lordrichter wrote: »Dust drop rate is incredibly rare. No one knows the average number of hundreds of nodes that must be farmed to get one.
Ciphers are probably more rare and require mass monster murder on an epic scale. This is really geared towards AoE farmers that can collect a following of adoring fans and then wipe them out quickly, rinse and repeat. I doubt that you will ever come across one while just out killing monsters as part of normal play.
Cipher drops from enemies, probably non-humanoid, since "monster" is pretty vague, while dust drops from resource nodes, the same way as nirncrux or cassiterite sand. But the drop rate is probably on the order of 1/100K. Farming for it is really not worth it.