SirAndy wrote: »

Is your character several levels above the zone level? If so, that's why.

The chest difficulty is based on the difference between your characters level and the chest base level, which depends on the zone the chest is in.

If you're in a level 20 zone and your character is level 25, pretty much all of the chests will be easy.

Conversely, if your character is level 20 and you're in a level 30 zone, you will see a lot of hard and even impossible chests.

Impossible means you're too low compared to the zone. This is to prevent you from getting loot that is much higher in level than your character.
;-)

This. I find Intermediate and Master all the time.

killedbyping wrote: »

It doesnt matter what kind of chest you find. There is no viable loot inside. Master chests ironiously have a WORSE loot then simple ones...

You can deconstruct chest loot for mats, so it's not a total loss.

I used to see a good mix of chests around, but have mostly (like 99.9% of the time) seen simple chests for the past 5 or 6 weeks. Regarding impossible chests - I saw one of these yesterday, but then I was in a zone 20 levels above the level of my toon.

I suspect they've been nerfed because of gold sellers. The harder chests gave good loot - blues, occasional purps and I'm pretty sure I picked up the odd yellow. If you can run a bot around all the chest spawns and pick this stuff up ad infinitum, even if it's a pain in the backside to sell items in ESO, the stack of high-level crafting improvements you can quickly accumulate from deconstructing these items will almost always sell.

It should be based on lock picking experience and not on what kind of chest it is. If you're a n00b lock picker you'll probably balls up the most basic of chests because you do not know what you're doing. Trial and error like in the other games.

I know the difficulty level of the chests depends upon your level, ie an impossible chest to a level 5 player will be easy to a level 15 player. I had just assumed I was keeping ahead of the level curve in that regard.

I have seen a couple of Medium difficulty chests, over about a month, but just didn't think abou it. The difficulty might be hard at the tougher end, but I just didn't consider it. The chests are just something to try when you find one and are not being attacked by three mobs.

My wife and I will be playing and come across a chest, it will be advanced for me and simple for her, she has opened a lot more chest than me, so I guess it goes by how many chest you have opened.

After looting a few thousand chests, here are some thoughts I've got on it.

1. Don't make the lock dependent upon your lv vs the zones. That's silly.
2. The loot should be better (for that level/zone) the more difficult the chest is to open. Having said this, simple/intermediate/hard/insane should be the difficulties. Whoever decided to have 'impossible', slap on the back of their head. Silly.
3. Nothing wrong with the decrease of time and mini game to open the lock. Heck, it is light years ahead of the mini-game for fishing.
4. The developers haven't yet realized they can actually have a player competition once a week (or whatever) for picking the chests. The players are let into a room with X number of each difficulty of chests. They are kicked out of that room within a certain amount of time. The results are put up on a leader board. (Yes, some people will *** about lag and stuff kicking them off it, but they shouldn't have a lot of stuff in the chest room.) For everyone, this would be a mini-game they can play. There doesn't even need to be treasure in the chests though they could have something like tolkens. Collect a huge number and get a small prize type of thing. When you complete the timed challenge, you get to see what your previous week time was and so on.
5. Have a 'chest hunter' skill people who wish to can dump points into. You can put up to three points in 'keen eye, chest' (oh, there is a joke there, I'm sure) and up to three points in another which gives a little more time to pick the locks. (Note that neither of these abilities would help in #4 above but would in 'out in the wild').

Just some thoughts.

I agree that the locks and difficulties should be spread a lot more evenly. When the game was first released I would see some simple, Intermediates and Masters all over the place. I think in the past month I've seen one Impossible outside of Daggerfall. I really wish they could tailor the loot in the chest to your level. I Hate finding a chest , for example, in a zone with lvl 18-20 enemies and opening it to find lvl 5 loot! It's happened so many times the past week alone I almost pass them but stop so I can get my achievements.

SirAndy wrote: »

... The chest difficulty is based on the difference between your characters level and the chest base level, which depends on the zone the chest is in. ...

Makes sense. After the beginner islands, I only ever find simple chests, but I'm always overlevelled (due to being a completionist). It would be nice to find some harder chests, the simple ones are so unchallenging...

no reason not to open chests but they are all easy and the crap I find inside is almost always worthless.

Bring back the harder chests please.

weird i was thinking the same thing this morning. Was really hoping for something above simple in the3 boxes I found. Been ages since anything but 'simple'. I kind of liked the sexy ones.

Falmer wrote: »

Because a lock has a level and what you see is different based on who is trying to open it.

If I transport my level 3 characters to Cold Harbor, every chest is going to be IMPOSSIBLE.

Since I tend to be the kind of player that is over-leveled for any given area I am questing in, I will always find simple locks, because the lock levels are always going to be below me.

While this sounds good I don't see any validity and can confirm that this is not entirely the case. I re-rolled a character that is now level 29 and I ride around just to open up the maps in impossible zones for me to level in but there are chests and such all about. I CAN open chests in areas 10+ levels above my char level.

SirAndy wrote: »

killedbyping wrote: »

It doesnt matter what kind of chest you find. There is no viable loot inside. Master chests ironiously have a WORSE loot then simple ones...

@killedbyping
The chest difficulty has nothing to do with the quality of the loot. You can stand right next to a master chest, level up and turn around and that very same chest dropped from master to advanced. I have done some extensive testing on this on the PTS over several weeks (while mapping chest locations).
In fact, if you have two players look at the same chest together and the two players are far apart in level, they will see the same chest displayed with different difficulty settings.

The quality of the loot is exclusively determined by the zone level the chest is in (and of course some small random component).
;-)

I have noticed that some higher quality chests that have a higher difficulty in the midst of lower quality chests will have better loot. Like I just started on cadwell's gold and was in the roost by the wrecked ships. Opened 9 simple chests back to back, all green loot, found an intermediate chest and it was blue loot.

Pretext wrote: »

Players said the locks were too hard, locks now simple. The vet levels are too hard...and so on.

You end up with a MMO that has the depth of play of Candy Crush.

candy crush gets pretty hard after a while.

I was harvesting mats in Craglorn, and found all these chests in an hour.








Of course I saw many simple ones too, but that's still alot in my opinion.