I’ve been told as much by some other players, but none of the wikis seem to think so. I’ve been trying to hunt down the last handful of Champion/Rare/Unique enemies I need for the relevant achievements lately, while also keeping a weather-eye out for some of the cosmetic-dropping Uniques… but along the way, I’ve been getting somewhat conflicting advice. Apparently I’m making a mistake in doing my searching on Normal, and should be going for the highest difficulties for better odds? But at the same time, some of the Unique supposedly ONLY spawn in Normal… maybe?
Anyone got any solid information?
Tying them to difficulty, particularly with how the difficulty systems have changed since launch, feels like a needlessly convoluted step from the code perspective. As such, I’d just lean toward the rare spawns being irksomely rare, some more than others.
Personally, I’d just suggest to keep running at the highest difficulty you could one-shot things. Better loot and experience overall, with less of a chance of accidentally exploding your target and maybe not realizing you did since sometimes the alert gong doesn’t trigger for whatever reason.
Not a bad suggestion… but I’ve mostly been doing ‘evasive’ runs, for speed. Not bothering actually FIGHTING anything that isn’t an Elite Mob, but just dashing around searching the map for my marks. Hence I’ve been sticking to low difficulty since this allows me to assume a purely speed-based build without worrying at all about attack OR defense.
As for it being ‘needlessly convoluted’… let me draw your attention to Bashiok’s Blade, which only drops from a specific random event, IF you’re on Normal and NEVER if you’re on anything higher. 
Stuff like that is what makes me so damned paranoid. Maybe Blizz’s programmers just have entirely too much time on their hands…
EDIT: Ebenezer Samuel, the last Unique I still need, seems to be surrounded by a particularly impressive amount of speculation. Some say he only spawns on Normal, some say he only spawns if the map is in the ‘night-dark’ mode, and some have written out elaborate rituals that supposedly would lead to him spawning, reminiscent of the approach medieval alchemists took to their experiments… good grief. >_>
I’ve been playing this game for a long time and i’ve never heard that specific elites spawn at specific difficulty level. I always thought they all had the same spawn rate on all difficulty level. I cant find where it says this specific elite will spawn at this specific location and this specific difficulty sooo. I’d suggest just continue to explore at your comfort, if in normal or exerpt or any Torment level.
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For rare events, people tend to find patterns where there aren’t any.
E.g. “Did 200 runs for Ebenezer Samuel on T1 and didn’t find him, switched to Normal and he spawned after 20 runs!” But it’s just the luck of the draw.
I’ve had Ebenezer spawn on T1.
Also, a Google image search might help. Here’s a (German?) video of Ebenezer spawned on T6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phKYsbZKyOo
That’s not true. I’ve had Rakanishu’s Blade drop on T6 doing bounty runs (back when T6 was the limit). Also, here’s a video of it spawning on T10 for proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoddlsJyEJE
I’ve done the unique/champion/elite achievements 4 full times. Once career, once in S1, once in S2, and once on an alt account. I’ve also helped a number of other people farm their missing uniques (my clan has a bunch of achievement hunters and I’m a mod in the Achievement Hunter community). I’ve never found any evidence that any uniques/champions/elites will only spawn on certain difficulties. I’ve had many different uniques/champions/elites spawn on a variety of difficulties.
I won’t claim that it’s impossible, as I haven’t tested every single one explicitly, but I think you are safe to farm them on wherever difficulty you want. Sometimes people just make stuff up because they thought they saw a pattern where there wasn’t one. The videos I linked above should be sufficient proof of that fact.
You’re probably right… I’m intimately familiar with the human mind’s tendency to seek patterns in everything, whether they’re there or not. Though… just out of curiosity, considering your experience, have you ever seen Ebenezer spawn in the ‘daytime’ version of the Old Road map? Someone in another thread pointed out that all the videos and screenshots of Ebenezer seemed to be from the NIGHTTIME version of the map, and reasoned from there that he’d only spawn in that version, albeit still rarely.
I’m actually in the Achievement Hunter community myself, but on the EU servers… where the community is, well, not dead exactly, but certainly a mite sleepy. Would probably have been easier to get all this done yonks ago, back when the community (both specifically and in general) was a touch more active, but… well, stuff happens, ya know?
(Oh, and as for Rakanishu’s Blade… everything I remember and can read at least confirms that it has MUCH better odds of dropping on Normal, in Campaign mode, even if it still CAN drop on higher levels and in Adventure… which still proves my point about how the developers ARE perfectly willing to create conditional modifiers for random events.)