I did the IK set dungeon. I usually do HoTA, but I did WW/Rend this time becaue I didn’t feel like farming for the supplemental HoTA gear and I already had a WW/Rend Barb made.
First try: Maddening Questions.
Eighth try: Yest More Questions.
Fifteenth try: Never Ending Questions.
Each clear was 90-105 seconds. Lets just call it 25 minutes total because I didn’t write down each time. If it’s around the same time in season 28, I’ll be fine. Heck, even if its a half an hour, I’ll be fine.
People freaking out about this doesn’t make any sense. Unless you are extremely lucky, it will take you a lot longer to craft the Staff of Herding. If anything, people should freak out about the Staff of Herding. That makes more sense to me. Your friendly neighborhood filthy casual.
Murphy’s Law: Now watch it take me hours to find Never Ending Questions in S28 and I trip over a Gibbering Gemstone while doing a bounty. DOH!
Yeah, I’d say that was a reasonable test of what people can expect if this goes live with that requirement.
I believe some people have found that the pages don’t drop after 100+ runs. I’m curious to know if those people also have tried the dungeons that seem to drop the pages more like IK or Nats. But the general consensus is that for some, these pages are bugged and just never drop.
Can only speak for myself… didn’t even know this Questions item exists. Because Set Dungeons are a annoying pest and a pain in the a$$. I don’t bother doing them at all, never ever. Not to mention I more or less only play wiz and only ever did the Firebird dungeon (once) and since I’m forced to, in every season I go fot Tal Rasha. Period. I already decided to not grind for that dumb pages. Should they drop within 10 tries. good. If not, so be it. I will try to unlock the double bounties, which is far more useful for me as a solo player with very limited time.
As for the Staff of Herding. The problem is the gemstone. Everything else is fine, but that thing is nuts. Tell you what, I have found Gemstones when we still had Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno for tiers. My Infernal Staff of Herding is my Pride and Joy. And then… after the changes: nope, not a single Gemstone in over a decade! And I can’t tell how often I killed Chiltara. So, no thanks. I won’t do this sh!t, unless they fix the droprates. I mean, why is it even that hard? That secret level is a pointless killjoy with literally nothing you can’t see elsewhere… Rainbow Goblin portal anyone? So hell, there is no reason why this item is so rare.
I only play this game for fun and stress relief. Things like these feel like a sick chore and don’t excite me at all. Im fact, it makes me angry. The rest of the required stuff is a walk in park, but these two are plain nuts. As much as I want that cosmetic, this is a hard pass for me.
Well it was kind of to be expected from blizzard. I mean they made World of Warcraft. The ultimate grind grind grind grind grind and waste lots of time game.
Figures they want to make us grind a named mob (Chilltara) in a dungeon (Caverns of Frost) which doesnt always spawn. The mob doesn’t always spawn either and to top things off, it doesn’t guarantee it drops the gibbering gemstone either. Like 0.01% chance. I’ve been farming it on S28 and after over 100 runs, still no gibbering gemstone. GG Blizzard, you’ve managed to force us to play WoW without playing WoW. Forcing us to grind a stupid item with an even more stupid drop-rate.
I seriously hope staff of herding will be replaced by something else. Same goes for Never Ending Questions.
Forcing people to do set dungeons is wrong.
Set dungeons are boring as hell. I much rather go to the dentist and have them do a root-canal. That’s probably still more fun then this. There is no fun in breaking a good working build to then struggle on in a set dungeon over and over again for hours on end to meet stupid goals just to get a stupid item to unlock the altar of rites further.
If you look at many of the PTR Suggestions, you’re going to see people wanting the game to be easier. (I.e. A lot of people are upset that the Power Pylon Potion might be changed when you can get a solo GR150 without any skills bound whatsoever).
My opinion is opposite of that. I’m not asking for Cosmic Wings drop difficulty, but there needs to be something that’s not obtainable if you only plan on playing the season for 10 hours for a season that’s going to last months.
