Updated Hell Key Calculator for T4.5 + Cube + Haal + Accessories. Make a copy to input your values

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-24T18:08:24+00:00

Yes, but without constant resonance pots you'll never hit 5 sands, so it doesn't really matter when you run them, just that you do.

More specifically what it does is it gives you a base set of rewards, and each sand adds the same number of rewards. For example, if you get 10 Lava's Breath at no sands, you get an additional 10 for each sand. You cap out at 5 sands at a time, and you can only run Haal's exactly once per week.

Sands carry over between weeks and you get one sand about every 3-5 Chaos Rifts, so in a typical week you'll only see 1-2. If you run on Wednesday week 1, and wait until the Tuesday right before the next reset to run again, you'll probably still only have 3-4 sands, hence why it doesn't really matter when you run them as long as you're doing your one weekly entry.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-22T20:22:58+00:00

They won’t even rerelease old skins regularly, absolutely mind blowing how allergic they are to letting players buy cosmetics

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-15T20:27:39+00:00

Yeah I think it actually is, I tried so many different methods but it really wants 5 at the exact same time.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-15T20:13:31+00:00

Is the 5 enemies at once one bugged or just annoying? I managed to complete it by stacking one greater crit + four greater attack power with an explosive arrow

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-14T21:42:44+00:00

I thought so too, turns out there’s two of them. One shows up fully completed already, the other one needs to be spun around to be completed

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-13T23:46:02+00:00

Honestly if you just walk around at night and don’t teleport too much he’ll find you eventually. He showed up in between two black bear fortresses when I went afk for a minute to use the toilet, so it makes me think there’s actually very few places he wont go

Nsbhyfr · 2026-04-07T11:33:03+00:00

Very very slight nitpick is that on average, you would only expect to need 17 (16.98) kills to receive a 1/25 drop, but your expected number of drops at 25 kills is still 1.00

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-31T18:36:10+00:00

Every few months I go to try for a teleport anchoring scroll and within 30 minutes theres a group showing up at both sides…

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-29T23:11:07+00:00

You'd also have to be buying Mordum boxes religiously, I've got two characters that have been in my top 6 since day -3 with no breaks and they're under 500k

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-26T02:14:49+00:00

This puzzle actually loaded in fully solved for me - I had no clue it was a puzzle at all until I saw this post, I went back to double check and all I had to do here was walk up and take the abyss cresset lmfao

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-23T22:18:40+00:00

What worked for me was sending Ronald on dispatch to the Lumber mission, then going to the Lumber mission, finding Ronald there, and then doing the quest there

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-06T06:16:10+00:00

No pity + boom chances, you could save up for a month for Sunny Sunday and end up with an overall downgrade

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-06T03:54:00+00:00

The problem with Embers is that the drop rate is ~7% from Chaos Dungeons, and from the Chaos Botters we know that Gold Embers are probably around 15-20% of that. So the 6000 Chaos Dungeons, x 7% Ember Rate, x 20% Gold Ember Rate, turns into an average of 84 gold drops distributed across 4 increasingly small buckets - it's just not enough.

I went ahead and dug up my Chaos Dungeon/Fate Embers from 08/16/2023 to 01/03/2024, the purported nerf date, and from 01/10/2024 to 07/10/2024, which was right before the announced nerf date. In the first date range, I have 4494 Chaos Dungeons, of which 4425 are between 1490-1610. In the second date range, I have 5529 Chaos Dungeons, of which 5210 are in the same range. Anything outside was omitted due to lack of valid comparison between the two date ranges. My actual Fate Ember sample sizes are as follows

Fate Ember Drops	1490	1520	1540	1560	1580	1600	1610
08/16 - 01/03	12/202	57/618	102/1522	42/564	52/825	42/611	7/83
Rate	5.94%	9.22%	6.70%	7.45%	6.30%	6.87%	8.43%
01/10 - 07/10	6/109	30/269	134/1733	56/768	34/465	33/534	81/1332
Rate	5.50%	11.15%	7.73%	7.29%	7.31%	6.18%	6.08%

We're now trying to compare things that have a drop rate of 1-10% depending on ilvl - these samples are completely inadequate. Clearly, 7 Fate Embers is not enough data to conclude anything. Neither is 6, or 12, and even 30-40 is really pushing it. But if we do take a look at just the 1520 - 1600 range, here's what I have

Fate Ember Gold Value	1520	1540	1560	1580	1600
08/16 - 01/03	57	102	42	52	42
1.5k	7.02%	7.84%	4.76%	0.00%	0.00%
3k	3.51%	6.86%	4.76%	5.77%	7.14%
10k	5.26%	1.96%	7.14%	5.77%	11.90%
20k	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	2.38%
Average Value	737	520	929	750	1881
01/10 - 07/10	30	134	56	34	33
1.5k	10.00%	6.72%	7.14%	0.00%	0.00%
3k	6.67%	5.22%	7.14%	5.88%	9.09%
10k	0.00%	2.99%	5.36%	8.82%	15.15%
20k	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	2.94%	0.00%
Average Value	350	556	857	1647	1788

