Hey there guys, this is Reckles with WTBGold and today we’re figuring out a solid answer
to a question that’s been plaguing goldmakers since the 7.0 prepatch.
How long should you spend killing in a group farm before you start looting?
If you’re super new to gold making, I’ve explained how group farming works, the basics,
in previous videos, so Reckles from the past, take it away
For anyone new to the goldmaking community, welcome!
5 man group farming can get pretty complicated but here's the basics.
Essentially, any time Blizzard has a quest that says "kill 8 blood trolls" they make
sure that a minimum of 8 have to be up at any one time.
Now, the spawn rate's complicated and they can raise or lower this depending on if they
want to nerf the farm, but essentially, once you kill that 8th enemy, another one will
spawn randomly somewhere else, so what we do is we get 5 people together and just make
sure that someone is in range of every possible spawn point, and then you're pretty much just
bouncing the enemy spawn back and forth as you kill them.
So, that's the basics.
Kill things.
Don't loot.
And then everyone goes out and loots everything together and then you go back to killing.
Just alternate between those two.
Now, I was in a spirit of harmony farming group recently where the leader, who was from
Barthilas, had us kill for 20 minutes straight in between each loot cycle.
If you didn’t die a little inside when I said that, listen up.
When you’re group farming, you want to loot many enemies as possible in each pile.
Flying around and looting 100 bodies gets you more loot than 50 bodies.
Duh.
Well, enemies in WoW despawn if you don’t loot them fast enough, so sure you can pile
up a whole bunch of enemies, but after a certain time, for each one you kill, one’s gonna
despawn, and you’re only gonna have like, 10 bodies in each pile.
So, the longest you should kill for is the despawn timer for that specific enemy.
But here’s a quiz for you.
What is the despawn timer for a normal enemy in WoW?
Pause the video now and put your answers down in the comments, cause I asked a bunch of
you goldfarmers this on twitter and got a ton of different answers.
I’ll tell you the number later, and give you time to pause and answer down in the comments,
but the moral: Never have a kill cycle longer than the despawn timer.
The spirit of harmony farm leader was wasting 18 minutes of every 20 minute cycle.
The moral for elite goldfarmers and guidemakersthough: if you find a new farming spot, kill one of
the enemies, don’t loot them, and time how long their despawn is, cause it can vary.
Here’s the answer though.
2 minutes.
Open world elites and normal enemies despawn after 2 minutes.
There are some caveats though.
The bodies despawn 33 seconds after the first person loots them.
So it's actually really bad if you're doing a group farm and you loot early.
On the other hand, if you wait until the end of the timer to loot it can extend how long
the body stays there to 2:33, but it’s not lootable after 2 minutes so this doesn't really
matter.
Then, if the enemy is skinnable, looting them starts an additional 2 minute 7 second despawn
timer so you can have 4:07 maximum on any average enemy.
Dungeon Bosses are longer, I stayed in front of one for 47 minutes and gave up, but I’m
still curious so if any of y’all have extra time and want to help out the channel, start
a stopwatch, kill a boss, don’t loot it, and let me know when it despawns cause I'm
still really curious.
So, long story short 2 minutes.
You want big piles, but if you kill for 2 minutes, then they’re gonna start despawning,
and you’ll miss out on loot, so should you kill for less than 2 minutes - say, a minute
45, a minute 30, 1 minute flat - to make sure the bodies don’t despawn?
How long should your 5 man kill for to maximize the amount of loot you get?
Well, we can answer that.
If your group moonfires for 60 seconds and then looting takes 60 seconds, none of the
enemies will despawn cause you’ll grab everything within that two minute timer.
You'll be able to grab everything.
A 5-man group can moonfire 200 enemies a minute, so that means each person will loot 200 bodies
every 2 minute cycle.
That's 6000 enemies per hour.
If you moonfire for 2 minutes straight instead, and then loot for 60 seconds, your 5 man group
will generate 400 bodies that will be lootable initially, but they'll immediately start despawning.
After a minute of flying around to the piles, 200 of those bodies will have despawned, but
the despawn rate is constant so you only actually lose out on 100 of those 400 enemies.
So, for a 5 man 2 on 1 off group farm, each 3 minute kill and loot cycle will contain
about 300 lootable enemies and you’ll also be able to get 6000 enemies per hour.
Now, that’s the same as 1 on 1 off, but before we say, “it’s always the same,
it doesn’t matter” let’s see what happens with 1 minute 30 seconds.
You kill for 1:30 and generate 300 bodies.
The first 30 seconds of looting are free and clear.
Nothing despawns.
Over the second 30 seconds, 100 of those bodies are going to despawn, it’s a linear despawn
rate so you’d miss out on 50 enemies, but because you already looted half of the ones
that are despawning, you actually only miss out on 25.
And in your 2 minute 30 second cycle, you loot 275 bodies, or 6,600 an hour.
That’s 10% more than with both 1 minute or 2 minute.
So, it gets a lot more complicated than this, but I’ll save you from all that, because
I did a spreadsheet.
I did a thing.
This is available to any of the wonderful people who support me on Patreon, but for
the average 5 man boomkin farm, the maximum loot per hour is at 87 seconds kill time and
60 seconds loot time.
A couple of the interesting things.
Global cooldown just changes how much loot per hour you get.
It doesn't change what the best ratio of kill to loot is.
The group size also doesn't affect anything.
The only thing that really changes is speeding up how quickly you can fly around and loot
all the bodies.
If you can fly around and loot everything in 30 seconds it actually increases the amount
of time you should be killing for up to 95 seconds, so a minute 35.
So before you go out on a group farm, keep this spreadsheet up.
And that's the big important thing I wanted to share with this video.
85 seconds to 95 seconds is almost always going to be the best.
I did included this neat little drop rate analyzer to actually put this thing to use
though, and we can use this for lots of different farms.
So, walking you through how it works.
Nyxondra’s broodlings have dropped the dark whelpling battle pet 556 times in 671,000
attempts.
With a little numbering, you can see that you should kill for 85 seconds and can expect
about 5 pets an hour doing that.
But you could speed up looting to 45 seconds if you hustle here, and then you can expect
6 an hour, which bumps your farm up from 90k per hour to 105k per hour.
For incandescent fel sparks, motes of fire dropped 175,000 out of 540,000 kills, so you
should get a max of 215 primal fire per hour here worth 108,000g.
Transmog really shines with this though, for silithus glorious farming, the twilight avengers
dropped glorious legplates 78 out of 1.7 million kills, at 250k per drop, that puts the glorious
legplate farm at 75k/hour JUST from glorious legplates.
There's a whole bunch of other transmog you get here.
But the sheet’s also good for nerf testing.
The faithless skycallers in BFA have dropped the dune scavenger mount, the hyena mount,
79 out of 35,000 recorded kills.
That gives us about a 1 in 500 drop rate and means each person should get 14 an hour, 1
mount every 4 minutes.
But that’s completely laughable.
In practice, if the entire 5-man group sees 1 an hour, that’s crazy luck, so Blizzard
is definitely doing something fishy and dynamic with the drop rate here without telling us,
and I'd love to know how it works.
That’s it though, thanks so much for watching.
If you want to play with the spreadsheet yourself, head on over to patreon.
If you can’t afford a dollar a month though, you can support things like this by hitting
the like button.
Thanks so much for watching, guys!
Have a great day, good luck, and happy goldmaking.