Gear, bronze farming, and threads, all known information/conclusions

Community WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria
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TLDR:

If you want bronze for tmogs and mounts make alts. There are guides on youtube which explain how to get your time to 70 down to under 4 hours. At that rate you’re around 300-350 bronze/min. That’s better than a very good set of heroic raid clears. It’s also about as efficient as alt-ing to do the daily quests for the 2 greater caches with each character you have at 70.

If you want bronze for gear (in a reasonable amount of time) your stuck doing the raids everyday. After about 400 or 440 ilvl (this is likely to increase as people get geared) you can get into heroic raids pretty consistently/fast. A great set of heroic clears is better bronze/min than alt-ing, but not by a whole lot, and requires a baller group with several guys in maxed gear. You can supplement this income by grinding on mobs in one of the common farms (Kun Li or Sra’vess) for <200 bronze/min.

Apparently no one likes the science of studying procs so my original thread got removed but whatever. It’s better to clean it up anyways:

This post contains a record of bronze per minute farm rates available in mop remix, scaling/gear information, and information about threads. If you have questions about what’s here lmk.

All data is collected by me. There’s between 40 minutes and 3 hours of data over each farm strategy.

Some information comes via hearsay (hopefully) from the craftsim community discord.

The central issue is gearing. It scales exponentially. So a table of DPS by upgrade level looks like,

[100.0,
120.0,
144.0,
172.79999999999998,
207.35999999999999,
248.83199999999994,
298.5983999999999,
358.3180799999999,
429.98169599999983,
515.9780351999998,
619.1736422399997,
743.0083706879997,
891.6100448255996,
1069.9320537907195]

Observations from gearing my guy
Around 450 I started to randomly one shot non-elite world mobs.
I’m in the 470s on all slots and I still can’t solo world bosses.
I was in the 500s before I felt powerful. I also had about 100k threads so keep that in mind.
At max rank (so 556) I do about 2.5mill single target dps (no cheese with meta gems).

SEE Direct link:

Unfortunately you pay linearly for every level of gear upgrades. That is, you pay 78% of the total cost for about a 6 fold increase to power. Then, you pay 22% of the total cost for about 1/3 of your total dps.

Total upgrade cost from 346 gear: 497775 (no gems bought.) For that you get about 25k primary stat (less if you use AP for damage).

This is unfortunate because the bronze/minute income rates doesn’t actually increase much when you start to max out your gear. The time you spent farming for the gear upgrades (pre-frog nerf farming aside) doesn’t really put you in a position where you can farm fast enough that you’re ahead. AND most of the cost is frontloaded with little benefit. You likely will pay out 60% of the total cost at least before you can do harder content. You basically just wasted a lot of time.

Bronze/minute farm rates:

EDIT: Leveling alts and doing dailies with them is probably the best way to farm bronze. (This is after all the reward changes. Before them it was the worst way.) Which is great IMO as that’s what the whole event was supposed to be.

  1. Old goat farm, 75 bronze/min solo packs 150 bronze/min double packs (NOT A CURRENT RATE)

  2. Random Heroic (no frog carry) (44307-43509)/30 = 26 bronze/min WTF

  3. Sra’vess bug farm (grouped) (35848-33067)/26 = 106 bronze/min

  4. Full raid clears with guild (no froggers) (59892-44307)/180 = 89 bronze/min (no quest rewards) (See section below.)

  5. (Theoretical) Full raid clears (with hard carry) heroic 114 or 129 bronze/min (See section below.)

  6. (Theoretical) Full raid clears (with hard carry) mythic 169 or 215 bronze/min (BEST KNOWN) (See section below.)

  7. Orb collection (no route optimization)(pre hotfix)(level 70) 63 bronze/min.

  8. Orb collection (route optimization)(shard hopping)(post hotfix)(level 70) 101 bronze/min.

  9. (post May 23 changes) First of the day scenario/dungeon 10 min (observed average) complete time 140-156 bronze/min (Instance rewards are trash. Like 400-500 bronze with dropped gear melted.)

  10. Crane farm (grouped, not 2x4, lots of competition, post nerf I think) (100320-97609)/34 + 7.8*86 = 99.464 bronze/min

  11. Questing estimate: the expected value of a timerunner cache is 80 bronze. (Melting any gear but keeping gems. Smallish sample size of 10 chests.) so multiply the number of quests completed by 80 then divide by time to complete. To be competitive with other farming methods you need to complete about 1.25 quests per minute.

  12. Speed Farming Bugs 190-210 bronze/min observed. This is with around +250% movement speed.

  13. Leveling an alt (sub 10 hour completion time, with the one time quest rewards) 124 bronze/min. I did not optimize anything beyond ignoring all Lorewalker Cho quests (too much RP). I think sub 8 hours is a reasonable time to 70. Note, if you wait until 60+ you get the big caches as rewards from the daily quests that can up your rate a bit depending on how you level.

Conclusion 1 Repeatable farms give about 100 bronze/min.
Conclusion 2 It will take you about 83 hours of farming to max out your gear at that rate. (In practice this figure will vary.)

