It's a Peak of Summer weekend buff!

@Azamagon, The default pickup delay is 5 seconds. I have her uncommon item that increase the speed of the ability by 25% and it is currently at 4 seconds. As for noting "from X down to Y", no other gear/ability notes such a thing, so having it happen here would seem kind of out of place. If you want to know how her gear's percentage will affect the ability, do 5/(1 + X) where X is the percentage represented as a decimal. So with her epic gear being a 100% buff, it would be 5/(1 + 1) = 2.5. I'm not sure if it would be 2.5 seconds, rounded up to 3, or rounded down to 2, but if I ever get the dang gear (seriously, 22 jeweled event chests and that's the ONLY gear slot on all 4 event crusaders below rare) I'll edit this to say the results. Assuming one of the devs doesn't clarify before that happens.

I just timed the normal pickup rate on a watch. When the first item dropped, it was at 35 seconds. When the item was picked up, it was 46 seconds. Accounting for delay between when my eyes moved between the screen and the clock, the pickup is probably normally 10 seconds, which means that an ungeared Penny would half the required time, an epic would cut it down to 2.5, and a golden legendary would cut it down to 1.25 seconds, effectively making pickup near-instant.

Azamagon, to your initial point: Change the mode to High Quality and the stuttering will disappear. Don't ask me why. Well, ok, you can ask me why:

Penny's Pick Up ability leads to some difficulties in the display of the items and their movement on screen. As Kevin, the CNE Developer, explained, the game is not lagging. To quote him directly:

"LQ targets 24fps, but your monitor probably runs at 60, so the intervals don't line up. This is what creates the jittering feeling, which is especially apparent when a bunch of things happen in sequence."

This is also why Kevin decided to remove some of the gold icons when you kill monsters since it was worse before and terrible if you had crusaders in your formation who doubled gold drops (i.e. Turps and the Bartender) or loot items. Basically: There are too many things happening on screen to display in 24 frames each second which leads to some effects skipping frames.

If you change to High Quality Mode the game will target 60 frames per second, draw a lot more resources of your computer and this leads to everything being alright ... well, if you like the explosions and the flying gold coins effect.

However, I do like Penny a lot. I have her Trash Picker on Legendary and she picks up items after 1.67 seconds. @Snow: I would guess, her Golden Legendary might decrease that time below 1.67 seconds.

The normal auto pick-up is just when the gold hits the lead of the formation.

We've pushed a fix that will most likely stop the game stuttering if you're using Penny and low quality mode.

@Erika

Really, really nice, the stuttering is gone for me now! Thanks for that :)

As for what Animenut said, I'm trying to understand the mechanics too, so a quick clarification for its "hidden mechanics" would indeed be nice :)

Awesome GE, thanks for making it available already, makes Penny even better!