[Respawn/droprate tweaks] Ten rares have a 2% chance to drop an item

[Rat]

Hello,

this is a suggestion that could be posted in all 3 realms; however, I'm a N'Zoth player so I'm posting this here. Let me get straight to the point, yapping incoming.

The TurtleWoW team added many rares to the whole world. 10 of them have a 2% chance to drop Epic quality items, most of them are very mediocre or straight up transmog pieces. All these rares have a 12-24h respawn timer.

Let's take a look at one of the rares - Crusader Larsarius. It's a lvl 61 humanoid that can drop a ring, a hammer, an offhand book and bracers. All of them have 25% droprate. The 2% item from this rare is called "Righteous Crusader's Helmet" and it's a bonus drop:




The issue with this particular item is that it's basically just a plate-only transmog piece. At level60 you are able to get much better helmets, therefore the only reason you would try to get this helmet is for transmog. From my knowledge, this item has been added into the game while the original TWoW team was working on Scarlet Bastion, which is why it shares appearance with "Headguard of the Scarlet Bastion" which can be found in game files.

As I mentioned earlier, this rare has a 12-24h respawn timer. No, it's not flat 15h. No, it's not flat 12h. If you intend to hunt this particular transmog, you are basically forced to sit in 1 place for 12 hours straight.
So the droprate is 2%, let's say it respawns every 18h on average (my experience from twow and octowow).
You will need 50 attempts to kill him, statistically speaking. This means that on absolute average, this helmet will drop once every 900 hours. That is one helmet every 37.5 days, assuming perfect 18h respawn times and instant kills. And a perfect 2% droprate, which we all know is never the case. You can go 100 kills without seeing it once making it 1800 hours of just respawn time.
But, the respawn timer of course isn't perfect 18h. You need to actually go to that spot at 12h mark and wait there for potentially another 12h. Where the hell is 'fun' in that?

The same goes for basically any other 2% item from the rares I'm about to post. Winterspring ring? It's genuinely super mediocre. Feralas belt? Same thing. Blasted Lands glaive? Exactly the same situation as Crusader Larsarius.

I therefore propose 2 solutions: either slightly increase the droprates of these items (for example to 5% so that they're still very rare but realistically obtainable) or disable random variation for the respawn times of these rares, so that you can come on the clock, slay it, keep going. Without the need to camp it.


Here's the rare list, there are 10 of them total:

EK
Eastern Plaguelands:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49008 Crusader Larsarius (2%)
The Hinterlands:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49010 Jal'Akar (2%)
Searing Gorge:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49011 Explorer Ashbeard (2%)
Burning Steppes:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49002 Blademaster Kargron (2%)
Blasted Lands:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49009 Zareth Terrorblade (2%)
Stranglethorn Vale:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=80269 Kin'Tozo (2%)

Kalimdor
Winterspring:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49004 Mallon the Moontouched (2%)
Azshara:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49001 Tarangos (2%)
Felwood:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49003 Xalvic Blackclaw (2%)
Feralas:
https://octowow.st/db/?npc=49005 Grug'thok the Seer (2%)

[Rat]

I would like to shortly elaborate on rest of the items, too.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=83274 <- Hinterlands necklace which is barely an upgrade compared to what's available to players at lvl50, there is no reason for it to be so insanely rare.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=83275 <- Searing Gorge trinket, 2% dodge is respectable but its NOT a 2% drop item. Why? Here's why - https://octowow.st/db/?item=18370. Just go Dire Maul. There is no reason for that 2% dodge trinket to have a droprate of 2%, from a rare.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=81369 <- Burning Steppes 2h polearm, this one is actually decent. Unfortunately, due to it's speed (2.9), it would not be a favored pick for minmaxxing. Which means that this particular weapon would be a pre-bis at most. While this item is genuinely decent, in my opinion it still doesn't deserve the 2% droprate treatment. This item is actually the best among the 2%ers.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=83269 <- exactly the same situation as the EPL helmet, its just a transmog piece. What's worse than EPL about it is that it's just a slight recolor of an easily obtainable glaive, it's not even a unique model. Just a recolor.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=60442 <- Stranglethorn Vale 1h axe. On paper, looks great. In practice, you go to a dungeon and get a weapon that's basically the same without having to suffer. Can be replaced very easily, not worthy of 2% droprate.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=81379 <- Winterspring ring. Lol, lmao even. Just go Black Morass, run it a couple times and u get a better ring. This is a rare that deals big magic dmg, lvl60 or so.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=81374 <- Felwood necklace, absolute disaster. +8 spellpower and some stats, required lvl53. Not worthy of 2% treatment.

