Boss Drop Rate

A while ago a bunch of people were talking about how some groups are able to get 100+ weapons at Chaos Vellum whereas others struggle to get even 10 between a party, but I don't think anyone ever explained quite how it works:

Chaos Vellum and Von Bon/Hard Magnus/Empress Cygnus (I didn't check any others before I quit) drop rates are split evenly between every party member who is active in the boss fight. Active meaning having inflicted any damage onto the boss at least once during the fight. If you have a party of 6 with 1 person on 20x drop rate and everyone else on 6x drop, and every party member attacked the boss at least once, the drop rate will average out to ((20 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6) / 6) = 8.3x. That was my general set up, I'd gift every party member a 2x drop card and have everyone cast a 1.6x familiar and we'd go on 2x weekends, and it worked out reasonably well for the most part, until I was able to solo.

If only one person attacks, the boss drop rate will be 100% of their own drop rate, rather than it being split between the party. So if your main attacker has 22x drop rate and everyone else is on 1x, but only the main attacker does damage to Vellum (basically if they do a full solo) the drop rate would be (22x / 1) = 22x. If everyone attacked though, it'd be ((22 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1) / 6) = 4.5x, which is a huge amount lower, and that's why a lot of people were getting very few drops, especially considering Vellum's drop rate is pretty bad to begin with.

If you bring other characters into the main fight map but they do not attack, and they just sit in a corner and either wait the fight out or die and then don't respawn, they won't count as 'active' players, it's generally safer to leave them in the entrance map but it won't affect the drop rate at all if you bring them in. Attacking just once is enough to be considered an 'active' player though, even things like Kanna's teleport which inflicts damage, or the 2nd job I/L teleport passive.

It doesn't have anything to do with aggro from my observations. It's generally an easier fight if the aggro is 'stuck' to the main attacker though.

Also, Black and White Star Potions both work at Chaos Root Abyss. Black Star Potions are +5% chance to find a Unique tier item upon killing a boss and White Star Potions are +25% chance to find an Epic item I believe. They're worth using if you have them but not really worth going out of your way to buy.

Saw a thread on Basilmarket and most people had some vague idea how it worked but they were still a bit off, so here you go.

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Something else semi related which as far as I'm aware is already pretty well known, but I may as well post here anyway, anything that gives +%drop rate stacks with other sources (+15% or 20% item drop rate potential, +30% drop rate on Holy Symbol, +30%(?) drop rate on Showdown, etc), but other things that give 2x drop rate like the 2x cards/events multiply, I believe the 1.6x familiars are multipliers too rather than 160% but I don't know for sure.

If you have 200% drop rate gear + 30% HS + 15% IA and you're on a 2x card, wolf underling and 2x event, you'd be on (2.45 * 2 * 2 * 2) = 19.6x drop rate.

ive often noticed drop rate discrepancy; when is it times 2 vs when is it +100% (example)
ty for the info
i dont even basil anymore, too sad, but rarely/sometimes, there is a gold nugget hiding

Hm, does it really even out when you bring a party of attackers though? I remember trying it before and everyone was made to buy 2x cards but it was still barely much at all say, 1-2 drops a person except for mules which didn't matter to the grand total. It still was nothing compared to the solo rate drops and felt the same as 1x drops lol.

Hm, does it really even out when you bring a party of attackers though? I remember trying it before and everyone was made to buy 2x cards but it was still barely much at all say, 1-2 drops a person except for mules which didn't matter to the grand total. It still was nothing compared to the solo rate drops and felt the same as 1x drops lol.

That reminded me, there used to be (and potentially still is) a glitch with 2x cards from the Cash Shop where they don't actually do anything at all until you change channel after retrieving them from your Cash Shop inventory. I don't know if it's a drop rate exclusive thing or if it does that for 2x EXP cards too, nor do I know if it is still an issue, but I always had my full party change down and then back up one channel after they retrieved them and before we started just in case.

I had been testing various drop rate related things every week for a few months when I was killing actively to try and figure out exactly how it worked and I think I cracked it with this, but due to the nature of drop rate I can't say 100% for certain, it seems to be from my experience though. I had a few weeks where people forgot to retrieve their 2x drop cards from the Cash Shop, or forgot to summon a familiar/equip drop rate stuff, or even died just as Vellum died and got no drops at all, and all of these things mess up the drop rate total rather heavily, so it could've just been that people didn't realise they weren't doing everything properly for your group.

Hm I see, yeah it feels weird in party runs. Too many things don't seem to connect properly or sometimes people make mistakes. The change channel trick I thought only applied to those free ToT 1.5 coupons maybe I'll try this from now on for regular 2x lol.

