I have come back from a long break and have been playing for about a month now. I have done a pretty decent amount of farming and in all that time I have only had ONE ancient legendary drop, which I couldn’t even use.
When I played before it was enough to pretty much outfit my character. Still, I am only strong enough to do T6-7. I can’t do higher. But, I am finding out nothing drops at that level that is an upgrade for me. It is almost like a catch 22.
What has everyone else done to get past this problem? Why were the drop rates nerfed so badly? How do I gear up?
Ancient drops are 1 in 10 legendary drops. Primal ancients are most likely 1 in 400 legendaries assuming that the pre-requisite of GR70 has been solo cleared.
You have to use some of the “standard” or “cookie cutter” builds. With them you can play at at least Torment 13 and probably also T16 even without ancient items and you can play the associated GR levels too (and perhaps a bit higher). At these levels the drop rates are much higher and you also get mats and bounty mats so you can target getting ancient weapons and you can start leveling up gems and getting more paragon points.
You can find the builds and guides on places like youtube, maxroll, icy-veins etc.
Check out their guides for more information… and their site in general for helpful information about the game as a whole. https://maxroll.gg/category/guides
I haven’t looked at Icy Veins for a long time, but they were derided for basically copying leaderboard builds and not offering much else. I’m too lazy to go there and check and also maxroll’s pretty damned good.
You have less than 400 paragon; you’ve spread your play time over multiple characters, none of whom have a full set. You shouldn’t be worrying about ancient items. You should be concentrating on just getting a full set. Yeah, things will be slow at T6, but make use of the cube, shards, etc. to get the pieces of a full set first. Then worry about getting better versions of the items.
You took a long break and didn’t occur to you to figure out if anything new happened? If you read about the seasonal journey, you would have been to T16 inside of a couple hours.
Well, your seasonal characters are level 40, 33, and 14. You will not get ancient gear until they hit level 70, that is a big part of your problem. As for your non-season characters, none of them are even close to being fully geared for any build. Focus on one character, get it built right, then you will be doing T16, then you will have more ancients than you will ever need.
If you want to gear faster, play your seasonal character and follow this:
Pick one, do not try to gear all three you have going at once or it will slow you down a lot.
Do the first 4 chapters for Seasonal Journey. This will give you Haedrig’s gift (a full 6 piece set).
Any shards you find, gamble on your offhand first for the build for Haedrig’s gift, then roll some bracers for damage mitigation, then your cube slot.
Use any Death’s Breaths you find to upgrade yellow weapons to get the correct weapon for your build.
Once you get the weapon, upgrade your weapon cube slot.
Once you get your weapon cube slot, upgrade rings/ammys.
By the time you get your correct build, you should be doing T12 to T16 easily will absolutely no ancient pieces of gear. At this point farming is stupid easy. Once you get to 70, it should take you less than 6 hours very conservatively to get Haedrig’s gift, your weapon and jewelry, cube gear, and your other missing pieces of gear.
Get this done first, then it is actually time to get ancients.