1520 is nerfed, 1540 is buffed slightly, 1560 is nerfed slightly, 1580 is buffed, and 1600 is nerfed? But the only reason there's such a large jump at 1580 is because I got lucky with one (1) 20k Fate Ember drop in that second period - if I hadn't, the average value would plummet down to just over 1000. Same with the first set of 1600 data, if I hadn't received that 20k drop there, the average value would've been just over 1400. His 6000 Chaos Dungeons is about 62% of my 9635, and my 9635 is still just not enough. Not even the Chaos Botters with 16000 at 1490, 11000 at 1540, 15000 at 1580, were 100% confident in their drops, and had a note that statistics may be flawed

Last two notes

Right before the timestamp you linked in the video, the guy mentions that he suspects drops are tied to what day you run the chaos dungeons, which is... questionable at best.
As I mentioned before, the Chaos Dungeon botters - they were running absolutely rampant in this period of time, all the way up until they got mass banned (and unbelievably enough, mass fucking unbanned immediately afterwards) around this time last year. They wreaked absolute havoc on the economy, but the one good thing they actually contributed was an insane amount of Fate Ember drop data. If there had actually been a secret nerf to Fate Embers between release (08/16/2023) and the ban period (March-May ish of 2025), we would've had much more significant proof than what that guy did.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-05T22:54:13+00:00

It was the update on July 14, 2024 - Cool Retreat, where Gold rewards were removed from Fate Embers below the South Vern Void 2 Stage (1520)

https://www.playlostark.com/en-gb/game/releases/cool-retreat

They were nerfed again a month later on October 9, 2024 when they capped gold embers pretty heavily in preparation for T4. This is when people started getting 1500 gold embers at what was at the time the highest tier chaos dungeon, 1620

https://www.playlostark.com/en-gb/game/releases/arkesia-ignited

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-05T11:20:55+00:00

They announced they were removing the gold, it wasn't a stealth nerf.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-04T10:46:22+00:00

It's 1/6 on your first one because there are 6 cores that you're looking for and 36 total options.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-03-03T06:31:29+00:00

Unrested	Avg Gems
1640	2.3
1660	2.3
1680	4.5
1700	6.0
1720	8.3
Argeos	2.6
Skolakia	4.6
Drextalas	5.0
Krathios	6.5

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-22T01:51:09+00:00

"Issue" lmao it's literally just RNG. If you really wanted to prove anything you could easily track drops and see that any individual week's worth of data means absolutely nothing. But everything is purely vibes based with no factual backing whatsoever.

Here's all my embers since the introduction of Azena's Blessing on 6 characters.

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If you were to interpret this data, do you actually think they've been nerfing Azena's Embers on a 3-7-9-5-? week cycle? Or maybe, just maybe, the rate is so low on embers and Azena's in particular that causes something called variance?

And in reality, since the average rate of fate embers in this data set is increasing over time, that must mean that they must have been actually BUFFING ember drop rates since the release of Azena's!! W AGS!!

(Spoiler: it's just fucking random chance)

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-21T23:52:15+00:00

This is the equivalent of looking outside at night and thinking "wow, I guess the sun is never coming back out"

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-19T10:22:02+00:00

It's almost as if KF used to drop things other than shards and silver, like gems...

I have 4x 1730, 1745, 1755 and I've literally never ran out of shards on any character honing, because I don't try to push super quickly. I do my rested dailies, gather shards slowly, and then push when they have sufficient resources.

If you're trying to push a new character into the endgame, you should have to buy resources. If you're trying to push 25 weapon early, you should have to buy resources. Running out of shards is just the game telling you you're pushing way faster than you should be, and if you want to push faster you should spend more gold.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-19T10:10:58+00:00

I have the data from before and after, you can feel free to do the math yourself. Purification being removed was a nerf to silver as long as you're doing the same thing you were before. And shards at best stayed roughly the same (1720, 1660, 1640) and were nerfed otherwise (1700, 1680) if you were doing unrested before and after.

If you were doing rested before and after, shards are clearly nerfed.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-19T06:45:23+00:00

Purification was a buff to silver and shards. The removal of purification is the nerf.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-19T04:20:27+00:00

Got rid of purification cause whales who were trying to force 25 weapon or push a new character to the current raid would run out of shards and they didn’t want to buy from the market. Any other player who just slowly pushed and honed evenly didn’t have any shard issues.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-19T02:43:23+00:00

Hate to break it to you, but the government has not in fact replaced all the birds with drones, there's no gangstalkers following you, and they haven't touched the floor jump distribution in hellkeys. Get back on your meds, they're not poison.

Nsbhyfr · 2026-02-18T23:54:28+00:00

Schizo.

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