Huh, I was actually wondering about this earlier today.

drop rate should be more transparent; its not so difficult to add a stat to our impressive Detailed Character Stats window.

re-add the raw attack value
add %drop rate
add %exp rate

i think there was one more good one, i cant rememnber

Hay nitonoob!

I think for the most part you're correct. I've been experimenting with this on cvellum for a couple of weeks and last week I sacrificed one run for testing purposes during 2x and had 5 people (with no drop rate %) at the end before I kill it tap him. Needless to say I didn't get the usually huge amount of drops but rather the 10 or so weapons my party would get when I didn't solo. This week I also had a bam friend run around in the map for the whole time i was in there and she made sure not to touch him and the drops worked out as if I solo'd.

Really sucks it works this way, it's like Nexon rewards the people who are able to solo 100x more than people who party up. =/

Hay nitonoob!

I think for the most part you're correct. I've been experimenting with this on cvellum for a couple of weeks and last week I sacrificed one run for testing purposes during 2x and had 5 people (with no drop rate %) at the end before I kill it tap him. Needless to say I didn't get the usually huge amount of drops but rather the 10 or so weapons my party would get when I didn't solo. This week I also had a bam friend run around in the map for the whole time i was in there and she made sure not to touch him and the drops worked out as if I solo'd.

Really sucks it works this way, it's like Nexon rewards the people who are able to solo 100x more than people who party up. =/

Hay henoobi <3

Yeah that's pretty much what I did when I was testing too, over the course of about 8 weeks I tested with 6 active party members, 4 active party members and 2 passive/looters, 3 and 3, 2 and 4 and finally 1 active member + 5 passive/looters. The fewer active party members I had resulted in slightly more drops each time, until we 'peaked' at just me attacking and everyone else looting. It wouldn't have been quite such a dramatic difference if everyone had more drop rate equips but I was the only person in my group to have a full set of ~220% gear, which screwed with the balance for everyone else. It was an extremely miserable discovery, given that Chaos Root Abyss was pretty much the last and only thing my guild did as a group (save for Flag Race at least). Even after finding out how it worked we did a few kills with everyone attacking just for the sake of it being more fun than everyone waiting for me to kill alone.

It's really rather sad that if you go in completely solo with no looters and are powerful enough (and loaded up on drop rate multipliers) you can get more drops than a full party of 6 ._. the way bossing works in MapleStory is completely backwards. Why they seem to be set on encouraging people to play a MMORPG alone is beyond me.

Holy Symbol increases drop rate? Since when x.x? I can't believe I never knew this haha.

Holy Symbol increases drop rate? Since when x.x? I can't believe I never knew this haha.

Hyper skill. Forget what level it unlocks.

It's really rather sad that if you go in completely solo with no looters and are powerful enough (and loaded up on drop rate multipliers) you can get more drops than a full party of 6 ._. the way bossing works in MapleStory is completely backwards. Why they seem to be set on encouraging people to play a MMORPG alone is beyond me.

It is quite absurd. If they want to "average out" the drop rate, they should just apply each person's drop rate to their own drops. I could sort of understand doing the overall average thing if the drops weren't individual, but as it is, it makes no sense at all.

There are basically 2 flaws in the drop rate system, from what Mazz writes.

1) The automatic assumption that, without attacking, "passive" party members will default to the active attacker's drop rate
2) The inability to directly individualise drops to drop rate

The first part is a simple coding issue I believe. The second is more tedious, but is necessary to fix. Having 22x drop but only getting 4.5x is absolutely unacceptable. edit: the reverse is true too: getting more drops from a solo than a full party of 6 is equally unacceptable.

 Ramble

I believe this issue crops up because the individualised boss drop rate system was designed with the assumption that everyone in the party takes part in bossing, and so the simplest and fairest way to individualise drops is to average everything out. By right the fairest way to assign drops is through normalisation of damage dealt to boss, or ranking of players based on damage dealt, then apply drop rate multiplier to every player individually. That's quite a handful to write properly... for Nexon.

Hadriel

I actually disagree about passive skills hitting the boss affecting drop rate.

Looking at Magnus specifically -- without any interference I can get all 5 capes/shoes 100% with just my drop gear and no card or event.
I've had Xenon's loot for me, with their missles doing some damage (<0.1% hp) and still get all the drops. However, I've had [MENTION=12966]Terebii[/MENTION]; (paladin) loot before where he would attack. I was on a 2x card at the time, as well as all my gear (gear includes wolf), and only got 2 shoes and 3 capes. I believe there is a threshold damage that needs to be dealt for that individual to be included in the drop rate calculation.

This method of party drop rates has been around for as long as I can remember. Back when I killed Empress for weapons (when no one else in the server could), I noticed more drops when we both bought 2x cards.

I actually disagree about passive skills hitting the boss affecting drop rate.

