for real the 1 out of 400 legendaries for a primal has to be the stupidest thing ever… im done with this crap for this season seeing how im completely screwed gear wise cause the current stuff i have is garbage and cant find a single damn upgrade at all… this isnt fun now rewarding for the amount of time im wasting at this point now… if i wanted to waste my time like this id keep playing world of warcraft…
Primal does not equal good. 
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Had my 1st primal drop and it was for a different class… couldn’t use at all.
Curious if the expectation for primals comes from looking at leaderboards?
The upgrades tend to flow just from playing and working towards a reasonable drop frequency.
Understand if you’re over it, but if you feel inclined feel free to post what kind of build your playing and how it’s performing for feedback on getting the drops flowing faster.
It’s a bit of a numbers game. The more drops that flow, the sooner the chance of an upgrade becomes an upgrade. An ancient with mostly the right affixes in each slot seems to be a good thing to focus on for upgrades initially (once you’ve got the right legendaries going for your build to work). They can all be augmented then if you want. That will improve the GR level and number of drops up to a point. Finding the GR level sweet spot for speed GRs for your build will maximise drop rates. 2 to 3 minutes ideally, but depends on the build.
Getting ancient with all the right affixes and/or high rolls on those affixes can take a bit longer.
You’re probably well into most of that process after 300+ hours.
Primal’s just a lucky bonus as has been mentioned, but they’re not always the right affixes which is more important.
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As was mentioned recently, a look at the leaderboards and seeing alot of people with primals should not be what you set your expectations to. Most of those people are exploiting a save data cheat that lets them reuse the same 200 bounty mats over and over and over; affording them the ability to get all those primals. A player doing just that can get all their gear primal in under 2 weeks (80-90 hours played).
Primals should never have been introduced into the game. There isn’t much difference between a primal and a good ancient piece. Eventually, the gear you have will be close to perfect, making the ability to find an upgrade virtually impossible. If you are to that point, then your gear probably doesn’t stand to be “upgraded” by very much.
Also, as previously stated, efficiency. Efficiency at completing the appropriate content in an appropriate amount of time matters more than you know. The best way to get upgrades is to simply get more loot. Completing speed GRs is the best method for this. If you are concerned about xp as well, run the highest gr you can averaging 2-3 minutes per run. If you only want to focus on loot, run what you can in 1-2 minutes. The number of legendary items that drop from a RG boss increases upto about a gr 80; where the number of drops is between 11-13 per gr. Going any higher does not increase the amount of loot dropped.
Bloodshards matter! Running 1-2 minute grs results in the fast accumulation of bloodshards. When spending your bloodshards, focus on the items you need upgrades for the most. Upgrade the yellow items you get from kadala into legendaries at the cube. This will cost death’s breath, but with being able to put sage’s gear on your follower, you should be able to have plenty.
If you find yourself getting bored or at a point that upgrades become far and few between, make another character. If you still can’t bring yourself to keep playing, play something else and take a break. If after all that, you still find yourself frustrated with the game; then maybe this type of game isn’t for you. Either way, I hope the drops start rolling in for you!
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I get this. For me, I think it’s because I’m a bit particular about what I want to push with… so actually still trying out options there as a late comer to spending any amount of time in d3. So when it’s getting slow, yea another build is like a breath of fresh air to keep the upgrades flowing and having something worth pursuing.
Run bounties. People underestimate running bounties or choose not to do them entirely and then complain that they don’t get gear for their character. You can run 6 sets in 1 hour with a good team which would yield 132 bounty mats + all the veil crystal, arcane dust, and reusable parts that comes with. If you are strictly looking for gear, that is on you for not utilizing everything at your disposable to get better gear.
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300+ hrs doesn’t equal skill/knowledge
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re-rolling is your friend.
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Legitamate rerolling is still 1 in 400 chance for primal(not even useable primal). You would need 2,000 bountie mats per item. At 22 mats for t16, thats 91 sets of bounties per item(on average). At 10 minutes per set thats 910 minutes or 15 hours and 10 minutes. All that for just 1 item.
You’re better off settling for good ancient items at 1 in 10 chance to be ancient.
I only mention primals as it is what the OP mentioned.
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im well aware, tag him, not me. lol - you can have all perfect primals and still be a scrub. I just always love seeing the “I’ve gotten zero primals this season, there must be a bug - or im quitting.”
always try and remind the topic maker that having primal doesn’t mean anything. You could roll perfectly terrible stats.
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I have gotten a primal after ONE try on a re-roll. RNG baby,
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I hope this is something they add and do in D4…but in Warhammer40K Inquisitor martyr…you can actually change individual attribute and stats…you might get a great pc say with 5 Attibutes but one on there doesn’t fit your character…you can roll that individual line or re-roll the whole pc…and later even roll to upgrade the stats per attribute or all.
How many times have we seen and got a Primal or Ancient that’s near perfect but 1 or 2 attributes could be changed…especially picking up a a so-called Highly Touted By-Golly-It’s-A-Primal and half the stats su*k…
you can do that with one stat already. But not more than one.
