Purples drop from any mob that is capable of dropping a level 50.
They are very rare (according to paragonwiki it's a 1 in 5000 chance)
It's not surprising you've never gotten one to drop, especially if you aren't "farming" and are just playing the game normally.
I've only had 2-3 total since they introduced them.
6000+ levels gained and 8 level 50's
Hello, my name is Soulwind and I have Alt-Itis.
Run missions solo set as if you are a team of 8. That's the best way to get purples that I have found.
Be well, people of CoH.
Ok, thanks for both replys. Maybe time to hit the Shard again and hang out for a week or pull up the annoying carnie train mish I have saved and set for 8 *gulps* (Mask of Vitation is horrible btw).
Masterminds annoy everybody, sooner or later. Heck, Masterminds annoy themselves.
-ShadowsBetween
We had a point where about three of us decided to play until we got a purple each on one set of characters.
Two hours every monday night, for something like two months. I was on an Elec/Inv brute, one of the others was a /Kin corruptor, so we mowed through content pretty quick. Lightning Rod, what, every 30 seconds or so... for around 30 hours.
Thing is, if you're by yourself it's 1 per 5000 critters. If you're on a 6-person team it's 1 per THIRTY THOUSAND critters.
I've had around five. One on an ITF. One seeing what my FF/Elec could do in the Shadow Shard (just goes to show...) A couple heroside doing ...I don't remember what... and that one villside. Only one of them was jaw-dropping money, and that was the FF/Elec. The rest were, like, sleep or confuse or similar.
Edited to add: I like 2-3 person teams. They're interesting and social, while still giving you a large percentage of the drops, and they can move really fast. Soloing... is less interesting to me.
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Rather than trying to farm the carnie mission (especially if your toon isn't great vs carnies), you can also just run police scanner missions in PI (set to whatever level you can handle).|
Originally Posted by Blunt_Trauma
Ok, thanks for both replys. Maybe time to hit the Shard again and hang out for a week or pull up the annoying carnie train mish I have saved and set for 8 *gulps* (Mask of Vitation is horrible btw).
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Then you can do a safeguard every 5 scanner missions to accumulate the various badges progress there (and there's a lot of badges for doing safeguard stuff). Or you can just tell the detective that you don't want to help and go on with more scanner missions.
Frankly, in this age of repeatable scanner missions, there's little reason to "save" a mission for farming purposes unless it's just one that you really enjoy.
6000+ levels gained and 8 level 50's
Hello, my name is Soulwind and I have Alt-Itis.
There are a group of us, collecting data to better pin down the drop rate.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=193665
All you have to do to particpate is log chat and send Archie the files.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
Ok, thanks all.
Masterminds annoy everybody, sooner or later. Heck, Masterminds annoy themselves.
-ShadowsBetween
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So essentially your best chances are to farm your *** off. We were having this argument in another thread. Soon the responses will turn to "you dont need them unless you want to be super uber like us."|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
Run missions solo set as if you are a team of 8. That's the best way to get purples that I have found.
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The team drop rate for these things needs to be reworked. Even with team multipliers its insane to think that your hopes are that every 30 thousand enemies killed on a team you get a random chance it will drop to you.
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Originally Posted by QuiJon
Even with team multipliers its insane to think that your hopes are that every 30 thousand enemies killed on a team you get a random chance it will drop to you.
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Just to clarify, it's not that every 30k enemies you get a chance, there's a chance to get one on every defeat. It's just a very small chance that any given defeat will produce a purple drop. And it's a very, very, very small chance that that purple drop would then go to you if you are on a team of six.
If you want to absolutely maximize your chances for a purple drop in a relatively short time you need to solo a map of lvl 47 enemies set for no bosses and a team of 8 with an AoE-heavy damage dealer (one that can survive hordes of 47's, obviously). The more defeats you make, the more drop opportunities you have.
