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Guild Wars ... I need advice on farming for green weapons?

Nightflower Blossom, my pretty but deadly Guild Wars assassin has reached level 17 and is ready for her first serious set of daggers. There are many ways to get decent weapons in Guild wars but some of them seem to be a lot more painful than others. I guess the easiest route is collectors because the items they trade for are fairly common drops. Sadly Nightflower hasn't progressed far enough through the factions storyline to be able to access any high end collectors so I decided to look for another route. I was pleased to see that some "rare" green daggers can be got as boss drops in Nightfall even though assassins don't really feature in that game. Having finished Nightfall with my Paragon I can pretty much go anywhere in Elona so I assembled a team of henchmen and heroes and set off to farm some daggers.

Now after several hours of slavishly killing the same mobs over and over with no sign of the desired green drop I can feel myself slipping into the grip of an obsession. Hanchor Trueblade I must have your daggers!

Hanchor is situated in a zone called the Holdings of Chokhin but in order to reset him I cross over into the neighbouring region of Vehjin Mines after each kill. This means I need to kill 20 or so Skree on the way so it takes me about 10 minutes per trip. Not exactly high speed farming but I have still killed him about 30 times so far with no green drop.

In an effort to increase my chances I use henchmen and heroes to help me clear the path and then send them to a corner of the map before soloing the boss. This method has worked for me before but doesn' seem to be helping now. I even tried doing the run in hard mode a few times as rumour has it that the drop rate is improved but the increased difficulty is too much for me. After only a few runs in hard mode all my team are carrying such a hefty death penalty that we can barely kill the boss.

Is there a better way to do this? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Comments

Ahhhh memories... Melf and I were in your exact position about 2.5 years ago. There is an art to farming for greens, but sadly it not an easy path. One thing I should point out though, is that having NPCs in your party will severely reduce the drop rate. Each drop has a 1 in 8 chance of being allocated to you, then multiply that by the drop rate of the item. In the case of greens, it's about 1 in 30. If you can find a method of completely soloing the boss, your chance of getting the item drastically increases.

Melf and I once spent an entire day farming for Everthorns Chakrams. There are a few monk builds that can solo it, but it's easier with more than one person.

In most cases, you just need to search the GW forums for the right solo farming build.

Also remember that any green item can be created with simple crafting items, via collectors and weaponsmiths. They don't look as cool, but it does the job.
mbp said…
Hi Crimson, normally I will alway opt for the easy path and collector weapons are plenty good for me but this is in danger of becoming an obsession. I guess I didn't expect the drop rate to be so low.

With regard to soloing, I don't really have much in the way of farming builds and I need the aid of henchmen to get to the boss but once he is alone I send them off to the corner of the map and tackle the boss on my own. This method used to work, I got a few green weapons in Prophecies this way but perhaps it is borked now. I hope not because if the drop rate really is one in 30 and I am sharing that with eight others then I will never get these daggers :(
Melf_Himself said…
Forget about crafting an equivalent or even farming your own. After being shafted trying to get those Everthorn's Chakrams, I caved and bought some from another player by spending about 2 minutes in Kaineng saying that I wanted them.

At the time, Factions had just been released... they cost me about 70 plat.

Nowadays I'd be surprised if you had to pay more than 10-20 plat for them.

And how might you efficiently get plat you might say? Look up "treasure" on the guild wars wiki... there are a series of chest runs that you can do once per month that give large sums of gold (and nice gold items), and the chests are not locked (i.e. you do not need to fork over cash to open them).

The other thing you can do is to make sure you bet on each monthly automated tournament series. Even just picking the top 8 GvG teams (in the order they're listed on the Xunlai Tournament site) will usually net you enough reward points to buy, say, 50 plat worth of Zaishen keys.
mbp said…
You are a voice of sanity Melf. I must have spent about 8 hours by this stage trying to get those sodding daggers (which by the way have a very similar spec to the Chakrams you coveted a couple of years back). No green daggers have dropped sadly and I am going to give up. At least the eight hours farming has amassed a haul of loot including black dye and valuable runes which may well be enough to buy me a decent set of daggers.
He may be the voice of sanity, but I still think solo farming is more fun ;)

The challenge and the thrill of a green drop is hard to beat. Well that is until the frustration and irritation from repetitive grinding kicks in...

WTB Everthorns Chakrams 20K

:P
mbp said…
I agree that solo farming is fun Crimson. I did a bit of it with my Prophecies Mesmer and the challenge of tweaking builds and techniques is a fascinating mini-game.

Killing the same boss over and over for eight hours and not getting the drop you want is not fun though. It is pointless and I don't really understand why I stuck with it for so long.

By the way did you read my next post. The price of things has dropped. You can now buy nice green daggers for 2k gold.
Melf_Himself said…
I do what I can for the people :)

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