only that to get the same spread of items you would need to do about 5-6 lower level maps, plus a hoard map JUST to equal ONE Ingenious map.  This is NOT an improvment.

The scrolls will NOT go down in value, they will actually become valueless.  There is a huge difference, once we have 1000 alactrity scrolls hit the shards in less than a month they will be tossed on the ground like 105 ps and level 1/2 masteries, junk. 

Why is it good to kill off the need to do peerless encounters?  I consider that actually just destroying another huge part of the game, they should be ADDING to the peerless loot table to make those whole encounters relevant again not just dumping the ingredients from them into tmaps and destroying those as well.  It will make that whole part of the game irrelevant not that anyone farms peerless ingredients anyways as other than pendants there is nothing much worth crafting, if you really need the stuff to make pendant of the magi you should NEED to do trav or if not you can always steal from the exodus zealots in the exodus dungeon to get them, not to mention nearly every single em events boss mob (ie crimson dragons) drop the peerless loot. People do peerless to get crimmy's and such more so than to get the ingredients anyways. 

Essences aren't going to skyrocket people will just farm the spawns instead of doing tmaps, tmaps were just another nice way to get that loot to avoid farming spawns.  The bulk of essences you see for sale are from spawns.  The fact that they spawned in tmaps just meant that for my personal use it was a benefit to doing tmaps rather than doing a spawn, now I will just do the spawn. Fact is it is a NERF to the tmaps.

Start testing the stuff you get in the lower level chests:   You would be NUTS to even bother with anything but artisan, well in malas anyways, I have yet to test the other facets.  The 'special items' like orbs can spawn in any of them, but if you are gonna waste your time to get the mana orbs on these low level chests you may as well do the one that gives you more than a chance at getting something else.  Unless you really need a mace alacrity scroll why would you even bother doing a warrior chest, as you can see i started to 'test' 5 of each supply level by type (aritsan, ranger, mage, warrior, assassin) but got pretty bored, the effort required to get the map, decode it, travel to the spot, dig it up, deal with whatever nuisance spawn and chest guardians there were to get gold a few gems and a tasty treat was NOT worth the effort. After I did 11 of the other type and listed the loot I didn't figure doing another 9 was gonna show much difference. Artisan chests are the ONLY ones worth bothering with unless you seriously need an alacrity scroll of the type ie mage or assassin.  These ones were just done in malas, I am traveling still so never got the time to do 5 each in tokuno or whatever but my bet is the loot spread is pretty similar.  Thing is though if you want an alacrity scroll then look UP you are MUCH better off doing the hoard map of the type you need.  Given alacrity scrolls make up pretty much the ONLY loot you are likely to get you may as well do one of them for the chance at 4 alacrity as opposed to doing a supply, cache etc for 1 or 2.

If they just added the new loot to the hoard/trove maps and left all the 'other' existing chest loot (maybe a reduction in magic quality armor weaps) I wouldn't have a problem.  Tossed in the boost to alacrity/sots/maps and ps in fel ones, no problem, they fact they nerfed all the existing loot and swapped it out for the additions has nerfed it to hell.

Sure leave all the lower level ones as they have done, but the so called party maps and the maps that experienced tmappers have done for YEARS have been nerfed.  No other way to look at it.  Go do ten of your own maps and post what you keep.  Let's compare.

jaytin

MissE said :
 What is a party actually going to 'split' given that on those 10 hoard chests above in the case of 7 of them there wasn't even ONE special item to loot?  Party chests lmao you wouldn't dare bore your friends taking them on a hunt where that was all you were gonna get. 

So all in all this is a MAJOR NERF.  If they had just added the 'new' loot to the existing tmaps it would of been BETTER.  Instead it is WORSE by a long way, not only that to get the same spread of items you would need to do about 5-6 lower level maps, plus a hoard map JUST to equal ONE Ingenious map.  This is NOT an improvment.

