I’ve been trying to farm various skeleton key bosses for a long time, and it’s pretty clear that the process of obtaining skeleton keys themselves is way too laborious and difficult.
The only way to get skeleton keys is to fight specific bosses that have a chance of dropping them. While the game does tell you where you can find bosses that drop keys, there is no way to determine which boss is the best source of keys, nor which boss drops keys the most frequently.
When there are so many options for bosses to fight for skeleton keys, how are we supposed to know which one is the best? Unless you spend days tirelessly farming every potential source of skeleton keys, the only way for you to know which boss drops them the most often is to ask other people, who may not even know themselves.
Additionally, the drop rates for the skeleton keys themselves are way too low. This is worsened by the fact that many secret skeleton key boss have very low drop rates for some of the items that you may want. For some items, it is not unusual for it to take over 100 fights of a single boss to get a certain item. How can this be justified when the resource that lets you access the boss, the key, has such a low drop rate itself?
I have asked many different people what the best places are for farming keys of all types (wooden, stone, and gold), and I have tried farming every single one of their suggestions. On average, I tend to only get 2-3 keys per hour. This means that, even if I spend the entire day farming for keys, I will most likely not have enough to have a good chance of getting what I want from the skeleton key boss.
The skeleton key system needs to be fixed. It would be most helpful if it can be made easier to obtain skeleton keys in the first place, as all currently known sources of keys have too low drop rates, and there is no way to get them other than fighting bosses (aside from certain quests, but those are a finite source, so once you complete the quest, you can’t complete it again). It would also be helpful if we were able to see which boss is best to farm, either from the game telling us explicitly, or by giving us drop rate information on skeleton keys.
Additionally, the drop rates for the loot from skeleton key bosses need to be increased. For example, if I wanted the Sacred Charge spell from Aphrodite II, I would have to be prepared to do possibly hundreds of fights against Aphrodite II just to get the spell (This specific fight is much harder since you can’t team up for this fight alone. You have to go through Graveyard, and people who join usually do not want to fight Aphrodite II. Because of this, it’s almost impossible to find a team for this fight without using external sources, such as Discord). The same can be said for other bosses too. For instance, if I wanted the item “Wizard’s timeless brim,” a hat used for stitching, I would have to fight King Borr or Stay-puffed Marshfellow, both of which have very low drop rates for this specific item.
Thank you for reading my suggestion. Please let me know if you have any additional suggestions or comments.
