Red Alignment Requirements For HMP

I was wondering what % of red alignemnt one should aim for when going for pouches. Was farming Qilin yesterday with 2 more ppl for ~3 hours. Used clusters so fight would last <30sec -> plenty of fights...
I traded cells, the others did not.
The others got maybe 5-6 pouches or even more (didnt count exactly >.<) I got one.

Yea I know...all random and stuff. Yet, I was wondering. The one pouch I got was on a pop where I forgot to trade cells. In the meantime, when I traded cells I got spammed with boots/gorget/dagger. So I was wondering if the "quality" of pouches is considered less than equipment, thus, favoring equipment with maxed red alignemt, i.e. 550%.
Did anyone else experience a similar thing or was it just bad luck?

That's just standard logwatch luck really. There's always that one guy rolling in plates while you're slowing building a log cabin.

Red alignment supposedly affect the probability of the "special" first slot occurring (which can contain scrolls, Heavy metal pouches, heavy metal, rift-items, equipment, etc.). I would be unsurprised to learn the probability of occurrence is just red light / 100.

Blue alignment affects the number of log/trash slots that occur. The relationship is something like 1 slot per 100 blue light. IIRC if you have 450 blue alignment you get the fifth log slot 50% of the time. 300 blue alignment would be 3 log slots 100% of the time.

Thx for the explanation. Was under the impression that the HQ slot is always there, but red light increases likelihood of rare drops, which could ve affected pouches and equip in a different way.
But clusters have no impact on drops right?

I'm pretty sure that's not the case, which explains why you get 4-6 items when you use Cobalt/Rubicund cells for 450 of each light.

Clusters probably lower monster level. I would bet they don't affect drops. There's really no reason to use them, though. I kill Qilin in approximately 1 minute as DNC+GEO with a few trusts and no weakeners. Getting and using weakeners is just an annoyance.

Does TH have a positive impact?

TH increases alignment of all colors but if you use cells its caped anyways ath the overall cap of 550%. So no reason to use TH unless you dont use cells.

Iirc TH adds an X% bonus to every light category only if you fail to reach the 550% cap, so if you do reach the cap via cells+campaign it's not doing anything for you.

Here is with my mule's TH4 GEO:No change


Also my numbers earlier were off. Perhaps red light does just control the probability the first slot will be replaced with a rare drop. You have 550 blue light max with cells and maybe get 5-6 drops? I think I've gotten 4, but perhaps I forgot to trade cells that time. I will have to check again tonight.


This is probably the best guide to voidwatch staggers: https://www.bg-wiki.com/bg/Category:Voidwatch#Spectral_Alignment

It does. think 2-10% increase in alignment across the spectrum. Helpful, but probably hardly.

Phase displacers cost 5 for 5k. This really depends on what you're all about. I use 1-2 displacers on aello when im soloing or at work, because I don't have the benefit of a dual character and need to get quick kills on my breaks. So they do have a use. For the average person who is trying to save gil, they could probably get by without using them. But its so cheap, that the random garbage that you get more than covers the cost.

Also, I would take caution in how much stock you put into others getting drops while you aren't. This is really a numbers game. A guy I was doing vw with boasted that he got 3 HMP pouches back to back, then 20+ fights later got nothing and then complained. I averaged the same across those fights. In the end, we both ended up with 3.

Also to consider is the fact that people are using 2-3+ characters, so just by sheer numbers they will accrue more pouches than you. If in 3 hours you can get 10-15 pouches on one character, the guy with 3 toons can obviously amass 45 or so. Its just numbers.

I have found, though, that doing several different bosses hourly has changed my drop rates. Anecdotal, but I do Morta > Qilin > Uptala > Kaggen and seem to get favorable drops when I change often. Though, the travel time likely cuts into it, so idk.

you have a 100% chance to get 1500 HMP if you fight mobs that drop HMP until you get 1500 HMP.

do you still have to buy 5 displacers at a time?

Hey, perspective is good. Yes, displacers is 5 per sale max.

I checked again. With 550% Blue/Red I always got 5 or 6 drops and the HQ slot would be the first of either 5 or 6 slots. So it seems to be always there, just filled with random stuff. That still leaves the question open what red light actually does.

Also...how do you guys get your plates? Ive been doing this for a while now and even with campaign it looks like it would be more efficient to just farm gil somewhere else and buy plates -_- Doing Qilin with 1~2min per fight with trading cells for a for the week now and collecting pouches is slow...only advantage over buying is that you can store pouches to conserve inventory

The key is the number of kills and the number of chests you pop. Bring a second character to substantially increase your drops. I used rubicund cells only, and always used 5 displacers to quicken kills. the time adds up.

I farmed 35 riftcinder and all 1500 plates during the last voidwatch campaign. i used almost all stones on main and was using voiddust on alt at the end. Popped over 4500 chests (2250 kills) total.

Lol >_>

Yeah, I got the same result. I bet the odds that the first slot will be replaced with a "good" drop is what depends on red light. "Good" in this case would be an item unique to the first slot, like spell / mob specific drop / Heavy Metal / Rift-item / pouch (/ cashmere wool / ethereal squama / other rare crafting materials?). If with 550 blue light, you get 5 slots and a 50% chance of a 6th slot, perhaps 550 red gives you a 55% chance of getting a first-slot-only item in the first slot.

Hmm.... might try displacers to reduce time. So far I was killing without and felt it was fast enough. Problem is: I dont have a 2nd char. So only one chest for me... Lets see how far I get. But I do think SE should do something about the acquisition of Empy weapons, i.e. HMP and dross/cinder...

