Well, I knew it was only a matter of time until someone figured out a faster way to farm cipher decoders than my Toland moon bounty farm, and here we are, a day or so later where someone has done just that.
I had a bunch of people send this my way so I am not sure who originally invented it (Update: It seems like Cheese Forever), but this farm gets you anywhere from 15-20 Cipher Decoders per hour if you do it right, but I will caution you that A) it requires a team and B) it’s a bit convoluted.
The basic idea is that you are trying to land a bugged Spire of Stars checkpoint that you can get if you quit out of the raid in a tiny, seconds-long window right between when you kill the boss and when loot appears.
If you do it right, and at least someone in your team gets the checkpoint, you can then do a “checkpoint join farm” where you load back into Spire right before your loot drops. Even if drop rates for cipher decoders are…very bad, they do seem to be somewhat higher for something as substantial as completing an entire raid. So what you can do is use this process in a minute or two to “clear” Spire of Stars on repeat to get ciphers at something like a 25-50% drop rate. If you’re lucky, that means you could get up to 20 cipher decoders an hour and be done with this entire event in maybe 2-3 hours of this.
This requires a bit more precision to explain so I’m going to post this video from Skarrow9 where he goes into how to do this exactly with the checkpoint timing window and the rejoins:
Personally, though I cannot say my bounty farm is better or faster than this, I probably won’t be doing this. Sure, if you have a hyper active clan that doesn’t mind first clearing Spire and then doing this checkpoint juggling thing for an hour or two, go for it, but I think for most “normal” players this type of farm will be out of reach and not worth the hassle.
As I said with my Toland farm (which is so dull even I’ve had to scale back on it), my advice is probably just wait until Bungie announces something about buffing cipher drop rates, which they’ve already said they’re looking into. The TWAB is later today and I expect we may get some information about that there. Hell, they might even end up giving us free ciphers for our trouble.
I do want to “beat” this event, which requires something like 45 cache openings and therefore 45 ciphers, but the current farms either take way too long or are too convoluted like this Spire one. I have to believe in the next few weeks Bungie will make some changes here, and until then, I’m not going to kill myself to get this done now. If they buff ciphers to be a truly “Umbral-like” drop rate like they were originally supposed to be, I don’t think it will be an issue to get them at all in a little while here. For now, do these farms at the risk of your own time and sanity.
Update: Bungie has apparently buffed drop rates of ciphers in the normal game, so either this tactic is now unnecessary, or even more rewarding.
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