@MissE Agreed again 100% 

LilyGrace

So say this publish goes live and now there's a lot more of the player population seeing first hand how treasure hunting is, post vs. pre publish. And there's a lot more feedback offered (Because the vast majority of players don't go to TC and don't frequent message boards but they'll show up if something goes haywire). And now there's a lot larger sample for Dev's to gather information from. Don't you think that will lead to further tweaks?

Uriah_Heep

LilyGrace said:

So say this publish goes live and now there's a lot more of the player population seeing first hand how treasure hunting is, post vs. pre publish. And there's a lot more feedback offered (Because the vast majority of players don't go to TC and don't frequent message boards but they'll show up if something goes haywire). And now there's a lot larger sample for Dev's to gather information from. Don't you think that will lead to further tweaks?

Very little, if any.  When it hits the three live shards, its almost always a done deal.

LilyGrace

I dunno. It's been my experience in life that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We get tweaks and patches all the time.  

popps

MissE said:

(part of the post has been cut to reduce length)

If they just added the new loot to the hoard/trove maps and left all the 'other' existing chest loot (maybe a reduction in magic quality armor weaps) I wouldn't have a problem.  Tossed in the boost to alacrity/sots/maps and ps in fel ones, no problem, they fact they nerfed all the existing loot and swapped it out for the additions has nerfed it to hell.

Sure leave all the lower level ones as they have done, but the so called party maps and the maps that experienced tmappers have done for YEARS have been nerfed.  No other way to look at it.  Go do ten of your own maps and post what you keep.  Let's compare.

I do not see the new Treasure Hunting as a nerf at all.

Personally, it has been a great IMPROVEMENT and enhancement.

I particularly love the differentiation in several "Professions" of the Chests so that one can focus on a given type of Map depending on what loot they are after.

That said, as I tried to point out in this other Thread https://forum.uo.com/discussion/4219/a-thought-re-the-new-treasure-maps-and-loot-quality , I think that the changes "might" be felt as a nerf due to the reduced number of items and the RNG....

I mean, before the changes, due to the higher number of items, the chances of the RNG assembling properties into a given item that well matched one another were higher.

Sure, now the loot quality with Forgotten Treasure has been enhanced as compared to before, BUT, as I tried to point out in that other thread, since the RNG is the same, and the number of items in Treasure Chest has been reduced, the "chances" of the RNG spawning an item with properties that actually are WANTED and liked by players, are smaller....

And this, I imagine, is felt as a "nerf".....

I mean, I have heard of players reporting that in MAGE Chests, Weapons do not even come with the spell channelling property !!!

How on earth can they be usefull to Spellcasters without a Mage Channelling on them ??

This is just an example how, to my opinion, the problem of the "bad quality" felt in the items is due to the RNG putting together properties in a weird way, and the reduced number of items now in Treasure Chests.

And this is felt, probably, by players, as a resulting nerf.

What the Developers should do, to my opinion, is give a look at the RNG and make "adjustments" in the way that the RNG puts toghether properties in items in a way that makes more sense to players and is more desired by players (and makes sense for the differentiated Professions chests....).

At that point, players would see how the "new" Treasure Hunting is much better then the one before.

At least, that is the way I see it.

Margrette

MissE said:

My problem is NOT with the armor weapon items in trove and hoard chests.   Sure I was a person who took pretty much all items to unravel, but I can live with less items. MY problem is that in about 2 weeks alacrity scrolls will be tossed on the ground due to over supply (current indigenous/diabolic chests spawn about 3 alacrity scrolls in around 10 chests, now you will get between 20 and 40 in ten chests)  THAT is a fact.   All hoard chests have 4 items of paper (either alacrity, transcendence or tmap) On the ones I tested I got around 25-30 in ten chests. Trove ones add another bit so 5 pieces of paper per chest generally speaking 3 alacrity's etc. 

Given that alacrity scrolls are used by new players or players retraining they are really not that great a loot item for vets unless they were using them for sale.  The market for them will disappear in 2-3 weeks of this going live and you won't be able to give them away.  So by the time you take out gold/gems/alacrity the ONLY thing you are gonna get out of these party chests is perhaps a transcendance scroll which again is ONLY of use if you are newbie, training or using them to sell and the chance of a tmap, for more of the same so ditto again to the value of this if the chests themselves are not worth the effort. 

