This is in reference to my signature that I had for a while saying that hell mode magatama drop rates are half of the hard mode magatama drop rates. Although I said it was from a decent source, I can pretty much guarantee that it's accurate (at this time). As for why I'm posting this, I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks this needs to be changed. Most people would and have assumed that hell mode has the highest drop rates (Kishinden, Room of Rites, Byakkou farming etc.). There's also the fact that ornamentation would become much more viable for non-bargain magatama so you could say that the game was designed with higher drop rates in mind. Note that this is all for typical mobs. For boss drops etc. Hell mode gives higher chances. Also, this is all without considering boosts.
So what are the drop rates?
In Hard mode, when you kill something you have a
0.1% chance of a magatama after which the game picks from all the magatama that the enemy drops.
In Hell mode, when you kill something you have a
0.05% chance of a magatama after which the process is as above.
My suspicion is that Hell mode was meant to have a
0.5% chance
and there was a typo...
I can't see why they would intentionally make hell mode have lower rates instead of making them the same or higher. There was pretty much no chance of players figuring this out through testing due to the ridiculously low drop rates and RNG not to mention that hell mode has higher rates (if not the same rates) for most other things.
Comparison:
If, for example, you're farming Kishinden
As always, the rate of magatama is 0.05% on hell mode and in this case, there are 38 magatama in the selection (Assuming level 21 youkai).
This gives a 1 in 76,000 chance of getting the magatama you want.
Assuming 1.2k kills an hour (roughly the room of rites rate iirc -I haven't tested this much but it should be roughly accurate), you should be getting around 1 specific magatama every 63 hours. It would literally be faster to just log in at a specific time each day to pick up a bargain magatama -which I've done (4 days for a full set of Amara Magatama -total login time: ~15 min).
For reference, in a level 21 dungeon for hard mode (there's actually no dungeons that give this, but it's just for comparison purposes).
As you'd expect, it'd be 1 in 38,000 on average. This is still far from being viable since it's still more than 24hrs of farming.
If in fact it was meant to be 0.5%, then, it'd be 1 in 7,600 on average. This would take about 6 hours without boosts. This would mean that there'd actually be benefits to farming magatama in addition to getting them from bargains, or that non-bargain weapon types such as bow, would become much more viable.
As can be seen, drop rates are ridiculous (don't even try farming a level 66 youkai on hell mode - 1 in 120,000 (60 selection)) and need to be changed. If you do decide to send a ticket, I don't mind if you put this as the source -I don't think that being in possession of this info is in itself, bannable. If any admins see this and want me to take this down, I'd also be happy to do so.
TL;DR
Hard mode: 0.1% magatama drop rate (random magatama)
Hell mode: 0.05% magatama drop rate (random magatama)
What Hell mode should have been (probably): 0.5% magatama drop rate (random magatama)