Nightghosts, the glove market, and funding your attacker without a mage.

Hey everyone! (Warning: Long, long read)

As some have probably heard, I was toying with the idea of making a thread logging x hours of Nightghosts on my DK to show that you don't necessarily need a mage to have relevant hourly income.
The original plan was to farm up to 25.000 Dark Cloud Foxtails for the BWG exchange quest. With this plan, I hoped to both put a small dent in the 'Make a bishop to fund your attacker'-meta and gather some data on the BWG exchange quest rates.
However, other projects came up (both irl and in Maple) so I decided to call it quits with the ~10.000 Dark Cloud Foxtails I already had. This was gathered over ~12.5 hours of farming Nightghosts, so the sample size isn't as big as I had originally intended, but it's still worth releasing.
I'm also just very fond of tracking multiple hours of grinding and seeing all the numbers go brrr, which was probably my main motivator for tracking/analyzing/releasing this information.

TLDR; goals of this thread:

• Demonstrate that you don't need a mage (or even multiple) to obtain adequate funding. My personal norm for this is that earning ~8-10m/hr on a non-mage is a decent goal, given that this competes with a Bishop farming Gobies and Ferlucio and Fishy (among others) have demonstrated that Goby farming is a solid standard of obtaining funds.
• Obtain more information about the BWG- and YAC exchange in Showa Town. Perhaps these numbers could be relevant to the (currently inflated) state of the glove market.
• If either of the above turned out to be significantly lackluster, perhaps open a discussion about whether or not either of these could be adjusted to further balance the server.
• Satisfy my personal geeky need for numbers.

A final note before we start: I know Sku did a comparable thread and I by no means am taking credit for this. I just wanted to add to what he wrote and perhaps use it to start a further discussion.
Let's get into the nitty-gritty.

Character used:

Spoiler

For this exchange, I relied on my absolute stunner of a DK:

He's weak, he's not efficient, but he does the job. When I was doing this, I had more gear on it so the damage range was higher. I think it was right around 5k max, but I don't remember the exact numbers.
My Dragon Roar did not consistently one-shot Nightghosts, so occasionally an extra whack with Dragon Fury was required. Numbers from DK's that can 1hit with roar will probably be slightly higher.

But Ainz, doesn't this just change the problem from "You need a mage to get funded" to "You need a mage or a DK to get funded?"

Spoiler

I really don't think it does. I briefly toyed around with other classes in the same map and got comparable numbers. Notably, corsairs do better here than DK's do, due to their smooth mobility. But Skuire demonstrated that it also works on a shad and I'm certain even immobile attackers such as (cross)bowmen could do just fine here with their respective version of arrow rain.

Why this map?

Spoiler

I chose this map primarily due to how accessible it is. Classes as low as early third job can probably start using this map if they desire to make meso.

Possible improvements to the strategy:

Spoiler

There are a few factors here that limited my profits, but I think they made it more realistic than playing on a turbo-geared-3pet-silver-mane-farming god. I'll list the factors regardless for those that would like to improve upon their hourly numbers:

• I could have used a stronger DK, this could have either come from better gear or just being a higher level. Consistently oneshotting Nightghosts with Dragon Roar would have sped up the kills per hour.
• I could have used a Silver Mane (or even a Hog for that matter). Mobility plays a very significant role in this map due to its awkward platforms and I primarily walked around at like 120% speed.
• I could have used 2 or 3 pets to speed up the looting process. It didn't happen too often, but sometimes I spent half a second here and there waiting for my pet to stop being an absolute buffoon and actually loot the item I wanted.
• Or, throwing all above improvements out the window, I could have just been a corsair.

Time for the fun part, the NUMBERS (For those who don't want to hear me rambling, I will include a summary of these numbers right below this)

Spoiler

This was the overall structure for my farming sheet. It contains a fair few more columns to the right, listing all the other items I got. I excluded those from the screenshot (for now) for clarity.
As you can see, the raw Meso/hour at Nightghosts is far from desirable (it comes out to an average of 486.155 meso per hour) and the equips aren't particularly a goldmine either (a whopping 127.661 meso per hour, excluding Red Katanas)

Thankfully, the raw meso per hour and equips are not exactly the main reason to farm Nightghosts, let's have a look at the fun stuff.

(Prices owled at the time of writing, these may vary in the future. Thanks to whoever messed up the claw market)
That's looking pretty good! In 12.4 hours we managed to farm a whopping 81 mil worth of scrolls and etcs. At an hourly rate of 6.562m/hour, this does not yet compete with Gobies, but it's definitely looking promising.
Note; I did the hours of farming for this before the Claw 30 price basically doubled. Hourly profits from scrolls/etcs at that point were closer to 5m)

Summing the equips, scrolls, raw meso and ores/rocks, we're looking at a total profit of 88.980.330 meso. This brings the hourly rate to 7.185.491 meso per hour.