RAID_COMPLETION_TIMES (From the week of May 26th.)

Raid, Difficulty, Min_Completion_Time, Avg_Completion_Time, apx.Bronze
Vault, n, 16, 21, 16, 4300
Terrace, n, 10, 15.7, 2500*
HoF, n, 9, 28, 3500*
ToT, n, 42, 46, 10000
SoO, n, 50, 67, 11000

Vault, h, 30, 30, 5500
Terrace, h, 17.5, 3757.5
HoF, h, 50, 50, 7100
ToT, h, 60,12706
SoO, h, 65.5, 16675

“*” Indicates that only cache drops were counted.

Rates vary by raiding between 250-388 bronze/minute

Almost all of this data is from pugging. The two heroic runs are with my guild. I included everything, sitting in LFG, killing, and scrapping gear but not the daily reward. I also haven’t made much effort to screen groups and anicdotally there isn’t much difference between the “frog farmers only” and the “lol-I’m-new” levels in terms of completion times. (It takes a lot longer for the former to form up.)

NOTE If you get into really good groups you can push the drop rate up a bit on the harder raids. ToT for example can be around 360 bronze/min. But, keep in mind that you’ll need several characters in the group with maxed out gear to do this.

Conclusion 1 Assuming you can complete the raid, you can’t really save a lot of time in raid by gearing. Most of your time is spent walking around, waiting for RP, ect. (For example, average vault is 205 bronze/min while minimum vault is 269 bronze/min.)

LFG Instance Times
Type, Avg_Completion, Avg_Bronze
dung, 12, 728
scenario, 7.75, 252

Conclusion 1 Rates here are pretty bad, 61 and 33 respectively, but with the cache for your first completion it’s 165 and 193 so it’s probably worth it to do at least one a day.

Thread information
Each thread can be 1 of 8 types. So there’s a 1/8 chance that you get a primary stat thread for example.

How many threads do you need to collect to equal one gear upgrade?

Upgrading from 346 to 360 ilvl nets me 14 intellect. The expected value of 1 thread with respect to intellect is 1/8. So it takes, on average, a many threads with, a1/8 = 14, or 112 threads. So in some sense 112 threads is worth 4500 bronze.

Upgrading from 542 to 556 nets me 83 int. So it takes 664 threads to equal the last upgrade. So in some sense, 664 threads is worth 4500 bronze.

These two values are extrema. Every other thread to bronze conversion rate lies between them. Therefore, it will take at least 112 times 14 threads (1568), but not more than, 664 times 14 threads (9296) to equal one piece of fully upgraded (big mainstat) gear.

The maximum amount of mainstat threads you can collect is 200k. (It varies for secondary stats and stamina. I didn’t write down the numbers and they got deleted with the old thread. If you know them lmk.)

Since a fully upgraded suit of gear gives about 25k in main stat you’d need to collect about, a1/8 = 25000 → a = 200,000 threads to equal a suit of fully maxed out gear.

Conclusion 4Frog farmers got off with no punishment when their cloaks were “nerfed”. They already have maxed out gear, hence the rough equivalent of a 100% maxed out cloak and a reduction of 2-5k mainstat out of 30k mainstat isn’t much of a reduction.
Conclusion 5 Threads are kinda worthless. They’ll follow the same pattern as gearing does. So they do very little until you start to collect a lot of them. Around +20k, or so mainstat. That works out to 160,000 threads farmed. (That’s 888 of the legendary 180 thread spools.)

ORIG POST SUMMARY (TLDR)

It's like they didn't even check anything. Just slapped some numbers on [everything] and sent it out the door. This is crazy.
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tyty it wouldn’t let me add the tag in when I was making it. Not sure why.

Oh maybe it isn’t a tag anymore mb. Do I have to remake it in the sub forum or what? Any idea?

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might get more attention over there, probably just annoy people over here

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This was information I was after. Going to bookmark this thread.

Edit: miswording on WoWhead

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Oh I’m sure. Problem is I thought it was a tag you add to something in general but it’s a subforum and I cant move it. (The last thread I made was in general discussion.) If I can’t figure out how to swap it over (I guess an admin did it last time but IDK.) Then I’ll delete it and remake it. (I can do that right?)

Um I think I understand what you mean. That should be in there as number, 9. You can get 4 greater caches for 1250 a piece, so 5k total, plus some garbo instance loot, like 300-500 an instance, and a few threads. I counted the caches and the melted instance loot but not the daily quest cache. The threads will add some value but it won’t be much and it’s hard to quantify. Or did I misunderstand?

The once a day dungeon/scenario plus the daily quest is probably the most efficient way to farm bronze possible now yes. It’s about 290 bronze/minute to do one. The problem is that you only get one a day per level 70 (I checked and the lower level dailies don’t give that big reward.) But if your leveling 70s for the bonus bronze (that’s also pretty efficient as far as I can tell) then yea you might as well do them all too.

Where did you get the 17.5k figure?

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Way to suck all the fun out of everything.

