Clarification on Notoriety : for a newish player.

[JMacClear]

Hail All:

 

I looked through the wiki and did a search on the forums but I could not find a concise answer clarification. I fully understand 'how' the Notoriety works in terms of Effective Level / Party Size equivalent / Bosses and Arch Villains'. Note: My objective is NOT to level up fast. I am the sort of slow methodical player that really enjoys learning both the Lore and Mechanics of the game. 

 

Question:  Does Notoriety impact "reward drops" or whatever they  are properly referred to as. Does it affect the random mathematical (etc) chance?

 

That is will I 'achieve' better Salvage / Recipes / Enchantment drops or rewards by adjusting my Notoriety ? Or should I simply pay the PtW vendor to fine tune my relative richness ?

 

Addendum : Which would be the most effective setting if Notoriety does impact reward chance:

(1) I am 'hopeful' (understanding a random factor) for better drops while 

(2) Not trying to accelerate EXP too much that I miss out on area/quests/lore 

 

Current: Effective Level 0 / Party Size 1 / Face Bosses Solo / Do not face Arch Villain's solo

[Crossie]

Yes.  You're on the right track. 

[mistagoat]

You'll get more drops if you kill/arrest more baddies so group size will be a factor. You just get more stuff at x8 than you will at x1 but stuff still drops at the same rate. I don't believe the level of baddies increases or decreases you chance for drops but I'm not 100% certain on that one.

 

You do have to be careful not to level out of content which is pretty easy to do by accident. You may need to turn off xp at points or you could do arcs through flashbacks to ensure you don't out level the contact.

Edited yesterday at 06:12 PM by mistagoat

[JMacClear]

Thank you both for the reply....

 

@mistagoat

 

Its not so much the "rate of drops" as the "quality of drops" I am trying to achieve.

 

However I understand your point - that if the engine dictates "a random percentage of each drop has a chance to be  X  or Y or Z quality"- then more would be better.

 

Anecdotally (based on observation not fact) 

 

I fiddled around with 

• Level +1 Level +2 - but that earned me much more EXP than improved / uncommon / rare type drops. It appeared to me to be an almost pure EXP lever.
• Party Size 2 / 3 - but generally the same I think... More mobs more drops over all - but the quality was no better. However it was improved from the above ( I think )
• So far "I think" -  Fight Bosses while solo - and likely Fight Arch Villains' while solo (though I have not played with this setting yet) - drop better / rarer / higher quality. There is increased EXP as well but its a few (1 / 2 / 3 opponents) per dungeon crawl  at Level 20 - 25 compared to additional mobs of dozens. The best quality  drops appear to come just before and in tandem with "Mission Complete"

However this is all speculation on my part - hence I was wondering if there is an informed answer.

 

Thanks

Edited 17 hours ago by JMacClear

[Ironblade]

Increasing the enemy level increases XP and influence but not the quantity or quality of drops.  A minion will drop the same loot whether he's your level or three higher.

 

Increasing team size *WILL* increase loot - indirectly.  Increasing the team size will give you bosses, elite bosses, archvillains and these drop better loot.  FYI, if you are set to NOT fight archvillains solo and you do a mission that would normally have an AV, he will be an 'elite boss' instead.

 

Personal opinion:  Don't focus on this.  To the extent you're interested in 'loot', focus on missions/story arcs/task forces that give 'reward merits'.  These are a type of currency that let you buy rare items.  They can also be used to buy salvage items like 'enhancement converters' which can be sold.  You're just not going to get a lot of value from random drops unless you're clearing large numbers of enemies quickly and you can't do that at low-mid level.

 

On a side note - doing story arcs gives you reward merits AND conveys lore to you.

 

Conundrum:  The newer story arcs have much better writing and sometimes better game mechanics - *BUT* -  some older arcs convey important lore.  For example, The Hollows arcs have a few really tedious missions but give you background on Frostfire, who shows up later on and has an interesting overall story.

 

I think there are a number of story arcs definitely worth doing at least once:  all of The Hollows, all of Striga Isle, Mathew Habashy, Twinshot, Laura Lockhart.  At higher level, there's Indigo, Crimson, Unai Kemen, Tina MacIntyre, Maria Jenkins, all of the Rikti War Zone.

[Clave Dark 5]

The chance of a drop depends entirely on the critter's Rank. Higher-level enemies do not drop salvage more often. Teams also do not directly increase the chance that each enemy might drop invention salvage, although they indirectly increase the total amount of invention salvage found by causing more, and higher-ranked, enemies to spawn. However, this increase is offset by the fact that each enemy can drop only one piece of invention salvage regardless of team size, and each drop goes to a random team member.

