Purple Drop Rate

No, this is a completely different thought on the topic.

I very much like the way that Shards have been implemented, in that each member of the team has a chance to receive a drop from a defeated enemy, instead of the RNG picking one team member for largess as it does with Purples.

I think this dramatically increases demand/opportunity for teaming, and while it doesn't penalize solo farmers, makes them more efficient to gather on steamroller teams. And this, I think, helps the game in a whole myriad of ways.

So: What if they changed the Purple drop rate to match the Shard rules? That is any enemy defeated might have a chance to drop a purple on any/all members of a team, instead of just one person.

They'd probably have to decrease the drop rate a bit, naturally, to not overproduce Purples, but on the other side I think things would feel a great deal more "fair" for the majority of players, spreading out their generation to more people.

As it stands now, a farmer solo-farming at x8 is likely to generate more Purples for themselves than any individual member of a steamrolling team of 8 players even if they're rolling through packs of mobs 3-5 times faster. And that doesn't really seem right to me.

Maybe you haven't noticed it but purples are dropping like rain lately. I'm seeing reports of 2 purples in a single tf often.

If they made such a change they would dramatically increase the overall supply of stuff that drops off of mobs, including purples. After all, the shard drop approach multiplies the average number of drops by the number of people on the team. That means it's an average drop rate increase across the game equal to the average team size. For purples of course that would be teams fighting level 50+ foes.

That's fine if that's what the devs want, but here's something to think about. If the devs don't want the aggregate rate to go up that much, they would reduce the per mob drop probability by the same proportion. If they did that, it would our solo drop rates negatively.

Shards can work like this with no balance impact not just because they're new, but because they're bind on pick-up. That's another possible outcome to consider. The devs might be willing to make invention drops multiply by team size while retaining current rates if they were more tightly bound to who gets them.

I'm really don't like or dislike our current drop rate, but the real question is: what do the devs think of it?

Had two drop on me on a Silos TF yesterday. However, as people have pointed out: random is random.

I don't remember the last time I got a purple, and I split my time between my 50's and leveling my other alts.

I was playing daily up until about 5/3, and even then I think I had one purple drop in 5 months - at that point I was playing mostly my 50 red siders.

RNG is Random.

More anecdotal evidence:

On the day i19 dropped, I ran four characters through the Incarnate arc, and did one ITF on one of those characters.

The first character was a twinked out brute, and I ran the arc on x8. I( fought everything, and during the arc, I got one purple. Following that I joined an ITF where we steamrolled from one objective to the next, clearing most of the mobs on each map. I got another purple drop during that.

The second character duoed the arc with a friend. Since I wasn't sure how squishy her character was, I dropped my difficulty to +0x1. We fought to all the objectives, but didn't kill anything we didn't have to. I got another purple off that.

The other two characters had stealth and high defense, so I sped from one objective to the next, doing NOTHING that wasn't mandatory. I got no purples on either of them.

Since then, I have done at least three level 50 TFs and a few dozen level 50 missions. I haven't seen any purple drops during that time frame.

Overall, I'd say that the drop rate is roughly the same as it always has been. However, with a lot more people doing content that can drop purples lately, I'm expecting to see the price drop over the next few weeks. Probably not much - purples will always be expensive, but maybe back down to the 250-300 million range for the most expensive, rather than 400-600 million.

I wsish i was as lucky, i've done atleast 20 TFs on my tank since i19 and not dropped a single purple! an we were clearing the maps too!!