After starting my Zakum pre-requisite quests, being the noob I am, I went through the frustration of Jump Quest, and it took me nearly an hour to complete it. Sweaty palms no more, I proceeded to the third stage of the quest; the hunt for 30 Gold Teeth. After staying at a single map for over an hour and half, going up and down on the ropes, killing the annoying flies around at the same time, I opened my inventory to check on the number of gold teeth I collected thus far. 7 Seven is the number that appeared on my screen. I couldn't believe it at first, thinking it was 17, but no, it was just 7. I spent an hour and half just for 7 teeth, which isn't even a quarter of the final amount that I need to complete the quest. And then it hit me; why are we still going through this whole ordeal? Retaining the original JQ is understandable, since it tests your patience and require some skills to complete it. But this... this whole hunt and collect idea is a big waste of time; a pain in the ass, if you would forgive my language for a moment, as I needed to vent off some of my frustration on this topic. I'm also surprised this isn't getting more complaints than it should. I've only managed to find this thread, which is quite old, and was happy to find that the drop rate was increased, yet I'm still not that satisfied with the results, seeing how the increased rate only gotten me a solid 7 in one and a half hour. And I know this has already been discussed, and I am aware of the idea of retaining how it was in GMS/SEA, but I just find it hypocritical at the same time. If we really want to retain it exactly like how it was, then why do we have FM warp function? Why do we travel across continents instantly instead of waiting for the ships and stay on board for the full duration? The reason is simple; because it was inconvenient. We do not want to go back to town in order to access FM, thus we can access it anywhere with a click of a button. We do not want to waste our 5 minutes of waiting for the ships to come, and another 5~10 minutes for the ships to travel across the continents. So, why are we not doing the same with this particular zombie teeth quest? Why is it still 30, with such a low drop rate? I'm already quite upset from hunting these measly 7 golden teeth on my main. I got really even more disheartened thinking that I have to go through this once more if I were to create a new character. Why can't we reduce the final amount to, say, 15 or 20? Or increase the drop rate to a reasonable rate? Or even let Adobis, the Zakum NPC, to trade normal zombie teeth for the golden one in 200 for 1 ratio? Please take my suggestions into consideration (especially the first suggestion, reduce it to 15/20. It's the most balanced one, IMO).
If you do it around level 50 you should be getting good exp from farming 30 goold teeth. If you really dont want to farm them you could always buy them. I've actually never heard anyone complain about this part of the preq before.
Hunting for gold teeth tests your patience too! Oh boy, you're not going to like what's coming in new source at all Personally I don't find anything wrong with the gold teeth requirement and some people actually making a good living from hunting and selling them. It's just one of those important steps to gaining that illustrious Zakum helmet
People to this day still want the JQ changed, and now they want to get out of gold teeth too? Come on now, at least you can buy those.
When you're new on the server and you start with a mage job, with zero funds and only yourself to make mesos, I'm sure you'll appreciate to farm gold teeth for a few hours. I used to spend about 3 hours daily when my cleric was lvl6x and I was getting like 10 teeth per hour or so, it was hard to make mesos besides from the daily 8k nx, so this method helped me a lot. It was a nice feeling to log in at the next day and see that Fredrick had 30m for me, it seemed like a lot of mesos for me because you can't do much more at these lvls on a mage.
There's the added issue that the teeth limit the number of people can zak at a given time, and that's a good thing. Items are required to summon the powerful bosses in this game and if they suddenly weren't required, every zak channel would be filled all most all the time. Just wait until you have to find and kill a Manon to get into HTPQ/Horntail. I see what you're saying but these teeth sell for like 1.4m each in FM. You can usually trade them one-for-one for regular Teleport Stones, and you can get like 12 of those a day just with your free NX. Also, I'm gonna go out on a whim and say that actually surviving Zak is going to be way more of a pain in the tookus than collecting ETC drops will be. Even with a good team around you, you need to watch youtube videos and experiment pretty extensively before you can functionally contribute to the party/fight. If the teeth frustrate you then the battle will make you throw your PC out the window.