There have been a few mini dungeons I farmed the boss two or three times so I could have one item to use, then a duplicate to research, but they do actually lower the loot you get if you farm it over and over. In beta I farmed the Dwemer Guardian in Inner Sea Armiture for about 20 straight kills. By the 20th kill I was lucky to get a single soul gem and a white piece of equipment.
Razgon
2036
Well, I’m happy for you, but my experience is that money is a bitch to come by, good weapons just as well, and I need materials from the weapons that drops to gain crafting levels, and they do not drop from other mobs pretty much ever. So, when the opportunity presents itself to just stay in the same spot for 20 minutes and gain 4 blues, and tons of potions and money and soul gems, its pretty hard to resist. Especially since loot is as scarce as it is. If you can do all the harvesting oodles of materials, lockpicking treasure chests for loot, and gaining a bunch of skill points through levels, skyshards, and quests in 20 minutes, well then more power to you.
Razgon
2037
Are you sure? Because it seems completely random to me. Sometimes you get zero loot, othertimes you get a ton of loot.
flyinj
2038
Do materials count at all against your carry limit? Also, what is the correct way to use the “potion wheel”? I hold the button down, push my mouse in the direction of the potion I want, then release? Or do I have to left click on the potion to use it?
KevinC
2039
It doesn’t happen in 20 minutes, no. Why does it need to happen in 20 minutes?
Razgon
2040
Because thats how fast I got 4 blues, tons of potions and money and soul gems :-)
KevinC
2041
Materials certainly do. My bank and personal inventory space are busting at the seams due to that.
To use the quick slot item menu, open up your inventory and hit ‘Q’ (or whatever your key is set to). Using your mouse, drag items from your inventory onto the wheel slots. Close out of the inventory menu and hold down ‘Q’, select the item you want slotted. Now when you tap Q, it uses that item. Hold down Q again to switch what’s currently active.
Razgon
2042
Open your inventory, press Q, and select what to put in what slot. As for using it, press and hold Q, select what you want as quick item, and release. Now just push Q to use it.
Materials, unfortunately, count against carry limit.
edit: CURSE YOU, KEVINC and your magic typing!
flyinj
2043
Is there a way to tell how much of a material constitutes one unit in the inventory? It seems that consumables, weapons and armor take up 1 unit each. However, I have like 200 units of various materials, and I’m still under my 60 unit limit.
KevinC
2044
Ahhh. But it doesn’t sound like you had much fun camping, considering your were complaining about how tiring it is? My motivation is to enjoy my time and progress through the game, and thus far “just playing the game” has been an approach that has worked well for both categories.
I’m clearing out quests 4 levels higher than me as it is, so I’m not seeing the need to camp a mob for blue items or potions. And that was my point, if you want to camp because the efficiency of blues-per-hour is better then knock yourself out. But the game isn’t requiring that you do so, out of my guild I don’t know anyone doing so and they’re all doing fine.
Unfortunately, I think what will probably happen is these mobs get their drop rates nerfed into the ground to “solve” the camping problem at the expense of people just completing the dungeon once and moving on. That’s usually the heavy-handed fix MMO developers put in, in any case, instead of having a more robust system where drop rates decay the more often you kill the same mob in a certain period of time.
Spect
2045
Materials can stack up to 100 of each. The stack takes 1 inventory slot. Potions and food do the same.
Weapons and armor do not stack, so each takes a slot.
I know they fixed it in beta to reduce the drops the longer you camp a boss, perhaps that isn’t working as intended now, but it used to.
Spect
2047
Speaking of inventory, I’m getting really bothered by this whole system. The character inventory is not adequate, and the bank inventory is horribly inadequate considering its for all of your characters to share.
The number of crafting materials out there is staggering. Even if you upgrade your bank storage a couple of times, it’s not enough.
Then they also go and make it impossible to send your alts anything in the mail. So now you can’t create mules.
I’ve tried creating mules by loading mats into the bank, logging on an alt, taking the mats to free up bank, etc but this is way too cumbersome to maintain.
I can’t understand what the goal of the dev team was in regards to tight inventory constraints. It’s not like they have a cash shop that you can by additional space from. That would make a ton more sense if they did, given the design decisions.
KevinC
2048
That’s great, I wasn’t aware of that. Thanks for the info, Arkon!
Agree 100%. It would be nice if the bank space was increased a fair amount, a separate bank was created for materials only, or each character had a personal bank along with the shared one. My lack of bank space contributes to my lack of inventory space on characters, since they’re lugging around a bunch of stuff that won’t fit into the bank!
flyinj
2049
They should seriously just allow unlimited mats storage in the bank.
Bateau
2050
These things apparently take up a lot of space in the databases. I’ve heard that’s one of the reasons D3 only has 4 bank tabs, as silly as it sounds.
flyinj
2051
What? That is a pretty ridiculous excuse. What are they using, legacy Oracle databases from 1988 that use 8 bit hashes?
Bateau
2052
I don’t know. But databases baloon to huge sizes over time, which means increasingly longer maintenance (backup) times if you don’t somehow limit it.
It depends on how to store it. If all you want is that they have the item, that might be a simple key value. However, if you want the items to have any other metadata around them, like when/where/how obtained and such for audit/customer service purposes, then it becomes a more expensive proposition. Now, instead of just having a key value, you actually store a whole record. This is why mats can stack usually, don’t really care for the audit, but other items are singular, do want the audit information with it.
