So, decided that I wanted to try and get the sword of mediocrity. Have been running a few GRs yesterday (around 20 or so) and 5 holiday gifts have dropped. Now, I have all of the pets, transmogs and wings. My understanding was that if an item was doing to drop but you already had it, you got a glowing ember instead. And that mats always dropped. Well, all 5 holiday gifts have ONLY dropped mats, nothing else. Nada. So, that tells me that I’ve had no pets, no transmogs, no wings, or anything else drop from 5 holiday gifts. Does that sound right?
I did a few runs a few weeks ago and got 2 glowing embers from like 4 holiday gifts, so I’m not sure if Blizzard has silently decrease the chances of these items dropping, or I’m just being plain unlucky with my runs yesterday. It’s certainly not what I consider fun.
Developer’s Note: If a player owns any of the Pets or Wings from above list, they will be unable to receive a duplicate of them from any recovered Gifts. Otherwise, enjoy your lumps of coal!
The sword is category misc.
Wings, pets and misc are not guaranteed. So, you had just bad luck.
Each Gift will always contain the following items:
Five Khanduran Rune, Caldeum Nightshade, Arreat War Tapestry, Corrupted Angel Flesh, and Westmarch Holy Water
Arcane Dust
Death’s Breaths
Forgotten souls
Reusable Parts
Veiled Crystals
Each Gift could also contain one of the following items:
Coal (Glowing Ore) Developer’s Note:If a player owns any of the Pets or Wings from above list, they will be unable to receive a duplicate of them from any recovered Gifts. Otherwise, enjoy your lumps of coal!
Taken from
And misc are not guaranteed
So, you’re just unlucky…
One thing you need to be VERY careful of. On the console, salvaging will salvage the Sword of Mediocrity. Unlike the PC, it’s not treated as a manual salvage (such as Legendaries). And due to the drop rate (it’s on the very rare side), the last thing you want to do is waste 10 hours of farming due to a stupid slipup.
I sure do get a lot of bad luck with the RNG in this game.
Interesting - cos 6 straight holiday gifts and ONLY bounty mats, nothing else. No glowing ore, no blood shards, no sword of misc, no pets, nothing. This is why I am asking. I should have been getting 1 of the misc items each holiday gift drop. And nada. Over 6 gifts. That sounds broken to me.
Not true. Each gift only has a “chance” of the extra stuff. I have had streaks of 20+ gifts without anything extra in them. Granted I already had all the pets but 1 when they started this thing, and I did get that pet at some point.
I have opened around 560 gifts and I’ve gotten the sword of mediocrity twice (or maybe three times, not sure). I also have collected 67 lumps of coals, zero wings.
(Edit: more like 580 gifts and 71 lumps of coal… the number of wings is correct though )
Haven’t gotten the sword yet, but the Cosmic wings just dropped after about 100 gifts.
O_o
Call me surprised. Still looking for the sword now though, I do want one. lol
And, now I have the sword. I just opened 150 gifts that I have been stashing back. And in 150 gifts, I managed to collect both those two items plus some missing cosmetics. Dang. Screenshot:
In approx 500 gifts I have gotten the sword but not the wings. Tho I do have the wings on Asia. Not in NA or EU tho. Chances are tho with all the grinding for the Staff this season I may get those too, fingers crossed
Thanks guys. So, the sword is so heavily wrapped around in RNG to make it CBF for me. Oh well, this will be the first item that I’ve failed to collect since s10. So be it.
Thanks Jazz. I’ll pass on it then.
Yes, since I’m obviously not actively playing the game anymore. I thought I’d have a bit of a play and see what happens with regards to the holiday gifts.
Complain? It is accurate - it’s a complete waste of time. I mean Jazz says that they got 2 swords of mediocrity from ~500 runs. I’m not doing 250 runs just for a damn item. I’ll just buy it off eBay for my NS character. Easily solved.
Congrats!
Anyway, I’m not prepared to do 250-500 runs to have a chance of the sword dropping. I have far better things to do with my time. Thanks for everyone’s replies.
Just an update - I ended up doing a bunch of GR runs for ~50 holiday gifts. Got a simble glowing ember (odd?) from those 50 odd holiday gifts. I had 3 xmogs drop (which I alraady obviously had previously found, and had in my stash!) and did get the sword of mediocrity.
Given the 3 xmogs, sword xmog and a single glowing ember, vs the number of holiday gifts dropped, it would suggest that there’s a 1 in 10 chance of One of these extras (pet, xmog etc) dropping. Given that it’s on average ~3 GRs per holiuday gift drop, that’s a really crappy drop rate. Easier to farm the damn pets directly imho. In the end, I got 3 extra sfrom around 135 GRs (actually, no, add another 6 GRs onto that, so around 140 odd Grs). At an average run time of just over ~2 minutes, that’s around 4 hours effort or 1hr 20 minutes per extra dropping.
Again, if I was missing these pets or xmogs, I recknn it’d be easier and quicker to just target them directly rather than via the holiday gift route.
I did 5 ancient vault runs, for a grand total of 3 holiday gifts. Slightly better rate than doing GRs, but still very poor vs what many others were reporting, with most seeming to say a holiday gift per ancient vault run, sometimes 2 dropping. I don’t know if console drop rates are different, or it was nerfed at some time during the season (you know Blizzard hates it when the community finds a looip hole and has you know “fun” lol).
It’s not that Blizzard nerfed the rate on the console. Just that Vaults have far fewer goblins in an Ancient Vault than the PC version. So, if you expect 4 to drop on average on the PC, on the console, you’d expect 2 to drop. (Or whatever the real rate is, it’s about half the goblins).
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