I recall one storm erosion episode that took a certain beach down to cobble and bedrock. All the light stuff had been pulled out. Even zinc pennies ! (since those are lighter weight). All that was left was heavier coins (copper pennies, dimes, clad, etc...) fishing sinkers, car keys, etc...
It was so insanely packed with targets, that a guy would easily get 300+ coins if he "dug every target". So we actually got to where we SKIPPED penny & up (yup, kiss the super bowl rings goodbye, kiss silver dimes goodbye). And by doing that, we actually increased our gold ring ratios. Since, let's be honest : Only a very very small percentage of gold rings read up at copper penny.
We could dig the zinc signals, since there was no zinc left after the erosion. BUT EVEN THEN it was beginning to be a nuisance. Because a worn down dime (beach-tumblers) tended to be worn down to where they read as zinc. So we probably got lazy and skipped even zinc signals too (kiss some larger gold rings goodbye).
But ironically, this served to increase the odds of gold rings. Because you only had so much time , before the next high tide would chase you out.
As an example, a buddy of mine had over 100 nickels on one of those days, and 7 gold rings. If he had dug the penny signals, he probably would have had something like 200 pennies, and ended the day with 3 gold rings (since his time and energy would have been to spend all day digging pennies).
Admittedly this is a rare scenario