I just play the game, do the things I like doing, run some dungeons/scenarios/LFR, level some alts. Bronze is not an issue and I haven’t felt like I will not be able to get all the things I want to get from the event
But then, I don’t have the unreasonable expectation of being able to get every single thing in a few hours played or even at all. There are relatively few things unique to the event and most of the stuff still be available by other means long after Remix is gone.
The bronze cost of the Remix exclusive items is very reasonable.

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Well then just do that then I guess what’s the problem? I mean if your not worried about efficiency at all then why do you care that this exists?

I like to game the game more than play the game. Most of the time it’s more fun to write the spreadsheet that breaks things. So this sort of activity is just my preferred way to game in remix. (I didn’t farm like 100k bronze because I was writing this all up and collecting information.)

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how do you get 17k bronze by doing the daily heroic dungeon and scenerio?

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Great post.

And exactly what I have been saying, people who say “increase ilvl and it makes you earn more bronze” are delusional.

I can do all the same content they do besides mythic and thats where most of the bronze is.

Plenty of people were actually pushing the narative of “increased my ilvl and now the game is raining bronze!”

What a joke.

Im either never upgrading gear till they nerf it or im going back to live. I got my alts leveled and this private server raid bs is lame af.

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They misworded it.

First WoWhead article had said just the first one.

Then they made a correction in this. It’s increased from before tho

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you posted that 8 hours ago though and that has been around for 2 days already - you did not notice?

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I mean that is how it works… I upgraded to max ilv and I run in a group of people with similar ilv. We zerg through each raid in roughly 45mins and make all 60-80k bronze in under a hour.

It is an incredible amount of bronze only reason it takes so long is a few rp bosses.

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Theoretically you can get the completion time down enough that it would be a decent bronze/min rate. But, my observed average time to complete one of the easy raids is about 30 minutes. (The two hard raids is about an hour and a half.)

My impression of some that are saying things like “see it’s easy” is that they’re not counting form up time, travel time, time spent melting gear and sorting whatever.

The data I have is from guild clears so it’s a 3 hour block of killing with 0 form up time and minimal travel time. Basically 0 waiting is what I’m saying. AND we also had a couple of guys doing 300-400k dps. (Normal bosses are all trivial at that rate and die in 2-3 minutes anyway.)

I don’t actually know what you can get the minimum completion time down to but I’d guess it’s around 10 minutes. That would include stacking speed gear, basically one shotting everything including bosses, and auto melting everything en-mass once a day. (Around this point just traveling becomes a pita as it’ll take you 3-5 minutes just to GET to the raid in the first place.)

I should get some more data this next week (we’ve a guy who’s almost maxed out his gear and a few others that are pretty close) so I can update the info later.

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The higher content you run, the greater your acquisition speed, so leveling up the gear does make some sense in higher content. You just have to figure out what level of gear keeps you alive in the highest level content of your choice and stop upgrading after that.

In my case however, I do zero instanced content, so leveling up my gear would just be stupid.

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I missed it, shift work. :disappointed:

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This is all good and interesting numbers (I do like me some data afterall) but doesn’t really take into account that it requires hella optimized and consistent groups for anything that isn’t solo content (which even also guaranteed unless you got bot or TAS capabilities working for you).

Simply put, I consider the bronze an investment into yourself. I know for a guaranteed fact my fresh 70 DPS alt is more than capable of clearing every raid at max level and outputting at least 400k DPS…way more than sufficient to clear a normal raid boss…but yet I get constantly declined from nearly every group thus forcing me to either make my own instead of joining an already formed and ready to go one thus wasting my time waiting for bodies to show up.

As I’ve said before, investing in your gear is investing in your future gains not only for the simple stat and tinker increases, but because assuming you don’t have a consistent daily group to clear with, you’re chasing down pug slots with a deeply embedded mindset that you “need” to be overgeared/experienced or you are dead weight to the group. I rather sign up to an 8 or 9 man pug group and get that invite over wasting 10-15 or even more minutes applying to them all and/or just end up forming it and waiting for bodies to get together when 3 of those raids can be practically done or at least VERY well plugging through in those same 10 mins.

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Most of the information on there is optimized, not optimized. I’m on a high population server so I have to dip in and out to get good results. I’ll end up retesting a few things now that I have a guy on a dead server cluster.

One of the next things I’m working on is a data set of pug raids. I’m just going to keep track of the total time to run each raid. I’m tracking everything, getting into a group, waiting for it to set up, running it, and to some extent cleaning bags. I’ll have a tag for a ward group or not and that’s the only thing extra.

It depends on what your doing this all for. If you just want to play the game (which sounds like what you want) then it can make sense quite early to upgrade. If you’re just trying to farm bronze then it might not make sense at all.

Spending 300k so that you can farm an extra 80 bronze an hour might not work at all. First you farmed at about 100/min over 50 hours. You’d have to farm for an additional 28 hours just to get back to 300k. With 78 hours of base farming you’d have 468000 bronze, or basically enough to buy every mount.

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We run 1 healer, 1 tank, and a ret pally rest high level DPS and just melt. It’s fast

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Yet I bought half the mounts tonight…