Though I am not sure it's worth it. Mods drop with sufficient frequency that the 90 minutes I spent on my 1st 40 combining R1 and R2 mods to end up with a half dozen R3's did NOT seem like a good investment of time. On other characters, I just vendored the old crafting mats, which took a fraction of the time, and those characters caught up with #1 in short order.

Indeed. I quickly realized it's faster, easier, and more effective to just vendor the old mats if your character is over say level 25. If they hadn't all converted to R1 mats it would possibly be worth it, but seeing as they are, it's just a waste of time - you're not likely to get anything out of it that you couldn't as easily have gotten from a few minutes of just playing the game.

Even before On-Alert i always thought the droprate in VB was very low. I just leveled a toon from 36 to 40
last night on Monster-Island, and the drops there were very good .. got even some R5 DEX and CON mods :)


The pro of converting is you get some Safeguard Catalysts, and its a "fast bank cleanup". Just keep the Catalysts
and sell all the R1 trash to the Vendor.

They felt that the difficulty wasn't adding enough actual difficulty so now short of slightly improving certain costume drops and darkspeed drops, you're better off running normal.

Originally running higher difficulties in action packs and comics would add stat scaling to blue item drops - not anymore.

I did not know that. Thanks

Your are missing one HUGE advantage to this system, especially for new characters. All of that crafting builds up your Crafting Skill Level. With the deplorable lack of Nodes in the game it can be very hard to get up to a high enough rank in skill to use the nodes your are finding at level 30 or so. Give your low level character a leg up by combining low level mods and you don't need to wast your first Nodes getting to level 50 or so. Those Nodes will push you MUCH higher than the low level mods did.

True. That's actually what I meant :)