After those bits of paper, there is generally NO other loot.  Nada, you don't get mana orbs, pardons, essences, marties, sash's, shields, vines, all the stuff you USED to get out of ONE chest.  Sure you can go dig up supply chests for the chance of an orb, or regs or bits of wood etc but who wants to go fight lichs?  Any 'surprise' as to what you get in a chest is well and truely gone.  They took the loot you used to be lucky to get in ONE chest and split it over having to do around 4 chests to get the same 'drop' rate and those chests are the low level ones that we used to toss away as they are boring as hell to do.  Sure they were great for those learning tmapping but the 'fun' was involved in the challenge of the level 6/7 maps.  That has now been killed. If you want a mana orb go do what was a level 2 chest, lot of fun ....... NOT.  

We used to get ALL the above out of ONE chests with a bit of challenge to it.  I Have done ingenious maps where in one chest I got a mana orb, pardon, alacrity scroll, essences, a mib, a runed sash 20 arti level items, the standard gold regs and gems.   Tmapping has now officially been borked as they have NOT listened to those of us who were telling them what we used to get. 

I wish they had left it alone. I do NOT see that anything has been improved unless you are a newbie thunter.  I am betting that within about 3mths noone will be doing high level tmaps at all.  I believe tmapping has gone the way of despise dungeon, refinements, the wreck of ararat, the eodon chain quests, and has now become a niche thing that you will do only when you are after something specific like you want some crafting alacrty's or what not so go do a hoard artisan chest. Rest of the time it will be left alone. On top of that I also doubt it is worth doing ANYTHING but the artisan chests if you are doing any lower level chests going on what my testing has so far thrown up. Sad

On Origin, I've noticed that a lot of the chests don't have any SoTs or SoAs.  They just have a gold/gem bag and randomly generated loot.  You might get 2 or 3 SoTs or SoAs in a horde or trove chest, but they really aren't showing up very often in the lower chests (maybe 1 chest out of 3?)  And I think the rate that maps drop as loot from monsters has been adjusted downward quite significantly and you don't get another map on every chest dug up.  So once people go through the piles of maps they already have, I think we won't be seeing much from treasure chests because people won't want to bother endlessly hunting the mobs that drop maps or doing hag's or Zippy quests.  I really think it's too early to be panicking about a glut of SoTs and SoAs hitting the market.

I've done 32 treasure chests on Origin so far: 3 hoard, 6 cache, 15 supply, and 11 stash.  That's generated maybe 15 SoAs and 10 SoTs.   The rest of the goodies are shown in the picture below, plus the hourglass near the parrot. I have no Ter Mur artisan supply maps to do and haven't taken the time yet to try to get some, so no essences yet. Did 2 Malas artisan supply maps and threw the luminescent fungi from one of them in a different box as it's a common ingredient I already had.  You can also see I've kept 4 pieces of loot for myself.  I've thrown a few loot pieces in a chest for possible use by guildmates and unravelled everything else.  It's the same stuff we've seen all through testing this publish, just mostly without the "package" names on it.  Mismatched properties all around that make pieces that no one really wants.



I checked the bags Poo has locked down from the 10 chests he did: 1 trove, 5 hoard, 2 cache, 1 supply, 1 stash.  His bags included 17 SoAs and 4 SoTs.  Only 1 bag had a map to do a higher level chest.

I think it's too early to worry about SoTs and SoAs and agree with you that there's really not much else to be happy about.  The ML ingredients are nice, but the essences being practically gone is a bummer, especially for people on Siege and Mugen.  The deco items drop very very rarely and only three of them are new (hourglass, floor tile and ancient weapon).  I guess we can hope new deco stuff will be dropped in periodically.  I also wonder if things like the octopus necklaces will just be temporarily available.  They seem to have a flavor that goes with what is going on in the game right now, but maybe not so much further down the road.

