Hey all, hoping someone can give me some information. Last night two friends and I wanted to do some POE, but one of us needed a key, so we went to farm. We went to both the Moon and then Venus and split up into three areas so we could alert each other when the Wolves event was happening, to maximize our potential.

Two hours spent, and not a one of us got a single key.

I thought Bungie recently patched it so while you could no longer get an Ether chest multiple time, the keys would drop more frequently? Is there some requirement a player needs to meet now before they can farm keys? I would think not, since we could farm for that first week before the DLC even came out, but maybe that changed in a patch and I'm unaware? All three of us have three characters, and all had done at least one bounty for Petra on all three characters, so that wasn't an option.

TLDR: Were we just incredibly unlucky, or were we wasting our time trying to farm a key out of Ether chests?

You get one guarantied per week per character from the first queen's bounty you do that week

You were not unlucky, and you are correct. Bungie did increase the key drop rate from Ether Chests, but from my experience it is still very rare. Considering you get a notification if someone in the area finds a key, after roughly 30 chests, I have found 3 treasure keys myself. I have seen three or four other Guardians find a treasure key during this time. Most of the time we were with 2-3 Guardians. So the droprate is roughly 8%ish judging from that.

They increased the droprate for the two side chests in the PoE itself more than that. From my experience roughly 15-20%, though I haven't run it nearly enough to actually know.

Luckily, you get one guaranteed key each week for the first assassination mission you do. Also more chance to get additional keys from that stuff. And of course one key for completing all basic missions of House of Wolves DLC.

Is there a specific reason you need keys?

Unless you're on the hunt for a pre-HoW exotic weapon or one of the Queen's Guard weapons (most of which aren't too great), or need to open the chest for the second step in the Elder Cipher bounty, then there really isn't much of a reason to bother with treasure keys. The stuff that is most valuable from Prison of Elders are all either guaranteed mission rewards or potential drops from high level bosses.