Or you could look at any of the many market guides available on the forums here and start making gobs of influence while playing the game normally, then buy the purples you want. Making metric tons of cash is not hard or time-consuming, it just takes a little bit of knowledge. Seriously.
...in CoH racing to 50 is like trying to race to the end of your vacation. -Arcanaville
Debt barely slows down levelling these days. It's just a little bar that measures how much Awesome you've generated recently. (If you're not getting debt, you're just not trying to generate Awesome hard enough.) -Kelenar
About a week ago I was reading the forums and saw complaints by players not getting purples in 5000 defeats while running the wall in Cimerora. So I decided to try it myself for a bit.
I ran my Fire/Fire Tanker for about 300 defeats over the course of half an hour. Nada. Then I switched to my SS/ElA brute. In the next 19 minutes I defeated 238 mobs and got a Soulbound Allegiance and an Unbreakable Constraint. Two purples less than two minutes apart. And I hadn't gotten a purple drop in more than a year.
This is the nature of random drops. If purples are, in fact, dropping with a chance of 1 in 5,000, that means there's a 37% chance of not getting one in 5,000 defeats. And a 14% chance of not getting one in 10,000 defeats.
Absent bugs or special programming in the software, there is no guarantee that you will get one if you defeat 5,000 mobs, or 10,000 mobs or even 50,000 mobs. Each time you defeat a mob the chance is still 1 in 5,000. It never goes up or down. There is no record kept of the drops and you don't get one when you're "owed." All the parlance and folklore about gambling and luck mislead us into unreasonable expectations of random events.
Probability theory and statistics are counterintuitive. People expect to find patterns in all things because the pattern-finding ability is key to human survival. But with truly random events there is no pattern. There is no luck. There is just that 1 in 5,000 chance for each defeat.
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My own drop rate analysis left me with those streaks:|
Originally Posted by Rodion
This is the nature of random drops. If purples are, in fact, dropping with a chance of 1 in 5,000, that means there's a 37% chance of not getting one in 5,000 defeats. And a 14% chance of not getting one in 10,000 defeats.
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1996 defeats -> Fortunata Hypnosis : Sleep Duration (Superior) (Recipe)
636 defeats -> Hecatomb : Rech/Acc (Superior) (Recipe)
1029 defeats -> Coercive Persuasion : Confuse Duration/End Reduction (Superior) (Recipe)
81 defeats -> Hecatomb : Chance for Negative Energy Dam (Recipe)
5814 defeats -> Soulbound Allegiance : Dam (Superior) (Recipe)
Two purples within 81 defeats, then none for 5814 defeats. Such is the nature of random drops, indeed.
However, you have to take into account that purples are not a separate pool that has a 1:5000 chance. It's actually part of Pool A. What this means is, you shouldn't think of it as a chance every X defeats, but as a chance every X Pool A recipe drops. The drop rate itself varies whether you're fighting minions, lieutenants or bosses, so you can't just say "1 in 5000" because if you're fightinng with lieutenants, it's higher (about 1 in 2000) and if you're fighting with bosses, even higher.
Based on my own numbers after defeating 10000 mobs, I got 384 Pool A recipes in total, and 5 of those were purples. So based on those numbers, it's about a 1:120 chance of getting a purple recipe every time you get a Pool A recipe drop.
Thus, every time you look at your drops and say "I haven't gotten a purple in 5000 defeats!", actually think, how many recipes did you get during that time? It's not just purples that drop a lot less when you're on a team. It's the entire pool.
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Are you sure of that? What's your source?
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Originally Posted by Leandro
However, you have to take into account that purples are not a separate pool that has a 1:5000 chance.
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There's no formal source for this information. However, there is quite a lot of circumstantial evidence that purples are part of Pool A.
- For a while, you could get Purples off of non-Gold AE ticket rolls. This was a bug. It possibly suggests the devs had to do something to stop Purples from appearing in the reward list, which otherwise mimicked Pool A drops.
