Dragon Horde
https://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/comments/837xlw/araxs_quartermaster_enchants_are_awesome_guide/
Hi, I’m Arax Elventree@araxelven on PC and last year I wrote a FAQ here to help fellow players to understand how Quartermaster (QM) enchantments work.
There are now a few elements in it that are have been of date since mod 12.5 went live in November, so I though a new version might be in order.
What are Quartermaster Enchantments?
They are a utility enchantment introduced as part of the Siege of Neverwinter event in the spring of 2016, as a replacement for the older Salvager’s enchantment. They give you a chance at getting a bag of goods each time you kill an enemy. You can wear them in your utility slots up to the maximum number of slots you have, normally five but up to seven for some classes.
Why do I want them?
They are, by far, the best and easiest way to accumulate Refinement Points (RP). You will need these RP to upgrade you equipment to better versions with more stats. Since the November update on PC (January on consoles) RP are now universal, meaning that you can use them to refine and upgrade all your weapons, artifact equipment, artifacts and enchants. To progress at “endgame” you will eventually need a lots and lots of RP. The Quartermaster enchants will allow you to easily acquire RP just by playing the game and they are now cheaper to acquire than ever.
How do I get them?
You can get them as a reward from the Siege event, which comes around two or three times per year. They are relatively easy to farm there, but you can also get them on the AH quite easily. With the mod 12.5 changes the prices for upgraded enchants have dropped considerably. Still, I generally recommend you make your own as it’s quite easier now.
What do they do?
Each QM you equip gives you a cumulative chance at getting a bag (let’s call them QM bags) after each kill.
Rank Chance 5 0.5% 6 0.75% 7 1% 8 1.5% 9 2% 10 2.5% 11 3% 12 3.5% 13 4.0% 14 4.5% QM bag drops are picked up automatically (thank god) and stack with each other, by type (more on this in the next section), up to 999 bags per stack. Since you (usually) have five utility slots you could in theory stack up to 22.5% chance but this is not necessary, because there are three simple rules you need to be aware of.
A) There is a short cooldown between bag drops, which corresponds to about 45 seconds. This means that if you’ve killed 50 mobs in that period, you’ll only get a single bag regardless of your cumulative chance.
B) There is a daily cap on the amount of QM bags than you can acquire, and that is set at 12 bags. This resets after about 20 hours, but this timer seems to affect each bag “slot” individually. For instance, in you played for one hour between 8 and 9 PM and got eight bags, but then played some more the next day from 10AM to 1PM, you will only get four more bags maximum. The first eight bags will “unlock” again at approximatively 4 PM, but if you play all evening you will only get eight more bags then because those four bags from your morning gaming session are still capped.
C) The two above limits are per character, and not per account. So if you play multiple characters, you can multiply the number of daily bags you earn. More on this in the Strategy section.
What about those bags?
There are five different types of bags, and which ones drop depends on a) the level of the critter you killed and b) some amount of random chance.
Scavenged supplies (white): From low level mobs (ex: running CT) Looted goods (green): From mobs around level 20 to 40 Discarded Equipment (blue): From mobs around level 40 to 60 Abandoned Gear (purple): From mobs over 60. Spoils or War (purple): From mobs over 67. The levels listed are best guesses and two types of bags will often overlap. For instance I usually get 90% white and 20% green drop form CT.I really haven’t done more extensive testing over which bag drops how exactly, because in the end, it doesn’t really matter for their main purpose. From 70+ level content I get about 65 to 80% Spoils, with the rest being Abandoned Gear.
NEVER EVER throw away lower-level bags, even the white ones.
So, what’s in the bag?
There are two things you can do with the bags: open them or donate them to your guild. Abandoned Gear gives 30 Surplus Equipment and Spoils give 70. Lower level ones give less. Needless to say, on 2x Marks you can get tons of Marks and really give a good boost to your guild, so this definitely is a nice option.
The other thing you can do is to… open them. They may contain a variety of stuff including potions (type depends on the bag), resources, green equipment, basic campaign currency and ENCHANTS. LOTS AND LOTS OF ENCHANTS… if you open them correctly.
Note that the enchants are Bound to Account (BoA), which still makes them the best source of RP in this game, bar none. You can move them between characters prior to converting them to RP but you can’t sell them outright.
You could also upgrade these enchants to higher-level ones but NEVER do that. They will always be bound to your account, so you can’t sell or trade them once you move on to other enchants.
The other crucial thing here is that ALL types of QM bags will give the same exact chance of getting enchants. This is why you never want to discard (or even donate) the lower-level bags.
How to Open QM Bags the Right Way.
This is the most important part of this PSA, so pay attention here. The QM bags have a mechanism that is otherwise unique in this game. The level of the enchants you will get is determined by the cumulative % chance of the QM enchants that you have equipped at the moment you open the bags.
This means that you can wear whatever combination of QM enchants that suits you while adventuring, but you must be wearing QM enchants that give a total of 10.5% chance at minimum if you want to get the best loot from the bags.
You will want to open your bags on 2x Refining Stones events (used to be 2x Enchantments, this is a new Mod 13 change), obviously. Anything else would be a waste, so the following calculations in this guide all will reflect this.
Each bag normally gives a variety of stuff depending on its level, but you should get at least two R6 enchants per bag. If you get any R5 or less stop opening immediately and re-check your QM enchantments because something is wrong.
For example, here is a sample of 300 bags opened at 10% QM chance.
Rank Quantity Per bag R5 256 0.85 R6 422 1.41 R7 10 0.03 And now here are the results from opening 1000 bags at 10.5% QM chance.
