Bringing something to light

After several years of ToTing I'm now starting to have several characters max out on Halloween salvage.
Basically the game will only let you have up to 99 of each of the 4 types of Halloween salvage.

Sometimes yes.

However, what is bothering me is the preponderence of Boss-class mobs coming out. Seems to be a higher spawn rate of Vampire Lords and Crones than in previous years, IMO.

I've found the opposite to be true for me this year.

Both last year and this year, the zombies are the low spawn probability group. I sent 5 toons to ToT so far this year and they all finished the zombie ToT badge last.

As for Lords and Crones, check your spawn settings.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

difficulty settings do not affect ToT spawns, the ToT spawns are completely fixed and based on team size only

+0/x1 and I still get tons of bosses, often bringing a friend, while solo.
And your settings don't affect the spawns, anyway.

0/0, No AVs, and solo. Tons of bosses with a minion typically. Dual lts also happen quite frequently.

This is definitely true, but it got even worse with the changes from last year. I have about 13 characters that are in their teens that simply won't bother with this until at least level 25, unless they can get on a decent-sized team. Before last year, I'd be fine to take the occasional beating from a Werewolf on a lowbie, but getting whomped on a good percentage of Tricks is just not fun.

Were you SK'd at the time? I believe there's a bug currently that is barring the awarding of the actual costume temp power, but still assigns the credit for the "phantom" drop to the toon.

It's causing people to have to solo (at least for a short while) on their toon before teaming and having a chance to be costumed (and thus have a chance to receive the Halloween Tip as a drop) while ToTing.

Im not sure that is right... we had a team, I was the lead at lvl 27, we had one at 41, two more in the lower 20s. whenever the lower 20s clicked on a door we got white and yellow villains, when I or the 41st level player clicked (and we have higher diff levels) we got orange and reds, occasionally a purple

I remember some weirdness with the costume temp power drops a few years ago that may still be causing some lingering confusion here.

As I recall you could earn those costume badges at unexpected times because the game would still count the unreported "duplicate drops" for the badges without being obvious about it. For example the first time you earn the PPD Hardsuit costume power you'll get the power and get a message about it. But later on you may actually get that same drop again as far as badge credit goes but you'll never see another message about it because you already have the power. Basically the game lets you get credit for duplicate drops but you'll never know exactly how many duplicates you get or when you got them.

So if there's now a bug preventing people from getting the power on a first drop maybe the game otherwise thinks it's a valid "first drop" and is allowing for badge credit to continue without knowing the first drop was bugged. *shrugs*

If you have one of each of the four types you can trade them in to unlock another costume slot on your character.
You can read more about it here on Paragonwiki.

Have fun.