The drop rate is only a few percent. I’ve heard anything from 1% to 5%. Let’s be generous and call it 5%. The important part of that is there is a 95% chance of failure. That’s the bottleneck that needs to be dealt with.
What that means is (assuming perfect random) that roughly 36% of players will complete 20 runs and not get it. Nearly 13% will complete 40 runs without success. And after 60 there will be nearly 5% still frustrated. And there is no bottom… even after 100 runs there would still be one player in 170 that won’t have the NEQ. However if we assume 5000 people will try to farm it that’s nearly 30 of them that will run it into this shoddy design choice. That’s the part that pisses players off and makes them rage on the forums. Your 30 minutes (or the smug SOB who gets on the first try and brags about it) will turn into several hours of running the same set dungeon with nothing but cramped fingers to show for it. And then they have the same “joy” ahead looking for the Gibbering Gemstone.
The only good part about this is players can unlock 19 of the seals and all three of the potion abilities before they need to get about grinding for the first of these rare items.
Blasters and speed racers like to blow past everything as soon as possible. They finish the season in the first weekend and come to the forum to vent that they do not have anything to do. With the number of people complaining I would not be surprised if the developers made changes to the alter. Some people just want everything easy peasy.
What if after a certain number of runs (tries) it will automatically drop on the next one. Let say you try 30 times with no success but you know it will drop on the 31st attempt. This way you still need to work at it unless it drops on the first run. I do not really care for things to just be give to me with no real effort on my part.
If Caverns of Frost spawned 100% of the time AND Chilltara spawned 100% of the time AND there was a 5% chance to drop that dang Gemstone, then yes, 95% failure would be correct. That would be fine. It’s a grind in a game that you need to grind for gear and other items.
Caverns of Time is a rng spawn. Even then, Chilltara is a rng spawn. Even then, the Gemstone is a rng spawn. You are looking at more than 95% failure rate with 3 layers of rng and a very low % drop rate for the Gemstone. I won’t do the math, it will hurt my brain, but I am sure the % of failure is greater than 99%, or maybe even a high 98%, you know… using a decimal or a fraction of 1 (depending on how you write your math).
Something like that would work. Or increase the drop rate by a low % every time you kill the damn mob and it doesn’t drop the item. Sooner or later it will, it’s just a matter of grind/time. It’s not too easy. If it takes someone a day or week or a month, depending on play time, then so be it. Obviously, someone with 21 hours of garbage time everyday will get it sooner than a casual that plays an hour or so a day or a few hours a week.
I’ve never had a problem getting the Staff of Herding in a season. I mostly play SSF and that turns into lots of bounty farming so Chilltara and even the Mysterious Cavern come up quite a bit. Heck, last season I finally decided to use the staff and farm for the Rainbow Portrait and I got it, so at least the staff has SOME value. But I’m willing to bet half, maybe 80% or more, of the players were unaware the Never Ending Questions was even a thing that dropped in set dungeons. Most players begrudgingly run them to get the season journey and never go back.
That’s what I do. I run IK once to master it and I am done with set dungeons for the rest of the season. As much as I dislike set dungeons, I would rather farm one for the pages vs. getting the staff. If the gemstone drops from doing bounties, cool, but I won’t go out of my way to farm it, no thanks. With set dungeons, I don’t have to remake the game, hope for it to spawn, and travel to it when it does.
I eventually got the Never Ending Question after around to maybe 10-20 tries and that is after I already Mastered the set dungeon months ago when doing the season journey.
But you do have to specifically kill the elites as they’re the ones that drop the page.
Being doing the Tal Rasha set dungeon cause its one of the easiest set dungeons to do and also I know where all the elites are on the map so maybe S28 I will try for Tal Rasha set dungeon again as I at least have experience with getting the page.
But overall it probably took me probably 1-2 hours to do as I kept doing the dungeon over and over until I it dropped.
I can understand the frustration of S28 as hunting down Staff of herdling mats over a set dungeon page.
Well good luck to anybody willing to do S28 and get the page.
Exactly how I feel. And it is not like the staff is required to be able to enjoy or experience the theme. It is the second to last upgrade. You can leave 2 nodes without any problem.