Rank Quantity Per bag R5 0 0.00 R6 2588 2.59 R7 110 0.11 As you can see, you get a ton more RP at 10.5%. I’ve opened thousands more bags for testing at various levels and these results stay the same.
With the universal RP system introduced in Mod 12.5, it is far easier to just group the prior calculations in one single RP value. Using that and by averaging over thousands of bags that I’ve opened, we get about 1200 RP per bag we open.
I’ve also tested opening bags various levels up to 22.5% (using 5x R14s) and the results stay the same. You do not get more RP above 10.5%.
There is however ONE exception. Prior to Mod 12.5, enchants used to be more expensive so it was more efficient to use six QM enchants using the Makos Ring you can get in the SKT campaign. This is the only ring that has an utility slot, so using it allowed to reach the threshold using more but less expensive QM enchants . However, if you want to do this with that ring or with any other item now or in the future which grants more than five utility slots, you must then (and only then) reach 11% QM chance. Why? I’m not sure but there is probably a rounding error in the formula the programmers used to reach the threshold which didn’t account for the 6th slot.
QM and utility fashion advice.
Usually at level 70 you have access to equipment which gives you 5 utility slots, so the least expensive way to reach 10.5% is by using 4xR9 and 1xR10 QM enchants. This would currently costs about 800k AD on the AH (on PC) but I strongly encourage beginners to make their own enchants, at least at first.
Obviously the better long term option is to slowly rank up your collection with whatever RP you can get through quests (Sharandar) or Leadership. Alternatively, you can share them between friends and guildmates. If you do this however, be VERY VERY careful not to get scammed.
I’ve been asked a few times what I use during regular play, so this is it:
2x R12 QM. I could upgrade them to R13 but there absolutely no point in doing that. 1x R13 DH. You can get a regular supply of RP stones, but also comes with a daily cap. 2x R13 Dark. For that extra bit of speed. Sweet, sweet RP…
Up to now, this guide has been mostly about raw numbers, but let’s math a little QMs can do for you with tangible examples, using the current value of RP on PC, which is around 2 AD per RP. For instance, stacks of 99x Black Pearls are 10k RP in total and sell for 20k AD on the AH.
As I calculated above, a single QM bag is worth at least 1200 RP. You can get at most 12 in a single day, but I play at various times and sometimes take a break so I’ll round this down to 10 bags. This gives us 12000 RP per day, which would be worth about 24k AD. Nice, eh? And the best thing is that you can get this by playing as you usually do, and with no farming at all. With a high enough QM chance, you can reach your max limit in 30 minutes or less. But wait, there’s more…
RP farming strategies using alts
I don’t really recommend this for very casual players, but since your QM bag limits are per character and not per account you can easily multiply many-fold your RP farming.
Over the years I never really got into playing different classes, so I have my main endgame-level TR (Arax Elventree, for those of you that I’ve met ingame), but starting with Chult it has become much easier to get spare gear for my three alts from seals and hunts. You can easily have them reach 10k level and blue/purple gear, which is fine for most campaigns prior to SKT. I equipped all of them with 5x R9 QM enchants and with as few as ten minutes per alt you can get most of your QM bag quota from short and profitable weeklies, Sharandar or DR quests.
If I’m multitasking or just have a few minutes you can just start a private Cloak Tower run and do the groups of mobs prior to the first two bosses. The Gnarlroots dungeon in Sharandar is another favorite of mine because you can get some additional RP from the reward at the end. DR lairs are longer but a single one can get you your daily quota on a lower lever toon. The mobs are tougher but nicely spaced, and you have to remember to take it slow because you gain nothing by rushing through the dungeon because of the 45 second cooldown between drops
Why would you do this? It takes TONS of RP to upgrade everything at maximum level. You would need a total of 10 million RP to upgrade everything in the game to max level, so that’s 10,000 bags. In practice though, you certainly don’t need to upgrade every other enchant to R14, so you don’t need that much but you can also make quite a lot of AD with this by selling high-level enchants you’ve upgrade with your “free” RP.
Tips on Upgrading enchants and making AD
Of course RP is only one part of the upgrade process, so if you intend to play this game for some time you’ll better plan ahead.
Superior enchanting stones drop from DR lairs on certain days, also in a few lockboxes. The AH price crashes when new lockboxes are introduced or there are sales on keys, so look to stock up on them at these times.
Marks of Potency can be bought from the in-game AD store. You get a 25% discount at VIP 12, but you can also stack an additional 15% discount event which happened every two months or so, so stock up on as many as you can.
Preservation and Coal wards have massive discounts (40% or 50%) on them twice per year in June and November for the Jubilee and Black Friday. You will need hundreds, so try to only buy them during these events.
You can complement your set of QMs with Dragon's Hoard enchants for artifact equipment and the Wanderer's Fortune mount bonus. If you need companion tokens some of the Companion Packs are also a terrific source of unbound RP.
One of the most efficient but long-term ways to make lots of AD in this game is the following:
1- Make lots of extra RP with QM enchants. Open the bags during 2xRefining Stones events.
2- Buy marks of potency and enchanting stones during Bazaar sales.
3- Convert ALL your AD to Zen some weeks prior to the bi-annual Zen store sales.
4- Buy Preservation Wards at 40-50% off during those sales.
5- Upgrade tons of high-value enchants and sell them on the AH.
6- Profit!!! (for real)
Conclusion and tl;dr
Quartermasters Enchants are great, everybody needs RP. Use them. Open them with 10.5% (unless you use six utility slots). Thanks for reading!
Arax Elventree@araxelven, Blackcloaks (PC)
