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Ornate Rusted Keys

Several months ago, a new item was introduced in the game - Ornate Rusted Keys. These keys open up Sunken chests which have a guaranteed drop of +10 swim infusion.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ornate_Rusted_Key

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sunken_Chest

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Swim-Speed_Infusion_%2B10

At the time, we believed that there was an underwater area coming up - complete with a map-specific race and this item was introduced as a means to dilute the onslaught spike of near-infinite demand.

So far that has not happened. But the preparations were still being done and one of our members opened up a lot of keys. Here are the results:

I opened about 215 keys. It's difficult to determine how many as some Ornate Keys were obtained in the process of opening up all those Sunken Chests,

These Sunken Chests have an annoying trait - you need to open all ten (10) before they reset. This requires a lot of loading screens and by extension, lots of waiting. Borrowing a fast hard drive for this task would be really worth it.

Each chest guarded by three (3) veteran kraits. Way too much muscle for such rewards. It is best to do this with someone - but as you can imagine, this requires a lot of coordination. The other person also needs to be opening chests or else they'll get disinterested quickly.

This takes way too long. You can open maybe 20-30 chests in an hour.

As far as the cumulative rewards, they were as follows:

So what conclusions can be make?

While a solid 100+ gold spike is nice, this also can be broken down into about 50-60s per ornate key. This includes not just the +10 swimming infusions but also any materials which pop in when opening chests and slaying krait guards.

You really need ten (10) characters to do this properly:

  1. put all keys in an open shared inventory slot
  2. plop a character at each location
  3. open chest
  4. load next character
  5. Rinse and repeat until keys have been used up.

As you can imagine, only those accounts with lots of characters can do that.

Non-80 characters can not handle the load. Even modestly outfitted max-level characters can not. Spruce them up before attempting this.

As previously mentioned, not every profession can fight through the three veteran krait security. Some are also way too well guarded - and very difficult to solo. I'm looking at you Kessex Hills. Place your strongest character there.

It is a wonderful feeling when you arrive at a chest and it is unguarded. A lousy feeling when you are fighting the vets and someone swims in, opens the chest, and leaves. Both of these typically happen during the weekend. This is a chore and is best done then when you can get random people opening chests and you'll get a few unguarded which speeds things up.

There is a bug. Once the 10th chest is opened. It will not reset on the next load. You need to load it up again to reset the chest. Best to do this on the 10th chest and then again making this the 1st chest - and hopefully the kraits will not have respawned.

Same thing about the time of day. Do this so that when reset occurs, you'll be granted one (1) extra Ornate Key.

Until underwater maps and underwater combat becomes a thing, this is purely a theoretical exercise. The skin is nice but is it worth over 100 gold? There are plenty of ascended breathers already available via crafting.

You also need a 7th rune as the breather replaces the headgear so if you want the 6th bonus underwater get a 7th rune.

After about 100-120 chests, boredom really sets in. Fortunately, this only needs to be done 2-3 times a year. Try and have some passive activity - like watching television or its ilk - while doing this. This can also be done while recovering from some illness.

So is this worth it? We all have these keys as they do drop normally so the question really is - should one go out of the way to collect these keys? If one is doing this specifically for in-game cash, there are faster, easier and more profitable ways to generate revenue.

Of course, if one is doing this for the bubble skin, or maximizing the swim infusions, then by all means do so.

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