So by now everyone and their grandma has heard about the IH materials chest trick to get a lot of obducite.
I gave it a try too and then I did a few runs without using the trick, and just dropped a few hundred Aether into the chest at once.
Results:
First run I got 23k obducite
Other runs I got less than 1k obducite
These results were achieved using roughly the same amount of Aether.
While it’s interesting to contemplate if the trick should be patched out, I don’t really think it needs to.
Why: if people are willing to spend 40 minutes doing this trick instead of fighting monsters, the reward for fighting monsters is too low. The fact people are willing to use this time intensive trick means there’s something wrong with the normal drop rate.
Now I’m not saying the chest needs to drop 320 obducite per Aether when dumping all Aether into it at the same time. However, I think it certainly shouldn’t be below 150.
At 150+ obducite per Aether it’ll become faster (if you’re strong enough) to run an extra IH instead of using the trick, so it balances killing monsters vs spending time doing a chore.
This would also mean that at 10 waves on T4 you can masterwork roughly 1-2 items per IH run, depending on how perfect you want it to roll. I think that sounds fair: you kill 10 waves plus a boss on the most difficult tier: you can fully upgrade 1-2 items.
In conclusion: buff the materials chest when people dump all their Aether in it, and keep the trick in the game, to make IH fun and worthwhile again.
They did a bad PTR and now get feedback over balancing rewards, I think this is fine. If they want to delete 23k obducite from my account: go ahead, I’ll earn it back fair and square if they buff the chest the way I suggested
When they fix this they should definitely buff the base rate a decent amount for people who aren’t exploiting to get more of this material than they’ll ever need for the rest of the season.
Does this also work on the gold chest? I’ve seen people with billions of gold and I wasn’t sure if they just got it from trade or some crazy raw gold farm.
I agree. However, I think the bug is the reward you get for bulk dumping Aether into the chest. 20k Obducite after doing 10 waves on tier 4 seems reasonable to me, but currently we don’t get that.
So I think the bulk reward is bugged, and the 1-by-1 trick is effectively an annoying way for players to circumvent the bug.
Consider that we know D4 has had many problems with too many items being on the ground at once, it’s reasonable to think that’s exactly what is happening here when you bulk dump Aether into the chest