https://octowow.st/db/?item=81384 <- Feralas belt, 1% crit and 5 spellpower which results in around 22-23 spellpower total. Quite decent but definitely not worthy of 2% treatment

[Rat]

bump

[Ius]

As someone who tried to get the Righteous Crusader's Helmet i'm inclined to agree, at the moment it only dropped 2 times on N'Zoth so it's more rare than Onyxia mount

Anyway i'd look at all of these and change the drop depending on the item, this particular one would be in big demand for transmog so i'd have it on a low % but not this low.

[Lane157]

Agreed. Dragon's Call from Sunken Temple is also an outlier, with a 0.5% drop instead of the 1% that the other rare epic drops from dungeons have.

[Rat]

Glad to see there are others who agree! But the dungeon drop changes I think could be a slippery slope - "if they increased the droprate of this, why don't they increase the droprate of that?"

[Rat]

Found another rare with 2%.

https://octowow.st/db/?npc=92163

Letashaz, Gilijim's Isle, fist weapon. Absolutely INSANE that an average item has 2% droprate with 2 days respawn time!

[Lane157]

Glad to see there are others who agree! But the dungeon drop changes I think could be a slippery slope - "if they increased the droprate of this, why don't they increase the droprate of that?"

The slippery slope is an argument that we can always use, that is true. However, in this specific case, Dragon's Call is the only epic rare weapon drop from bosses in higher level dungeons (the first one I can think of being Princess in Maraudon) that has a 0.5% chance instead of 1%. The other outlier is the Greymane necklace with a 0.5% when non-weapons usually have a drop of 2% (Embrace of the Wind Serpent, Circle of Flame or Mark of the Dragon Lord) but that could be attributed to Gilneas being an even lower level dungeon or simply an oversight.

By the way, the respawn time of these rares is hardly 12 to 24 hours. It can be longer or shorter. These rares used to have dynamic respawn already, or seemed to, and then the OctoWoW custom 33% variance was added on top of that, making their windows much wider than they should be or 8-32 theoretically in this case. This is the only explanation I can find considering some of the timers I've witnessed over more than two months. A rare like Letashaz, which takes even longer, could easily require camping for 3 days straight before a respawn! Even without competition.

Ultimately, the solution is to increase the drop rates to something like 4% and/or make the baseline respawn time fixed and then apply the interval. Totally fixed respawn times without the interval would cause issues like in the past where some rares were just camped 24/7 like Narillasanz or Blazespark.

[Rat]

Oh man, I thought I was tweaking, dude. I have been slaying different rares for around 1.5 month now and when it didn't respawn after a maximum of 24h I was like "dude, how did someone snatch this right from under my nose? Not even a corpse?". I had cases where I waited for almost 30h without a respawn, and I had cases where I was very confused by 11h respawns. I blamed it on server issues - restarts and such. The variance is absolutely 100% real and not some nonsense talk - if anyone reading thought it might be.

It's all just... sigh. I really think it should get looked into. It's not a thing that affects many players, but it definitely drives many, many people away from even trying to get that cool +10 mining pickaxe. Or a cool glaive. Or a cool helmet. Or this, or that. Because, let me put it bluntly, what players experience when they try to get these items is pure bullshit lol

I also now understand your sentiment regarding that 0.5% but have no opinion on that, personally. It feels like a proper concern, I just haven't put much thought into this particular "case" so I don't want to talk bs ^^