They did, its called Ambuscade! 50000 hallmarks for a scorcia, what a deal.

As I pointed out in a recent discussion regarding the relative difficulty of RMEs, it's really not worth farming Voidwatch with only one character. It really wasn't even worth farming Voidwatch with two characters when I had to warp. Now that I don't have to warp and the campaign is on, it takes me 5 hours to get 99 plates (10mil) with two characters, so 2mil/hr. With only one character, it would be 1mil/hr and you can get that a lot of different places.

Then there is just the rising price of plates. 13m for a stack on Shiva right now....if any1 has some spare plates on shiva Id be willing to pay 80k/plate. Not cause I think they are easy to farm, but cause I think empy weapons are expensive enough -_-

Before this campaign and the change to cell petcentages i would use 2 Red and 2 blue cells during runs on Kaggen. I would just aim for blue (magic) alignment and build the other lights during Blitz. Capping blue and Red seemed to yield HMP inline with FFXIDB's Stat of 35%. Dual boxing with no trusts and 3 displacers per fight would take about an hour to go through 6 pops and yield about 5-7 HMP. Using 4 or 5 displacers cut about 15 minutes off the run but diminished HMP to 3 or 4 because he was dying too fast to cap Red and Blue. If one and not the other was capped drop rate plummeted.

Did some tests again to find out what Red light really does. Test was conducted on Morta with about 100 spawns and to me it seems to work like this:

As mentioned above, Blue light determines the number of item slots, with pretty much alignment/100 = # of slots.
So 550% = 5.5 slots, ie 50% to have 6 slots.

Now there seem to be two different lot pools (leaving out glowing weapon for now casue sample size was not big enough for that). One NQ pool for basic items like logs, medicin and stuff and one for HQ items like equip, cinder/dross, HMPs. Red light seems to determine the chance to switch the lot pool of the very first item slot (always present!) from NQ to HQ as with 550% alignemnt HQ slot would appear more or less 55% of the time and without cells, i.e. 400% alignment the ratio would drop. Did less spawns without cells so exact numbers might be off.
Inside the lot pool the items seem to have fixed drop rates. Sample size wasnt big enough to put any numbers but I felt like all but cinder/dross (and maybe Abj) had the same drop rate to me...

Anyways, the important point is, that this way the drop rates on the wikis are not precise as we dont know the red alignment values.
For example if all ppl had caped alignment and lets assume rq that HMP is said to have 10% drop rate then inside the loot pool it would have
x = 10% / 55% = 18% drop rate
while if ppl would not have used cells and not even had KIs for red that would put it at
x = 10% / 35% = 28% drop rate inside the HQ loot pool.

That way we can say as well that trading cells does not(!) increase the cinder or whatever drop rate inside the loot pool but rather just the occurance of the loot pool itself.
Example:
If a HMP has a 20% chance to occure in the HQ pool, then the chance with trading cells but otherwise caped alignment is:
55% * 20% = 11%
without trading:
40% *20% = 8%
So trading cells would in this case increase the overall drop rate for HMP by roughly 3%. Have to decide yourself if thats worth it...

I have 6 million cruor and it grows with VW... Now that cells max with a single trade, a simple macro of

/item "Rubicund Cell" <t> <wait 01>
/item "Cobalt Cell" <t>

makes life easier.

The real question is do you want to spare the inventory space to the cells?

Sure, I mean trading cells on a NM like Morta doesnt cost you anything as you get more Cruor than you pay. So I do and will in the future trade cells (even for blue as well cause selling stuff to the Npc quickly adds up to quite a fair amount of money). Just wanted to math out the actual contribution of trading and try to find out what kind of influence the red alignment really has.

At least the riftcinders are economical - 5 VD dragons for 1.3M Riftcinder. Should help the supply a bit over the course of a year as long as monthly gear keepa getting added.

Were u doing morta getting those results? If so then u can get other Gil items besides the 99 plates in 5 hours. I been averaging close to 99 plates on aello per 2 chars per 2 hours. So 5 million and hour. Of coz with other people and with displacera so quick kills. Doing it with 1 char is frustrating. At least work 2 chars if 1 char has bad drop rate it averages out with a good drop rate of second char.

I don't know what else to do to Make 5 million an hour. Delve with 2 chars and 1 random can only make 3.2 hour.

You'll notice that it's all really because Square Enix. It's just how it goes. I personally rarely ever used cells EVER and I had no problem collecting every single VW body within 20 fights. I believe I also got the first Coruscanti on Caitsith server within 4 fights of doing Qilin. 2/4 of those fights I got heavy metal pouches, but I do not recall the quantity inside the pouches.

That being said, don't expect to ever get pouches, just expect to barely even get singles every other fight or else you'll end up extremely disappointed. Then, when you finally get a pouch or two you'll be thankful cause you weren't expecting it in the first place. ;)

At this point the mindset is to do per hour. Watch a movie or something and consider 10 plates an hour to be good so when you get over 10 plates u are happy and won't walk away disappointed. And do this when u are in a good mood. And don't try to grind another 10 cause that last 10 prob won't drop u a pouch.

I think the point was that unless you have two or more characters to spam VW with, the rate of gil per hour with one character is either equal to or less than other gil farming methods in the game. For example, Salvage can easily compete when it takes 20 minutes per run and you get anywhere from 99-140 alex per run, with the occasional double linen drop as well.

I have noticed that my mule (525 blue, missing someperiapt) gets shittier trash drops than my main. Specifically,he gets hi potions+2 with cobalt/rubicund cells and many fewer gemstones. Just a PSA that blue affects both trash reward quality and quantity.