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I personally think primals, as they are, should go away. RNG being what it is and all, in addition to exploits, ruins the value of these primals.
I had an idea awhile back that I shared and thought would be a viable replacement. The concept was to do away with different tiers of legendaries all together. Essentially, no ancients or primals. Instead, individual legendaries start out at stat ranges similar to that of non ancients.
Through leveling with the item worn, the item itself becomes stronger. Instead or rerolling a single stat, you could reroll/forge every stat. Say you have shoulders with main stat, vitality, resist all and armor. You want main stat, cooldown, resource cost reduction, and area damage. You would have to find another legendary shoulder(same kind) with one of the stats you were looking for, then use that item to replace a single stat on the item you are keeping. Replacing a stat resets it value to the lowest value, requiring time/grind to improve the stat.
One could get lucky with RNG to aquire an item with the exact stats you want, but would have the ability to develope gear even with bad RNG. To get the gear leveled to the equivalent of current primals, you would be forced into a time sink/grind. No easy reforge exploiting to bypass the grind. Diablo is a grind game, and a person should feel rewarded for the time they have spent.
Yup, its all RNG. A lot of people who complain about gear, probably don’t run bounties, ever. There are some people who choose to get 10k bounty mats before thinking about doing any pushing and then pop up on leaderboards a few weeks after season start. To each their own. And in reality, the biggest items you need rolled are weapon, offhand, and jewelry. 4 items are crafted and only require a small investments, so getting a good ancient is fairly easy.
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I will say that a person can get lucky and get a perfect primal is less than 2,000 bounty mats; however, probability points towards averages. The more pieces of gear the person is getting as perfect primals, the more likely the average amount of bounty mats needed will settle out to its calculated average. The 2,000 mats calculation previously was just to get A primal, not a perfect primal. The probability for any given item varies based on the number of stats and number of possible stats. The average bounty mats requirement for a perfect primal starts to grow greatly when taking into consideration this fact. 2,000 mats can easily become 10,000 mats for a single item. If it takes 15 hours to farm 2,000 mats, then it’ll take 75 hours to farm 10,000. Given a season, on average, is 3 months long. 30 days average per month. 3 months x 30 days x 24 hours = 2,160 hours in a season. Considering we are human, and cannot stay up that many hours consecutively. We can say a dedicated player could put in 16 hours a day. So actual play hours in a season drops to 3 x 30 x 16 = 1,440 hours.
If it does take 75 hours to farm 10,000 bounty mats, and IF you could achieve a perfect primal with the average of 10,000 mats per item, then it would take 75 hours x 13 items = 975 hours of bounty farming. Which is 68% of a person available in game time. 68% of thier time would equate out to roughly 61 days.
Grinding bounties for 2 weeks and showing up with numerous perfect primals on day 15 of the season does not happen legitamately! Even then, the time required to farm bounties means the person isn’t getting paragon quickly. So, if a person shows up with 4-5 perfect primals on day 15 of the season with 2500 paragon, it is mathematically improbable they did it legitamately.
Could it happen just by getting lucky, sure, but highly unlikely. Especially when that same person is able to achieve it 5-10 season in a row. Thats not luck at that point, thats exploiting something to increase their odds.
the problem with your thinking is your math is the worse case possible, but RNG doesn’t work that way! Some seasons it is raining red beams everywhere and other season may only get 2-3 at best. RNG gods care not for your math! LOL. You can check out videos on YouTube of people re-rolling and getting primals after a 100 tries or so. It is not rare at all. Of course you can have bad luck as well, but it just as likely to get it in your 1st re-roll than your 10,000th.
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I had no issues getting good ancients and primals. My gg traveleres pledge dropped on my barb as I was zbarbing and was able to use it on my fb wizzy. I usually ran 5-6 sets of bounties a day, as a daily, if you will. I never had issues getting gear during any season.
Funny enough, i had one season on day 2 of the start where i had 2 primals in 30 minutes. One from a drop, one from kadala. It was early saturday morning my time, around 10 hour mark of seasons. Most of friends went to bed, but one so we were chilling running gr60s after doing solo 70 earlier in the night. I think it was s18. Not sure. Anyway, i got a perfect rolled primal scythe the cycle. 30 minutes later, i gambled on lost time time, from kadala, with perfect rolls for rats. So i literally had primal weapon and offhand in less than 12 hours of a season start. I’ve never had luck like that since, though, but yeah, it was wild. My friend Jimmy, who i was playing with, was like gimme your drop mod. 
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The problem with your reply is that my math was for the average chance, not the worst case. The average drop rate of primals is 1 in 400. Yes. A person could get one in less than 400 drops, but it could also take 1000 drops, or even 2000. 1 in 400 is the average.
My math for the time it would take to gather bounty mats was actually favoring fast bouties. Theres not much room for getting them faster, other than having a several dedicated squads of bounty goonies running bounties for you constantly allowing you to jump from one lobby to the next just collecting mats. We both know that doesn’t happen.