To Qilin Or To Kaggen, That Is The Question...

I'm debating is it worth farming pouches or single during this campaign. I need 1500 HMP's for my Almace and after doing Qilin spam today for almost 5 hours I only got 6 pouches (I didn't pop the pouches yet because my plan is to farm 150 of them and hope I average 10 per pouch, and it also saves inventory). I think Qilin has a 6% drop rate (which I obviously was unlucky because we were killing it in no more then 2 minutes and I probably killed about 250 of them) and Kaggen has approximately a 32% chance of dropping singles. I hate the idea of killing at least 4500 Kaggen's (I don't have mules) but if I killed 1500 Qilin I may be able to get at least 90 pouches if the 6% holds true. Any thoughts?

Last time I brought this up, Papa Rooks said that with the changes to stones allowing you to just sit there forever, it's much better to farm the pouch NMs now.

I spammed Qilin for a few hours on 2 characters and I still havent seen 1 pouch on either. It is pretty depressing.

Qilin without a doubt. Gibby and I practically ran shifts doing qilin shouts for a long time. It was still a grind... but that's ffxi.

During the last Voidwatch campaign I did a run of 60 Qilin, only saw 1 pouch and it only gave 3 HMP.

How many people did you have? We always have 12-18 and have at the very least one pouch per run. Sometimes we would be lucky and people would give us pouches or sell them cheap.

If you have mules or not so greedy LS members and (gasp) friends, go with Qilin. Otherwise if you're by yourself spam Kaggen. The 32% is more like 30~35% with the RNG.

I'd rather have a higher chance at a single knowing overall I could spam one NM 4,500 times by myself over the course of a month and actually average out to 1,500 plates than take my chances at a 7% drop rate on a random number generating pouch.

Neither, Uptala

last Campaign I did Kaggen. hundreds of Kaggen using 2 characters. I tended to get a Plate between 1/2 to 1/3 of the time on average by taking an alt. I also finished out with something near 3 stacks of Cuticles, which I held onto until about a month or two ago and slowly trickled onto the AH once they had some value again. the bigger question is, do you have your Cinders, because if not it's Morta all the way. by the time I got my 60 Cinders, I had between 3-400 HMP from single drops.

killed Qilin 131 times tonight~ got 7 pouches.

anecdotes everywhere

the statistics make it quite clear: pouch nms drop more value per kill on average, and it's not even close

the only argument in favor of jeuno t3 is if you plan to kill an extremely small amount(<200) and want to reduce variance

FFXIDB already did the data collection work. Just do a bit of math.
Pouches are a 6% drop rate from the 3 nms that drop them
plates are ~35% drop rate from the 3 nms that drop them most commonly.

Pouches give an equal chance of any number between 3 and 15 which averages out to 9 per pouch.

Statistically if you did 1000 runs of each your results would be:
Single plates: 350
Pouches: 60 (540 plates on avg)

Of course there is variance as mentioned. Technically you could do 100 pouch NMs and get 0 pouches. Or you could get 12 but 6 would be the avg amount.

I kept getting 3-4 plates in the pouches I got.

Started thinking it'd be better to farm synth mat/riftdross/riftcinder to sell for gil then buy plates.

You'd also get 50 Cuticles though, worth about 25 mil (at 500k/each, which seems to be the avg price across all servers), which will net you approx 200 plates (120k each).

Of course, you still have to sell the Cuticles and buy the Plates off AH.

Does Akvan 1-shot often enough that people don't spam him instead? Pennon's are closer to a mil average across all servers which would then net another ~400 plates on top of the 350 singles.

Can someone explain this? I still have to go back after I use six stones.

VW Officer > Ask a bunch of questions > Bottom option (stone usage) > stock.

I will check this out once I can get on later. Thank you.

NP, my new main character is out of stones, so I have to get a bunch of dust just to do VW.

I set it to Key Items so I can use up the 4 stones I have (and no, I'm not going to go get the other 2 KIs to get 6 stones) and go back to Bastok Markets #1 to get 4 new stones.

Usually, when I do Aelio, I can warp out and get back in the time it takes for the group to kill 1 Aelio.

Morta is soloable with trusts without using displacers but speed of kill is most important factor here. Displacers are 1k gil each and weaken the mobs tremendously which speeds up your kills. I did about 60 Morta last night, no cinders and 12 single plates. Was killing Morta in under a min. Got bored of it and went and joined some friends at Qilin and killed about 50-60 qilin, 30 second kills. There was a JP there who didnt want to wait for people to trade cells so I made a macro for cells and got them off aout 50% of the time. Personally only got 2 pouches, but one of my mates who came was only there for 10-20 fights and got 3. Qilin all day for me...


P.s: This was only about an hour and half maybe 2 hours of farming and ended the night with 37 plates - 1 pouch gave 11 stones and the other 13. A lot of people believe drop rates and number of plates are lowered during the event. I don't agree but if you think that then just hold your pouches until after event ends :)

Isn't the amount in the pouch determined when it drops?

Anyways, can anyone answer my question above? Does Akvan still 1-shot often enough to make it not worth farming over Kaggen?

That wouldn't make sense.

It's all random anyway. Holding onto pouches shouldn't effect the number of plates it releases.

18 hrs total of Aello yield me 500+ - guess that works too. *shrug*

Not a single cell traded.

Rubi cells make a huge impact so far.. I was spamming Qilin for 5 hours and only got 6 pouches with no Rubi. Last night I played for 2 hours and got 6 pouches using Rubi on all the pops. I know sample size is small but that was pretty decent.

Hmmm. Azriel, would you mind recording your Pouch Rate whilst using no Cells?

The projected 5% rate recorded on BG most likely assumes Capped Lights + Cells. What I'm getting at is that rare+ items require a certain minimum of Ruby light before they'll practically drop,most likely capped for full Base-Rate. What I want to know is how much are the Cells really helping?

If you get some 500ish samples (each mule would obviously count as an individual sample) we can get a fair assessment of the base rate.

BG assesses 5% fully capped + Cells.
What if the cells are only adding +1%?

It'd help to know once and for all because even with my Lua set to quick-trade cells across my mules I still come across some spam-happy people so if I can TRULY stop stressing out over it, that'd be awesome

Killspeed was severely hampered by 100% uptime amnesia. Suppose if you have a geo mule it might make it quicker.

Are there any scripts to buy displacers, like the shield one?