MissE

@Margrette the lower levels only have 0-3 soa's it is the hoards/troves that have the large numbers.  It is too early to worry about soa's and sots now as it isnt live on all shards, as soon as it is start worrying about it lol.  The ONLY thing worth anything in the hoard and trove maps are the soas/sots and within a month they will be pretty much valueless so we just killed off high level tmapping in a month, as that is all that is in those chests worth keeping unless  you luck out and get an armor bit with decent mods.

Out of 10 hoard maps I got: 

25 SoA's

9 soT's

6 Trove maps.

---

40

---

(ie 10 hoard maps x 4 bits of paper per map = 40 items)

In 10 trove maps I got:

28 SoA's,

12 SoT's

10 powerscrolls

--

50

--

(I did 5 maps in fel out of the ten, these would have been sots or soas if all were done in tram)

(ie 10 maps x 5 bits of paper per map = 50)

So basically out of 20 maps I got 53 alacrity scrolls, 21 sots.  Doing 20 maps prior to this would of netted between 2-7 alacrity MAXIMUM and sots were one per if maps were done in fel.  That is a huge difference so if people continue to do the most common map in game that has any kind of challenge in it then yes I do seriously believe there will be totally valueless in a short period of time.

The most commonly dug up map in the game prior to this change were ingenious maps from miasma given they are the easiest to farm by far.   They will still be the easiest map to obtain after this goes live to all shards unless there is major boost to other spawns.

Other maps easy to farm are the dark guardian maps (plain, expert, adept although they are all in malas) and were generally farmed for clean up points not to actually 'do'.

Even from the maps you did:  

"I've done 32 treasure chests on Origin so far: 3 hoard, 6 cache, 15 supply, and 11 stash.  That's generated maybe 15 SoAs and 10 SoTs."

that is a HUGE amount of soas and sots, given that same spread of maps if you did them now would of netted you maybe 1 alactrity and max 3 sots if you did em in fel as all those lower level cache, supply stash rarely if ever had any in them. That is still a 1500 percent increase.

I am over this topic though.  Just sad that it seems very few can see what a total nerf it is to loot, sure it is all 'still' there but I just had a look at what I got in my 10 ingenious chests and what I got from the 50 slash/supply/cache/hoard/trove chests and I got more KEEPER loot out of the 10 ingenious maps than I did out of the 50 others combined if  you take out the sots and soa's.

Sad.

Forge

I get that the amount of soas and sots appear to be dropping in greater numbers which will in turn affect the values of them but is that such a bad thing? Whilst the market will of course take a hit it might actually make them more affordable, i.e rather than say something like parry, which are selling for 800k+ on Atlantic, sell for 300k/400k? I personally dont see the problem here, some of the sots for say taming are ridiculously expensive, if this does bring down prices to make them more realistic then i for one am all for it. Im just playing devils advocate here.

Minerva_Foxglove

Oh I soo agree. So much better if players can afford to use them more . More fun to do other things!

LilyGrace

I'm with @Forge and @Minerva_Foxglove on this. Over the years I think I've GM'd stealing 4 different times. A couple of times before PS and a couple of times since. I never tried to take it to 120 real because I've always had gear to add the other 20 points. 

Now I'm playing around with Smuggler's Edge more and success with it is based on real skill. So I've stripped off the helpful gear and been training. I had a handful of SoA's and SoT's that I've used up. And have been searching on vendors every day for more of both. Haven't found a single SoA. Every couple of days I might find a .1 to .5 SoT that I'll snatch up immediately.

I don't have the time or the inclination to train for hours and hours each day. Especially with summer here. So things can go pretty slowly when you devote an hour, two tops, every or every other day. I don't run vendors but if I were finding more pinks and blues when I do a vendor search I'd be buying all I could find and at the same price I'm paying now.

Could things change eventually and the prices drop some? Yeah I suppose so. But I don't see that as a bad thing. If vendors sell at a lower price but higher volume doesn't that end up being six of one, half dozen of another?