Looking at Magnus specifically -- without any interference I can get all 5 capes/shoes 100% with just my drop gear and no card or event.
I've had Xenon's loot for me, with their middles doing some damage (<0.1% hp) and still get all the drops. However, I've had Terebii; (paladin) loot before where he would attack. I was on a 2x card at the time, as well as all my gear (gear includes wolf), and only got 2 shoes and 3 capes. I believe there is a threshold damage that needs to be dealt for that individual to be included in the drop rate calculation.

This method of party drop rates has been around for as long as I can remember. Back when I killed Empress for weapons (when no one else in the server could), I noticed more drops when we both bought 2x cards.

Interesting. I didn't ever boss with a Xenon so I don't know if they are an exception or if it just works differently. Do you know if the Xenon skill triggers aggro? As I recall the Xenon Missile skills don't trigger aggro so that might explain why it doesn't consider those attacks worthy of making a player an active attacker, whereas I'm pretty sure both the I/L Chilling Step and Kanna's Ether Pulse trigger aggro. Familiars would also not cause a player to be considered an active attacker if this is the case because those don't cause aggro either, same with most final attack skills (but you'd need to attack at least once for the FA to trigger anyway at most bosses).

Interesting. I didn't ever boss with a Xenon so I don't know if they are an exception or if it just works differently. Do you know if the Xenon skill triggers aggro? As I recall the Xenon Missile skills don't trigger aggro so that might explain why it doesn't consider those attacks worthy of making a player an active attacker, whereas I'm pretty sure both the I/L Chilling Step and Kanna's Ether Pulse trigger aggro. Familiars would also not cause a player to be considered an active attacker if this is the case because those don't cause aggro either, same with most final attack skills (but you'd need to attack at least once for the FA to trigger anyway at most bosses).

I don't think it has anything to do with aggro; I've been bringing a Kanna mule as a binder as long as I've been soloing. I've hit magnus with the teleport before, and the "aggro" notice on the boss notification bar routinely says my mule is "the most threatening enemy."
[MENTION=12966]Terebii[/MENTION]; has gotten quite a bit stronger recently, and I had him bind for my last two runs since Kanna's are so broken atm, and it didn't hurt my drop rate. He was making sure to use smite outside of the blue zone to reduce the damage dealt, however. Magnus considered both him and my Kanna mule as "the most threatening enemy" several times throughout the run as well.

I don't think it has anything to do with aggro; I've been bringing a Kanna mule as a binder as long as I've been soloing. I've hit magnus with the teleport before, and the "aggro" notice on the boss notification bar routinely says my mule is "the most threatening enemy."
Terebii; has gotten quite a bit stronger recently, and I had him bind for my last two runs since Kanna's are so broken atm, and it didn't hurt my drop rate. He was making sure to use smite outside of the blue zone to reduce the damage dealt, however. Magnus considered both him and my Kanna mule as "the most threatening enemy" several times throughout the run as well.

The boss aggro bar is super broken, it would occasionally forget my Bishop was even in the map and the box would glitch up ;_; but that can't be the reason then. I imagine there probably is a threshold that you have to pass in order to be added to the 'total' drop rate thing, but how much that threshold is exactly isn't going to be particularly easy to figure out haha

And I'm not sure exactly how long ago this has been in place, iirc it didn't work like that when I used to run Horntail in 2009 ish but I'm pretty confident it did when my guild started doing Cygnus runs in 2012 or so. There have been several 'general update' patches in the past so I wouldn't know when exactly it was adjusted but it's extremely noticeable with Chaos RA (and Vellum in particular).

the cygnus boss bar is/was pretty accurate;
somewhere around unleashed patch or so, they added attacks where the boss will reset aggro
some that "make sense" are like when empress tornado/morphs you or jails you in the garden.
however, the truth not always the case

I actually disagree about passive skills hitting the boss affecting drop rate.

Looking at Magnus specifically -- without any interference I can get all 5 capes/shoes 100% with just my drop gear and no card or event.
I've had Xenon's loot for me, with their missles doing some damage (<0.1% hp) and still get all the drops. However, I've had Terebii; (paladin) loot before where he would attack. I was on a 2x card at the time, as well as all my gear (gear includes wolf), and only got 2 shoes and 3 capes. I believe there is a threshold damage that needs to be dealt for that individual to be included in the drop rate calculation.

This method of party drop rates has been around for as long as I can remember. Back when I killed Empress for weapons (when no one else in the server could), I noticed more drops when we both bought 2x cards.

I believe it has to do with who deals the killing blow, but I'm not sure. At least it seemed that way on my tests.

For the sake of completeness, I observe that only Familiars and server-sided "FA skills", namely Xenon's Aegis missiles and WA's Trifling Whim arrows, de-aggro (which gets a bit annoying). All active attacking skills, (generally client-sided) FA-type skills and summons will aggro.

Hadriel