Very true, and SP players need more variety than MP players. 1054 item types is fine. If I could pick my items, I could be satisfied with a count of about 50.
Is there a list somewhere rating items? I'd like to know if anything I have is considered to be good.
Wow, that's a lot. I'm only at 1,170 and that includes a few of the holiday items (like maybe half of them?). What did you do to get so many items? I think I own every Common, Uncommon, and Rare in the game at the moment.
I've been farming a lot of different levels (to the tune of thousands of items) for loot drop research. I've gotten a wide variety of items that way. I've also been lucky with the Epic and Legendary drops. Sometimes it seems not a day goes by I don't get a new one. I also got eight new items today by dropping 9,000 gold on Ornate Chests as a test. I have too much gold and nothing to spend it on. In 4 1/2 months of playing Card Hunter, Randimar's has given me 1 (one) Legendary worth buying, a pair of boots. I've come to the conclusion (not my original idea) that the best way to get lots of high-rarity items is to complete as many SP adventures each day as you can. It's much faster than MP and the gold chests seem to drop almost a Legendary a day even with a moderate amount of adventure completions. Unfortunately, the grand majority of the items are still useless, but you'll have a high item count .
I have come to a similar conclusion. I play to 1 MP win a day (sometimes 3 if I'm really bored) as that gives a good return (1 to 2 golden chests). Outside of that it seems like farming specific bands of SP levels with quick kill builds (1 Savage Curse / Imp Nimbus Priest + 2 Firestorm Wizards). Right now I've been farming levels 13, 12, 11 looking for a Lochaber Axe. I found one in a club membership chest but clicked too fast and proceeded past it before I could sign up to get it. Luckily a few games later I got one anyway. I'm trying to get 3 or 4 of them, so I still have a bit to go. Outside of that I've been farming the level 17 campaigns in hopes of getting some good level 18 Legendary items (Vibrant Pain!). So far I've gotten a few (3 Whiteglow Flails recently and some other good stuff like the 3 SPR item).
That's been my advocated method for a while. I only tend to repeatedly farm the lvl 6 caves when I need gold for randimar's. It really depends on how many levels you can reliably beat each day. I manage just over 20, and with the club membership I'd still say I only find around roughly 4 legendaries a week on average. I'm sure if you could improve the number of adventures you're beating you could improve on that, but that's been my experience so far.
To me the Legendary drop is way too low for how many Legendaries there are. If you get overly lucky you have a huge leg up -- something that MtG designers realized was bad when they purposely made rare cards significantly better (Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus are the prime examples). Epics have a decent drop rate and I think you can specifically farm for Epics (I've been hunting down Lochaber Axes), but to hunt down a specific Legendary is nearly impossible considering how rare they are and how many there are. I'd love to see the drop rate of Legendaries increase. It would most likely increase their income too as the Club Membership slot would see more Legendaries and more enticement for players, but that's just my speculation.
*Jarmo genuflects before Oberon* You are the Master! It's natural the collection will grow at a much slower pace the closer you get to 100%. It will slow even further geometrically or even logarithmically as it's much much more likely a dropped item is one of the ones you already own rather than a new one. Witness my experiences and numbers culled from opening 1,000 Epic chests.
I second Oberon's "Master" rating. My gaps are down to epics and legendaries, so filling them will be slow and sporadic. I'm more interested in getting several of the ones I want, but filling out the collection is a good secondary motivation. Edit: And I'm still missing the Rowan Staff.
I'm not sure what I'm missing at lvl 1.... I know I don't have all the treasures at that level, but this is excluding that. (edit) ahh I'm missing the uber powerful Unholy Nimbus . I completely agree with your point about finding new items dropping off. With a full random drop rate, if you plotted your new/unique pulls for each week I expect it would eventually look like an inverse logarithmic chart, eventually dropping away to almost 0. I'm not sure when it'll happen but I expect I'll hit a wall at some point. I already have weeks where Randimar's has absolutely nothing unique for me (like this week). And even on weeks where it does I'm buying items like Bynzer's Weighted Club simply because it's unique. I'm not complaining about this, I see it more as a design decision they made about the game and I'm cool with that. But without trading (which I also understand isn't a viable feature), random distribution makes it nigh impossible (mathematically prohibitive) to collect a full set. Again, I'm not advocating for changes as it would likely impact other aspects of the game, which I respect. I'm missing 4 legendary treasure, and 1 epic treasure at this point. And as a simple subset they are a perfect example of how slow it goes, I haven't seen anything new for over a month in terms of treasure. They'll eventually add more items into the game, so it'll start over when the set grows. Eventually the game could have well over 500 unique legendaries. Based on the Wiki there's currently 1538 items in game. Taking out the 6 Holiday legendaries I didn't get, that drops it to 1532. I have 1371 of those. In terms of legendaries I have 104 unique items out of 231 (excluding holiday items again), so that leaves 127 legendary items I'm missing. Total I am missing 161 items, 127 of which are legendary (or 167 and 133 if you want to include the holiday items), so there's still a good 30+ epics I don't have. Realistically I think the chests I purchased early on helped fill in my epic collection. While they have a smallish drop rate for legendaries, they do fill in your epics pretty quickly with 2 per chest. I expect playing MP to the epic chest regularly would have a similar effect (especially with the club to boost your take). Though once you actually have a good amount of epic items, you have little incentive to purchase chests, because getting items you'd only want to sell ruins the cost to benefit analysis. There's just these odd little intersections between the freemium designs and collectible games. All in all it's just for fun anyway.
A fine analysis, Oberon, thanks for the info! EDIT: I don't have the Rowan Magestaff, either. It's the rarest common by far, only obtainable from multiplayer, Mauve Manticore or level 16 and 17 adventures with a very low chance of dropping.
It's not too easy to get a specific Epic, either. I calculate the odds of getting a Lochaber Axe (level 12 Epic) from a level 12 adventure brown chest as 1/3,006 or 0.00033 or 0.033 % if you're a club member, 0.022 % if not (based on the data in these two posts). That means you need to farm 2,084 brown level 12 chests to have a 50% chance of getting one or 6,922 chests to have a 90% chance of getting one (club members). The gold chests have a much better chance of dropping one but you can only get those once per day.
I have quite a few Rowan's, but then again I primary farm the level 17 campaign and MM#1... Yes, I know they are still super rare, but I feel they are obtainable. As for Legendaries... the drop rate is so small that it is basically just a blind shot in the dark against a tiny speck. For Card Hunter to become competitive I think the availability of Legendary items has to be much easier. I can see someone farming to get a specific Epic (yes it takes a while), but to farm a specific Legendary? It is nearly impossible. Also, the sheer number of Legendaries mean that getting them all, or even a vast majority like Oberon has, is nearly impossible for any normal player. No clue how Oberon got so many... how many Purple Chests have you opened? And how many hours a day do you farm? I've been playing 2 to 3 hours a day, nearly every day, since the game's release and I only have a small fraction of the stuff (although right now I'm really only interested in getting another Lochaber and a VP or two).