The previous screenshots didn't cover the (potentially very significant) BWG and YAC exchanges though, so perhaps the hourly profits could be significantly higher!
When I was just starting out with this project, I had asked around about the previous rates people had experienced when raffling. I also took note of Sku's Nightghost thread, given the large sample size.
The conclusion I came to was that the chance of getting a BWG from the raffle was probably close to 1%. This is based on fairly limited sample size, so don't take it as hard evidence. However, it was a good starting point to do some math!

Looking at my logged hours, I was getting around 750 foxtails per hour. That's 7.5 raffles per hour or 13.3 hours to get 100 raffles.
Using the 1% chance of getting a BWG (worth 30.000.000 mesos), this means that 13.3 hours should roughly translate to an additional 30m meso made.
This comes out to an hourly rate of ~2.2m meso per hour. Adding this to our previously determined hourly income, we could now be totaling up to 9.441m/hr!

However, whether or not this estimate of 1% was accurate, is left to be seen.
My numbers were not exactly what I had hoped for:

Oops! A saddening result of 0 BWGs. I guess that is exactly what I deserved for doing 95 raffles on a supposed 1% chance. Clearly, the 0.00% doesn't portray the realistic number, it was just that my sample size was lackluster.

The 42.75m noted on the right is based on the fact that Dark Cloud Foxtails have previously sold (quickly) for 4500 each. Taking the gamble here instead of just selling my DCFs cost me an unfortunate 42m, but it was a risk I was willing to take for science.

In my case, this, unfortunately, meant that I had to take off the 2.2m/hour I added earlier, bringing us back down to 7.237.402 meso per hour.

My final hope: The YAC raffle

Unlucky! Not a lot of money was made from this either.

Summary of the numbers for those who don't feel inclined to hear me ramble:

Spoiler

Hourly income from scrolls/ores/equips(not RK): 7.185.491
Hourly income I personally gained from BWG: 0
Hourly income at 1% BWG chance: 2.200.000 //1% chance based on other people's numbers
Hourly income possible from selling Dark Cloud Foxtails at 4500 ea: 3.447.580

Total hourly income if selling foxtails: 10.633.071
Total hourly income if raffling for BWG at 1% chance: 9.385.491

Whew, that was a long read. Let's try to take a step back and refer back to our previous goals:

• "Demonstrate that you don't need a mage (or even multiple) to obtain adequate funding. My personal norm for this is that earning ~8-10m/hr on a non-mage is a decent goal[...]"

I think we can safely say that we've achieved this goal, sweet!

• "Obtain more information about the BWG- and YAC exchange in Showa Town. Perhaps these numbers could be relevant to the (currently inflated) state of the glove market."

We did get more information about the Showa exchanges, now let's see how this relates to the current state of the glove market.

Spoiler

As of a few months ago, the price of BWGs (and Yellow Markers alike) has skyrocketed. Clean BWGs went up from 18-20m to 30-33m and 14 att gloves have gone up from 240m to 430m.
Whether or not this was caused by a normal free market and/or inflation is out of scope for this thread, but I would like to discuss possible balancing changes that could normalize glove prices.

Currently, the only two ways to get BWGs are Gachapon and the aforementioned exchange quest. If we have a look at the recently added/buffed CWK exchange, White Scrolls have been brought in to normalize that specific market and to provide more non-mage money-making options. This exchange is still under active monitoring, but a recurring complaint was the fact that it is (or was) very feast-or-famine. If we have a look at the BWG exchange quest rewards, my average profit from 95 raffles was 6.776 meso per exchange. If I had rolled a BWG in my next 5 rolls, this average would have been roughly 45 times higher. I don't think further elaboration is required on how this falls exactly into the 'feast-or-famine' problem.

Improving the BWG supply would (hopefully) bring the glove market back to a stable and affordable position. Additionally, it would allow non-mages to compete with mages in terms of farming for meso.

Our next goal was:

• "If either of the above turned out to be significantly lackluster, perhaps open a discussion about whether or not either of these could be adjusted to further balance the server."

I think we can safely check this one off as well!

This only leaves the last goal of satisfying my geeky need for numbers. DONE!

Thank you for coming to my very long TEDtalk, please don't flame my writing style too harshly.

 

This indeed does not take looted gachapon tickets into account. Over the 12.5 hours, I got 43 common gach, 7 rare gach and (when these were still a thing) 9 gold gach. However, I don't really agree with slapping an EV on these and adding it to the hourly income.

Additionally, I gained ~8k NX.

 

Was mentioned in original post

 

I wouldn't exactly say this is the issue. Nightghosts is (for its level) an incredibly lucrative spot. Even for higher level players, it's still a very solid mesofarm.

My problem was moreso the fact that the raffle could be used to help resolve an ever increasing trend of rising glove prices, but due to the nature of the very feast-or-famine raffle, most people don't bother with it.
As a result of this, less bwgs are generated.