A Rogue’s Plea: The Brutal Reality of Poison Gland Drop Rates

aerodt

I absolutely live for the rogue class in Monsters and Memories. Slipping through the shadows and lining up that perfect strike is peak MMORPG gameplay, but fellow shadows, we really need to have a serious talk about the current state of poison crafting. Right now, it’s a massive headache.

If you pick poison creation right at character creation, it honestly feels like a trap. You head out into the Underdocks or the Night Harbor newbie yards, ready to start brewing, only to find that the drop rates for poison glands on the snakes and spiders are just brutally low. You can spend hours grinding in the muck and barely scrape together enough venom to make the skill feel remotely viable for a low-level character.

And the frustration doesn’t stop in the starting zones. By the time you’re hunting for T2 and T3 materials, those drops feel practically non-existent. I’m honestly not even convinced a T4 gland actually exists in the loot tables right now it feels like a complete myth.

To make matters worse, our baseline DPS already feels like it's lagging behind some of the other classes right now. We rely on those coated blades to close that gap and give us our edge in combat. Having our defining utility gated behind an impossible material grind on top of already feeling completely out-damaged ,we are absolutely starved for decent daggers.

We desperately need to see these drop rates improved across the board. A rogue's kit just doesn't feel whole without a coated blade, but when the material grind is this unrewarding from day one, there's almost no point in even bothering to learn the trade. We all love a good, classic grind, but let’s get a little more venom flowing out there so our class can actually do what it does best!

Thial

Not like it matters that much since we only have utility poisons and we don't have a DoT poison which might be the biggest problem.

nerrith

I could see this being resolved in the same manner they have quest items drop after a kill, like when using a silver edged blade to get wererat heads. An item or ability could be used to trigger the targeted enemy to drop its poison sac.

Gertbeefrobe

nerrith I'm not a fan of more tools to carry but an ability off the GCD, only usable at <20% mob health with a catchy name and increased/maxed chance to harvest a gland sounds fun. I hope we get dots and direct/instant damage poisons. I've played enough rogues to know that poisons are wonky and hard to balance.

Khadyn

In Ail'vorith the drop rates of venom glands aren't brutally low. They are non-existant.

First problem there are only snakes in the AV starting area. No spiders.

Second the snakes literally only drop snake meat in AV. I even checked the merchants to see if anyone was lucky enough to get any glands and sell them off but there were obviously none. I spent nearly all of levels 3 to 6 killing snakes because they were the most abundant mob. They were the most abundant mob because they only drop the snake meat and even the meat has incredibly poor drop rate. People need to pay for abilities and spells so they simply ignore the snakes in lieu of other mobs that actually have trash loot to sell.

I am hoping they fix the drop rate in AV and/or add some spider mobs to the starter area for a little more variety for EA. If they dont have the time to do that at least add some venom glands to the Rogue Supplier. The Supplier has literally everything we need for the level 4 snare poison except the glands.

GoblinDruid

This is off topic and not meant to be dismissive of the OP, but I also was struggling heavily with getting glands in the Night Harbor area.

What I learned is that over in Faelindral I could buy as many venom sacs as I wanted for 1 copper each by visiting the shady dealer, the shifty elf, and Drogo the Grocer (Drogo is also a shady merchant, he's just sneaky about it).

This may not be the case with more people playing during EA. I normally wouldn't even share this information because of how OP it was for me, but I don't plan on rolling Rogue as my first character during EA. I'll wait until I can afford some decent twink gear 😉

I will also say if you begin solo'ing the spiders in EW at the hill that has millions of spiderlings you can level 2-5 really fast and you'll get an insane amount of venom sacs and spider silks to level your tailoring.

I feel like they may have purposefully misbalanced the game like this to encourage travel and trade, but I'm not sure. Wolf Pelts are also super abundant in the forest, but I feel like mining was better in the NH area.

I also thought it was messed up that Elf Archers had no way of training tinkering in Faelindral and had to travel to NH in order to do so. Maybe this was by design, but IMHO forcing players out of an already under populated zone at a fairly low level isn't cool IMHO !