Applied Work Technique Book Drop Rate Is...

[drakeloreroar]

...Bad. Really REALLY bad. There's no reason an item that lets you use your favorite pals on base should be a 0.1% drop rate, especially since you need to complete a series of quests that require you to own multiple tier 4 work pals (including Frostallion) before you can even start getting them. add in the fact it only boosts it one level at a time and you have a literal 300+ hour grind PER base pal if you want to make some of the earlier ones viable... and now you have to do this 60 times... that's WAY beyond unreasonable.

Personally feel the drop rate needs to be 20X higher than what it is OR the books should just max out the stat, or even put it on the medal merchant for 5000 Dog Coins... but what it is right now is frankly a bigger waste of time than Pokemon VGC especially considering you don't actually get anything out of it besides being able to use your favorite pals.

[Khergit Horse Archer]

yes its veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery bad ive done prolly like hundreds of dungeons only have 1 book so far lol

[Dragisnaj]

wow you get one? i didnt get any and searching for them like 2 weeks.... like dunno how much dungeons but over a 100 suply drops not a single one ...
in my opinion the drop rate is very bad i would rather have a ridiculus amount of farming than rng ...

[Khergit Horse Archer]

ye its super painful cuz i was trying to get the legendary compound bow and on top of crashing every 2 to 3 dungeon

[Sevrojin]

do you use katris? that pals party buff boosts book finding

edit: nvm neutral pals

[drakeloreroar]

Honestly i just want to be able to replace my Falaris Aqua and Jignis with a Celeray and Rooby or something... I just want to be able to leave my base for 10 minutes and not have to rescue them from the oven, or furnace, or silo, or the wall they clipped halfway up and are somehow standing on top of 1 wall but underneath another.

[Flying Fish]

All drop rates in this game are horrible

Endgame is unplayable without mods there is a mod that increase drop rates and chances and it makes it a lot more bearable

[funewchie]

I'd never even heard of this item until now.
And... yikes.

Only a 0.1% chance to find in dungeons and such, or a 1% on the Lv 60 Oil Rig's Big Chest (which means pretty much the very end of the game).
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Man, not even Monster Hunter goes that low.
In MH3, the much desired Rathalos Plate was a meager 3% chance per carve (3 carves per hunt).
But even that is 30 times more likely than this book.

Those odds are down into Rimworld's Resurrector Mech Serum (and/or Healing Mech Serum) levels, if you have all the DLC.
Though those two items's odds weren't decreased on purpose, but solely because the item pool had been inflated with new items, driving down the odds of it generating those items for quest rewards (or in ancient complexes).
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One thing's for certain, if I do find one of these books by chance, I am using WeMod to duplicate it big-time. I don't care if that's considered cheating or not.
My goodness, those odds are atrocious.

3% is far more tolerable, while still maintaining any balance concerns.
(Putting it at roughly 1 in every 75 dungeon chests opened.
At 5%, it'd be 1 in every 20 chests, which is bit high for a potentially gamebreaking item)

[drakeloreroar]

I can somewhat understand the drop rate for Legendary Weapons and armor since you don't really NEED that stuff and an epic will more than suffice and carry you into the next update. (I mean I'm still using my Legendary AR) but yeah. In this case though this is a case where it's a flat out downgrade in most cases, you're just doing it so you can use your favorites and for some reason it takes so long that you can literally max out a character in an early 2000s MMO before you even finish 1 pal.

[Sevrojin]

kinda kicking myself now. knowing how rare they are..... i found one when i was around level 20 didnt understand what it was for at the time and wasted it.

granted i think it was just a planting buff but still. annoying to think about now

[Extremely Rare Sigma Gurdy Champ]

To be fair drops in this game seem to be all over the place and needlessly bloated at the moment. Like the level 55 Oil Rig is giving legendary schematics for guns that aren't on par with the Assault Rifle and Pump Shotgun (Level 45 and 43 guns). Legendary Pals are still dropping Pal Armor schematics.

Looking further most Pals didn't get any new Active Skills at level 55, so lack of polish all around, honestly surprised Faleris Aqua even got an exclusive skill considering Lyleen Noct has had nothing.

Hopefully this is because the devs are more concerned about getting the rest of the game finished before going deep into balancing and polish. Best you can really do is voice your concern about these issues in a way that can reach the devs, Steam Forums is not the best way for that.

[Muffïn]

How about condensing raising the existing levels to the star level plus one? up to level 5 max, and get rid of the whole unintuitive book nonsense?
For example a 2 star Pengullet would have Watering, Transporting and Cooling level 3, but so would a 2 star Penking as well, as to not give too easy access to ridicolous suitabilities by just condensing an anubis once to raise its Handiwork by one, for example.

[drakeloreroar]

I think from a coding standpoint the easiest solution would just be changing the books to instantly max the skill instead of just being +1. That way it's just 1 line of code saying something along the lines of "setvalue: 5" instead of "setvalue: +1" or however they're doing it. It's something you can patch in 5 minutes and test within a week or 2 just to be sure that it's not going to delete people's system 32s (obviously hyperbole). That way the item can retain it's rarity without being life consuming to actually finish one thing

If you try to change the drop table you have to adjust a bunch of other things to compensate, and adding a new system in or adjusting an existing system takes a lot of time and testing.

[Cheato1]

This could honestly be easiest solved by adding an npc like brawn that can be used to buy a single book per day at random for like 200k a piece.

[drakeloreroar]

Ok, since posting this I've gone back through and done some more testing and... it's SO much worse than what i thought.

First: There is only ONE 0.1% chance in the pool, not 11 like i thought, the game rolls for the book first then rolls the type after.

The best method for farming is dungeons. With a speed build + Engine Jet and Fenglope you can zerg through a dungeon in around 45 seconds once you know the patterns to the dungeon layout. time between dungeons is a factor as well conservatively i estimate around 3 minutes per dungeon for 2 checks each. that's about 40 checks per hour.
If you set your supply drop timer to 1 minute you would need more than a 66% supply drop rate to outpace this. And the oil rig should not even be considered as an option unless you plan on scumming it as it would be roughly equal to 14 checks per hour being that it's a higher drop rate.

Assuming all of this you're looking AT BEST somewhere in the 18-24 hour mark of farming per book. And to get what you specifically want it's going to be 300 hours each on average then you need multiple books just to make 1 pal viable.
Let's say for instance i want Chillet to run my fridge. Tier 1 ice pal, at max extraction tier 2, then you need THREE books to max it out. That's around 900 hours for a single pal...

[Killial]

This definitely requires a more guaranteed approach. For example, selling for dog coins or bounty tokens. So if I don't want a roulette of luck, where I don't know when at least one will drop, then I can always be guaranteed to grind, so that I can see and feel the progress, when I am approaching the guaranteed line to get one (and preferably the one I want).

Already 2025 - I expect that the gaming industry will already start moving away from these old Korean MMOs style (and especially in non-MMO games), where rare loot drops with a chance of less than 1% with no guarantee of getting it in an alternative way. It's a waste of time and unnecessary grind.