How much time did you spend on this project?
It took me an average
of 4 minutes to obtain a cache and by that estimate a total time of
approximately 67 hours to complete this project.
Sorting out 70 caches
worth of loot took me about 20 mins. Picking up the loots involve tedious
clicking but it is exciting due to the fear of getting DC. :D Thankfully Blizzard
is going to implement auto pickup in the future. :D
What did I get out this journey?
From 1000 horadric caches I got: 103 legendaries,
16 RoRGs - out of which 4 are useful , 3806 Keystone fragment, 5184 blood shards, 2603 arcane dust, 1798
veiled crystals (+ salvage rares) and a combine total of 2492 marquise gems.
I like to specify that
I did try to follow the Junger rules in the early stage of my journey but it
turns out impossible for me to do so with the random people I group with. So I just
went ahead with opening chest and picking up stuff at times.
Incidentally, I also
learned how to optimize keystone fragment farming. I’ll come to that later.
The following points are the summary of this project.
How many keystone fragments per cache?
You get 2 guaranteed
keystone fragments per cache.
Things with zero chance
White items and death
breaths do not drop from caches.
Drop chance for horadric cache legendaries x distribution
x chance per cache
With my “RNG”, I got a
total of 103 legendaries out of 1006 caches. My average drop chance for a
legendary is 10.24% (1 in 10 caches). Out of 103 legendaries, I acquired 16
RoRG, 15 M.M Scepter, 20 Pauldrons of S.K, 23 G.G of Leoric, 14 S.Vambraces and
15 non-cache legendaries.
The distribution out
of the 103 legendaries is as follow:
RoRG at 15.53%, M.M
Scepter at 14.56%, Pauldrons of S.K at 19.42%, G.G of Leoric at 22.33%,
S.Vambraces at 13.53% and non-cache legendaries at 14.56%.
The estimated chance for
each Act 1 legendary per cache is as follow:
RoRG at 1.59%, M.M
Scepter at 1.49%, Pauldrons of S.K at 1.99%, G.G of Leoric at 2.29%,
S.Vambraces at 1.39% and non-cache legendaries at 1.49%.
All 16 RoRG
Blood shards and its buff
Blood shards from
caches are buffed on the Diablo 3 anniversary. Before the buff, the average is
0.19 per cache. After the buff, the average is 2.7 per cache. The increment is
about 14x.
Gems per cache and it’s distribution
I acquired a total of
2492 marquise gems. On average, I got 2.47 gems per cache with the distribution
ratio of - 19.22% Ruby, 20.30% Emerald, 19.38% Topaz, 19.82% Diamond and 21.27%
Amethyst.
The thing about bounties
The first completed
bounty does not give keystone fragments and blood shards while the remaining 4
will always do if you are in the zone.
One little trick on bounties
You can still get the keystone fragment from
the boss bounty by staying at boss zone without fighting him. (Intended by
Blizzard?)
Is speed farming cache a productive way to
accumulate crafting materials?
Speed farming caches
for crafting materials is not viable. On
average you get 3.5 white mat, 2.5 blue mat, a 35% chance for a yellow mat, a
4% chance for a blue item and 1.4 rare per cache. Salvaging a white item gives
7-9 mat, a blue item gives 3-4 mat and a yellow is 1 for 1. Farming for items
to salvage is a much better way to accumulate crafting materials.
An alternative way to gain crafting materials
A good alternative for
farming mats other than doing rifts is to do bounties but at a slower rate so
you can pick up the drops from opened chest etc.
Public bounties are good
for this because you can always stay last in game to visit all bounty zones for
collecting items from global drops – chest, clickable, breakables, etc.
Optimizing Keystone Fragment farming
In patch 2.1, everyone
is required to pay a keystone fragment to enter a rift. So it is probably a
good time now to start accumulating those rift keystones so that you can enter
rifts as much as possible once patch 2.1 goes live. So the question is - what
is the best way to farm it?
At the later part of
my journey, I learned how to improve my rate of acquiring keystone fragments by
memorizing each bounty and as well as knowing how the bounty reward system work.
You can see a gradual increase in ratio of keystone fragments I gain per run
date from the data I recorded.
My strategy ~ As I have shared the mechanism of
the bounty reward system in my findings above, I usually turn in my bounty at
second place and analyze the remaining uncompleted bounties. With an
understanding of the different bounties and a grasp of the situation, I choose
and teleport to the next bounty with high probability that it is completing soon.
With this strategy, I usually make a minimum of 4 keystone fragments (2 from bounty,
2 from cache) every run, sometimes I get more (maximum is 6).
I think it is
pointless to save a few seconds by staying in town after you have completed
your bounty just to be quick enough to click on Tyrael to get the cache. When
you are in town, you are losing 1 to 4 keystone fragments every run. In the
long run, small numbers add up.
With no doubts, farming
for keystone fragments slows down the process of cache farming. However, I feel
that the loss of a few seconds is worth it for a fragment.
My plans for the future
Moving forward, I need
to spend the keystone fragments I got from the project because my inventory is
limited. At the same time, I plan take a break in order to gear up my runners
so they are T2 efficient. Hopefully soon, I can work on 1000 horadric cache in torment 2 act 1 if drop rates are to stay the same.
Last of all - I have uploaded my excel on google docs:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pUiNky97rcj2SUoOAQLn08W65VRj_z9iZaC-WK3o4Zk/edit?usp=sharing
Thanks for reading. :D
Mitqa
