It seems an universal experience to everyone farming this item. Getting it at 0-200 corruption is fairly easy, and afterwards it simply stops dropping. I have 2 dropped in 3 hours at 0-200 corruption. I then went ahead and got 87% wand increased drop rate, 22% unique drop rate, and farmed 70 more hours and 300-450 corruption. 0 drops. I know it’s empirical evidence but its corroborated by many other farmers and it legit feels bugged.
Edit: While I was writing this post I asked myself “what if I’m insane” so I decided to test in an 100 corruption mono. 3rd exile dropped an 1LP ladle.
Solo account found, leveled a bunch of characters, including last 95.5 lvl rogue, idk how much mages slain, but i was always killing them as soon i saw them in my echoes. Until finally at least one dropped at 270 corruption. No drops before. Mages even refused to drop spears/cuckoos, not only ladles.
I tried to raise this matter before but got dismissed because people just want say RNG is RNG.
But I strongly believe Exiled Mages drops are messed.
More than 100 mages killed and not a single one mad alchemist laddle. Playing legacy CoF.
More than 50 hours farming.
And exalted experimental affixes drop rate is really bad. They nerfed it to the ground and CoF bonus dont affect the experimental affixes dropping from exiled mages.
The Mad Alchemist Laddle, its considered uncommon drop, that means it should be just a bit harder to drop than a common item, but I killed a lot of Exiled Mages and did not get even 1 wand with 0 LP, it seems like the wand runs from me hahahahhaha
But yea, I think his loot table drop rates are F-up, they need to be looked into it. I did sent 2 tickets already , stating my problems, hope it will get solved.
My curiosity was up so I decided to do a two hour mage run and tally the results. The run was done using an echo that was fairly distant from the center of the monolith and that tends to have a shrine/mage spawn site at the most common entry point to the echo.
After entering the echo, if there was no Mage, cache or shrine visible on the mini-map, I immediately left the echo and then re-entered it. If there was a gold or idol shrine or a cache, I hit it, then left the echo. This process was continued for 2 hours. My character is a Mage, played in Off-Line SSF. It has the increased wand drop rate blessing at 86%. The corrutpion was at 500.
To avoid going TLDR, my reults are as follows:
total runs: 220
number of runs that spawned a Mage: 73, which is 33% of the total runs done. 43 of the mages (59%) dropped a rune of research
items dropped: one Mad Alchemists Ladel with 1LP, a roughly 0.5% drop rate. Also dropped a boot with T7 experimental haste and with T6 poison resist and a glove with T7 missing health gained as ward and T6 melee damage leech. There were two 2 LP uniques, Snowdrift boots and Ucenui’s relic. Only 11 gold shrines spawned (5%) and only 4 caches (1.8%)
Now I need to try the same process at 200-250 corrution and compare results. That’s if I can tolerate doing that again for two hours straight.
If any one does want to pool data, I’d be happy to pass mine on.
I did a another 2 hour ladle run today. I used level 238 corruption today to see if lower corruption had a clear difference compared to moderately high corruption of 500 that I used yesterday. I used the same character and the same echo type. A total of 264 runs were completed, 38% of the runs had a exiled mage. 46% of the mages dropped Runes of research. 6 Mad Alchemist labels dropped. Two of them were 2LP. Two T 6 experimental items dropped, no T 7’s.
Yesterday, one Mad Alchemist Ladel dropped in 220 runs, 0.5% of total runs and in 1.4% of the 73 mages killed.
Today, 6 Ladels dropped out of 264 total runs, 2.3 % of all the runs, which is roughly one in 50 runs. In terms of ladels per mages killed, it was 6%, roughly one ladel for every 17 Mage kills.
That sounds a lot better than yesterday’s result of one ladel for every 100 Mage kills
2-3k mage kills should do it to get the ‘big number game’ for pure laddle drops going, given the chance for one to drop is to be found. Not perfect but closing into the real drop-rate.
The % of mages encountered is a nice bonus but doesn’t matter for the example, only the drop-rate is needed since the example focuses around mages killed. The percentile chance to go into a place and have one spawn is a nice bonus though to see how likely it is to happen.
Hi Kulze, thanks for replying. As you noted, I put up stuff like the info on mage encounter frequency and Rune of Reasearch drop percentage just for interest sake. As to the Mage spawn frequency, I’d be willing to bet that not many echoes have as frequent a Mage spawn rate as that one does
Slightly unrelated, but I recently saw this strategy mentioned for farming exiled mages (I think it was Perry the Pig, sorry if my memory is wrong on that):
You would find an echo with a small map (named something like “John’s grotto” or similar) and then leave and restart it over and over. He went so far as to leave it if the mage wasn’t in sight of the starting point.
I suspect the drop rate was hugely nerfed on 1.0 release.
I have seen dozens of these drop over the time since it was added to the game. With LP varying from 0 to 2. DOZENS.
I have not seen a single one drop since 1.0 release despite playing hundreds of hours since Feb 24th release.
EDIT: Irony Alert: 3lp ladle dropped about 5 mins ago; good rolls on it too. I was running the final standard mono with a level 80 Beastmaster, for the record. Life is strange.
hahahahhaha