 

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Invention_Salvage

[Andreah]

I'll add that if you have a fixed rate and quality of drops per kill, then you want to optimize kills per unit time. In this case, you would want to run at a lower relative level and a higher team size. 

[tidge]

@Ironblade and @Andreah have explained best and made the best suggestion.

 

For drops, x8 is best. The level adjustment is probably best at +0 or -1 (for speed). The main reason to not turn down difficulty is this: attacks which do knockdown against +0 enemies can turn into knockback against lower-con enemies. This may or may not slow down map clearing. Higher con enemies yield more XP/inf upon defeat, but the drop rates are unchanged.

 

My personal experience with RNG at level 50 is that running something like a 4-part arc at +0x8 (solo) and defeating every enemy on "large-ish" maps has something close to a 50% chance of dropping a Very Rare or level 50 PVP recipe.

 

[Andreah]

A while back, I did a test on a radio mission at all different combos of level and team size, solo from the same level 50 character. I didn't save the data (wish I had) but I recorded the time it took to defeat the first spawn in the mission, how much xp and inf dropped, how much damage I was doing vs a minion, lt, and boss with single-target attack, and how many HP they each had. 

 

From that I concluded that I got maximum Inf and Xp per minute from +2/x8. I figured If I had my incarnate alpha slotted, then +3 or +4 would make sense. This was on a tanker, so I had no possibility of being defeated myself, I just wanted to know how the level scaling of their hit points and my dps combined to affect the clearing speed. 

 

Overall, I've settled on a rule of thumb for when I run mixed-level radio teams to produce the best overall xp and inf gain per minute for the whole team. I start at +2/x8, and if I have an extra well-built 50+1 on the team, I increase it to +3/x8.  I tend not to run at +4, since lower level players sidekicked to level 49 and often without good slotting can struggle to hit them. Even at +3, half the mobs will spawn at level 54, but the the other half will feel hittable. If there's a lot of deaths on the team, I'll drop it back, all the way to +0 if needed -- Imo, Fun>Efficiency.

 

Sometimes people get focused on experience or inf per mob-defeat, and forget that mob-defeats per time is just as important.

 

[Uun]

Another way to change the quality of your drops is to disable lower tiers of recipes/inspirations at the START vendor. I typically disable small inspiration drops at around lvl 30 (you don't get enough medium/large inspirations until then). I don't bother disabling common recipe drops as the inventory doesn't fill as quickly and it's easy enough to vendor those.

[Frozen Burn]

1 hour ago, Uun said:

Another way to change the quality of your drops is to disable lower tiers of recipes/inspirations at the START vendor. I typically disable small inspiration drops at around lvl 30 (you don't get enough medium/large inspirations until then). I don't bother disabling common recipe drops as the inventory doesn't fill as quickly and it's easy enough to vendor those.

 

Disabling certain drops does not change the quality of the drops.  It just eliminates you from receiving the lower tiered drop outright and lowers the quantity of drops overall received.  It does not covert that roll of a drop from a lower tier to a higher tier.

 

For instance, if you defeat a group and the system rolled its chances to award these 8 drops for you:

• Generic IO recipe
• Generic IO recipe
• Common salvage
• Common Salvage
• Uncommon Salvage
• Uncommon Recipe
• Rare IO Recipe
• Rare Salvage

And if you disabled all common and uncommon drops.... you'd only get the Rare Recipe and Rare Salvage (2 items) in total.  The other 6 Generic and and Uncommon rolls would not be converted into Rare rolls - you just would receive nothing for those reward drop rolls because you "rejected" receiving them.  (If it did convert, everyone would do this and rake in the moolah.)  

 

Even with inspires, disabling the little ones does not increase the amount of medium or large ones received - those still occur at same normal frequency.  The roll and awawrd of the little inspire still happens, but you just outright reject receiving it.  And your overall drop rate will be lower because you've rejected a portion of them.  

 

For leveling up or being a new player, I advise against disabling these as the "trash" drops do hold value when vendoring.  And at least uncommon IO Recipes can made, converted, and sold for profit.  By disabling drops, you're basically refusing this portion of income, but not gaining anything in its place.  But it is good for higher level and well-established toons that don't want/need/care about the trash drops, though.

[Andreah]

@Frozen Burn is absolutely correct. Only turn on rejection of things if you don't care about what they're worth and want your trays and inventory to fill slower. I think there's ten i25 badges for rejecting a certain number of insps or recipes (from 50 up to 1000), so you might reject things if you are a badge-hunter.

Edited 23 minutes ago by Andreah