How to Farm Istan

Now that you understand how to participate in the Istan events, what the profit sources are, and what to do with those profit sources, it's time to talk PROFIT! This shorter section will cover what the overall profit from Palawadan, Great Hall, and Istan looks like, accounting for specified levels of Magic Find and Supply Stashes opened.

First, I'd like to establish a baseline for our gold-per-hour comparisons. To do this, I'll keep constant the participation levels in the two events - namely participating in each phase of Palawadan, as well as doing Great Hall from start to finish 3 times between Palawadan raids. Also, take note that all profit estimates below were from early January 2018, and may have changed by the time you read this.

Fortunately, the Google Sheets model makes it easy to see these trended profits all in one chart.

Above, we can see several lines for different profit centers. Palawadan in yellow, Great Hall in cyan, and the two of them combined make up Istan in green.

In those 35 minutes in Palawadan, even if you only open 30 stashes, and take all the unidentified gear you get and open those at 0% MF, you're still making between 12.5g and 13.5g during that event. It's admittedly tough to see the Palawadan - Net Profit line here because it aligns almost perfectly with the Great Hall - Net Profit and Istan - Gold / Hour lines too. However, the fact that it takes only 35 minutes to run Palawadan means that it's gold / hour is over 21g. That's huge, especially since you can quickly hop into a Palawadan zerg in LFG and spend 35 minutes raking in a good rate of money.

What if we added just 25 more stashes to our Palawadan raid?

Here we see a bit more differentiation, save for the Palawadan Gold / Hour and Istan - Net Profit lines.

For Palawadan, our net profit over 35 minutes climbs from around 13g previously to over 18g now. That means the gold / hour of Palawadan rises to 31g, which is absurdly high when compared to the expected profit from Silverwastes today. Keep in mind that accounting for the Great Hall event means the overall Istan gold / hour is still only around 15g.

What if we max out our supply stashes and hit the cap of 80?

Palawadan grows even more profitable, with it's overall net profit rising to 23.5g and it's gold / hour rising to over 40g. Istan's gold / hour has risen to over 18g, still being weight down by Great Hall.

What if we boosted our MF to 750% with our account-bound luck, consumable buffs, boosters, and Silverwastes buffs?

Magic Find not only improves our Palawadan profit, but our Great Hall profit too. Palawadan's net profit grows to 27.5g, gold / hour rises to almost 47g. Great Hall net profit sees a modest increase from 13g to about 15.5g. Istan total net profit climbs to 42.5g, or 21.25g per hour.

At this point it should be obvious that earning 27.5g in 35 minutes in Palawadan currently makes it a far better gold farm than the Silverwastes, and probably makes it the best in the game since the Fractal 40 farm was nerfed. The Great Hall event was amazing until it was nerfed, and so it's up to you whether you want to participate in that event between Palawadan raids or do something else.

Perhaps a rotation of doing Palawadan every 2 hours and doing Silverwastes in between makes the most sense. However, if gold / hour in Istan as a whole is roughly the same as Silverwastes, then you can camp Istan and earn lots of karma by purchasing the Karmic Retribution for the map from Alelah at the Docks and farming all the mobs in Great Hall (this is what I do because I can't be bothered to jump back and forth between Silverwastes and Istan). Either way, the Google Sheets model will help you keep track of any changes in that profitability based on TP prices.

And that's it for How to Farm Istan! Feel free to head on over to the Download section to get the latest version of the model, or check out the Research section for even more detailed information on the research methods I used and how I constructed the model. Any data sample contributions are greatly appreciated and help make the model more accurate for everyone in the community, so if you are willing to share your own research, go fill out those data submission forms!

• Step 1: Participate in Palawadan Event
• Step 2: Participate in Great Hall Event
• Step 3: ? ? ? ? (Now what?)
• Step 4: PROFIT!