Farming for a really long time to get a nice set of wings isn’t a big deal.
I agree. Also, those wings really aren’t all that nice looking either. Granted, they are perfect with the Marauder set (which is why that set was chosen as an example), but I can’t really see them fitting with any other armor set, especially any of the Crusader’s sets.
At first I didn’t think farming for the never ending questions would be much of a chore, I gotten a few while playing and I have farmed for the staff of herding a number of times and it didn’t seem that bad when I did it, so I don’t know if the never ending questions is worse or not. What I did seem to notice is that when players post on the forums that something is impossible to get or bugged the response from others seems to be its just bad rng so it only a problem with you get lucky, but for the questions streamers were the ones having the bad luck so now for some reason it seems to be a problem. I could see changing it to some other rare item that Rax will get in five minutes of testing so problem solved even though there would be the same number of players that potentially will never be able to get the item by the end of the season no matter how much they grind and the response will go back to you just need to get lucky its only your problem. I’m ok with a couple of things being grindy as long as the chance to get what you are looking for isn’t so low that people are still farming for the item after a couple of weeks of trying.
I could test out each set dungeon and see which ones perform better than others, or at least do a few more sets for IK, but I really do not like set dungeons. Since the barb is my favorite class, the IK set dungeon is my go to for a fast master so I can move on to other things.
Maybe I did get lucky getting the page in under 20 tries. Maybe it will take over a 100 tries in s28. That would not surprise me at all and would definitely give credit it to the “that’s just rng” answer.
Edit.
The thing that would bug me the most, if it does take more than 20 tries or even 30 minutes to accomplish, would be the fact that I don’t get any experience points or loot for the time spent doing something I really do not enjoy at all. Hopefully it won’t take too long or too many tries. A grind is one thing, fine, but a waste of time is something else, annoying.
I feel the same way with rerolling stats or trying to get a socket in an item at the mystic, or turning rares into legendaries or rerolling an item to become an ancient with the cube. A few to several tries here and there is fine, it’s the grind, rng, etc., but when it becomes tedium, dozens of failed tries, then it’s a waste of time and not fun at all, especially when you used up all or most of your mats and you can’t continue trying if you wanted. Now you have to go back and gather/farm mats just for more rerolls or reforges or whatever.
That’s why I generally do a few here and there. If I succeed, cool. If not, then I come back at a later time and try again. If I don’t, then I will go bonkers. I play to have fun, not go bonkers.
I think most people hate set dungeons and for most of them once I master them I will never do them ever again and we all have those couple of dungeons that we find easy to complete and we master those every season. Farming for the questions to me is different because you can use you regular character with no modifications to farm it and you are under no pressure to master the dungeon so to me that takes away most of the negatives and on the positive side once you finish the dungeon you are taken to the entrance where you can grind for it again no need to start a new game for each run. I assumed that this task would be doable in 20 or less runs but I fear there may be a hidden variable that we are unaware of that will make it nearly impossible for some. The best example of a hidden rng variable is the bovine bardiche if you weren’t aware of being able to craft it in the cube, and you needed it for the altar I think only 3 of the 7 classes get them a few times in a season but for the rest of the classes they may never find one through normal game play because the odds are so low.
I spent an hour on PTR clearing the DH UE set dungeon. Got 2 pages, but neither of them was the one needed for the Altar.
I think most people hate having to do set dungeons every single season as part of the journey. Most set dungeons are kind of fun the first few times.
Grinding set dungeons just for a drop is really dumb though. Unlike every other aspect of the game, you get nothing out of grinding set dungeons. No loot, not exp, everything is the same, no challenge at all, just one-shot everything until you get the drop or the last mob dies and it resets. Not a very good way to increase engagement.
So true. You don’t need a ‘set dungeon’ build or a gimp skills set up, just the 6pc to enter it. You can open it as many times as you want, don’t have to start a new game. It’s not as bad as some people are making it out to be, especially understanding that many do not like doing set dungeons for so many reasons.
DOH!