- The predictable drop RNG bug caused some maps to have set patterns of exactly which mobs would drop Pool A recipes, and one of the things that could drop at the "Pool A" spot was Purples. Those same spots in the sequence never dropped costume recipes (which happened at different points in the sequence).
- Anecdotally, I have never seen nor heard of a purple and a pool A dropping at the same time. This is possible with other differing drop pools. For example, I have gotten an enhancement recipe and costume recipe off of the same mob defeat before, when solo. Of course, it's possible I have never heard of this simply because it is sufficiently rare.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Right now, Trick or Treat at level 47+ will reward you with Purples on occasion. I received 2 of them tonight in a pretty short period of time.
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Ah, that makes perfect sense. Given the evidence, I concur that Purples are part of Pool A (unless Synapse recently stealthily changed it).|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
There's no formal source for this information. However, there is quite a lot of circumstantial evidence that purples are part of Pool A.
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Originally Posted by Catharctic
Right now, Trick or Treat at level 47+ will reward you with Purples on occasion. I received 2 of them tonight in a pretty short period of time.
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I dreamed about getting some purple recipe drops last night 
QuiJon said
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... I've gotten a purple on a full 8-person team. It's happened to me MORE on smaller teams, but it does happen. | The team drop rate for these things needs to be reworked. Even with team multipliers its insane to think that your hopes are that every 30 thousand enemies killed on a team you get a random chance it will drop to you. |
As far as the "you don't need them unless you want to be super uber like us" discussions: I've never slotted one. I've only soloed one AV, and that was on a level 44 Stalker- so I didn't need purples to do THAT. (Yeah, yeah, countess crey is a big wuss, whatever. ) From which I conclude that I don't need them AND I'm super uber.
Also, if I wanted purples I'd drain one of my swimming pools full of inf and buy them.
Can I hit any other of your hotbuttons while I'm here?
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
I have a funny story about purples.
I was on a 8 man team a year or so back, and had never gotten a purple drop. So Im on my lvl 50 fire/rad troller doing the majority of the work for the "team" which of course was me and one other 50 basically clearing the whole map for a bunch of lowbies to get them some levels.
I was in a foul mood (as usual) and was griping about how I had never gotten a purple, and how much the RNG hates me. So this lowbie on the team pipes up with ..."oh purple? you mean like these?" and proceeds to link 3, yes 3, purples (all hecatomb or apocs) in the chat window and tells us those are what has dropped for him during the last 2 runs...
He was on his first character, and was just a random who asked for a team in PI when we happened to need one member... he didnt even know what purples were or anything.
So.Effing.frustrating.
Yeah. I kicked him.
And damn if it didnt make me feel better.
So the moral of the story: shut your big fat mouth if you are on my team and get a purple drop, cause I probably didnt get one, and I probably did all the work, and yes. Yes I am a bitter, mean man. 
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Of course, he could have just typed the recipe names in the chat window. That works too. Same for powers and inspirations. Try typing [Enrage] in the chat window, or [Dry Heave] (yes, that's a real power).
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Originally Posted by SlimPickens
I was in a foul mood (as usual) and was griping about how I had never gotten a purple, and how much the RNG hates me. So this lowbie on the team pipes up with ..."oh purple? you mean like these?" and proceeds to link 3, yes 3, purples (all hecatomb or apocs) in the chat window and tells us those are what has dropped for him during the last 2 runs...
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How frequently do these things drop (if ever), and what are the requs to try and achieve the best possible chance for them?
I always thought it had to be from lvl 50 critters but that's all I know. The reason I ask is that I kill lvl50 critters for WEEKS/MONTHS, both teaming and solo, missions and sweeps and never get any.at.all.eber. I don't much farm but I have a couple of missions saved for that when I feel masochistic or want to bring/help a n00b along (and show off).
Do the gods of random probablity just hate me or am I doing something wrong? By the way, I just resubbed after a long absence so HI again.
Masterminds annoy everybody, sooner or later. Heck, Masterminds annoy themselves.
-ShadowsBetween