I know primals are rare. Forum-goers, be civil. I only want to ask if anyone else has shared my experience. Been farming Enmities for the entire season. Well and truly countless legendaries. Averaging 2 inventories worth of leggos per Enmity. Have gotten 4 primals all season. Early season. One was the guaranteed from GR70. At some point, I feel it’s entirely justified to be a bit suspicious. At least a THOUSAND legendaries from Enmities, no primals. Out of the roughly hundred Enmities I’ve done, the only primal that ever dropped in one was like a week into the season.
Are other people experiencing this odd primal rate in Enmities? The rate a legendary will be primal is 0.25%, and I know that doesn’t mean 1 in every 400 will be primal, but this is starting to feel strange.
Try not to worry about lulls in the primal drop rate… They make up for those infrequent brief moments when they drop like rain. (I’ve seen 3 primals drop in one night)
We tend to notice the drawn out lulls more than we do the brief pinnacles.
With more time and a growing sample size, it averages out. Good ole RNG.
RNG will be RNG. Haven’t really played much this season, but seasons when I do play I have gone 4-5 hours of speedrunning grifts and no primals and I’ve also had primals drop in 3 grifts in a row.
“RNG is RNG”, or in other words; randomization is as expected, being random. As game determines the quality of a Legendary or a Set item, assume Random Number Generator rolling two different dices; one with 10 sides for Ancient quality, and one with 40-sides for Primal. That sums up chance of occurances. If both aligns with the highest rolls, you’ll get a Primal quality; if not, it’s an Ancient or a regular one.
Now consider that only around 10% of what you loot are Legendary or a Set item and you’ll realize the process is actually slow when looting only. Deeper floors of Visions will give you higher quantity of high quality items (Legendary and Sets) as you go up, but maximum floor count you can visit in the Fissure is random as well.
I suggest you to try gambling from Kadala and upgrading rare items from Cube; if you want to break the dry spell. That may sound like superstitious, but that worked for me whenever I needed it. Not that I got the piece I wanted most of the time, but it’s good enough for landing that extra Primordial Ashes to craft my own Primal.
On the scope of looting a few hundred of the same item on average, you are supposed to see a Primal somewhere inbetween. However, on the account of randomization and loose expected limits of big numbers, no one can estimate when a Primal quality item gonna occur.
No, that doesn’t mean finding more duplicates in a short time span, would increase your chances of finding a Primal of that item. Whatever you may loot for, can end up at Primal quality in your hands at a whim the next hour, or never arrive for this entire season; it’s a matter of time. You can end up finding a Primal quality of something else entirely, because pseudo “pity range” of different items could change and at the mercy of randomization.
We have these questions every season. Even though there are drop rates and statistics and averages it is a given thing that some players will be in the extreme ends of the ranges. Like for some Ramaladnis and Petrified Scream or whatever seem to be raining from the sky, while others hardly ever see any.
The only advice I can give is to relax and not be too focused on things that don’t seem to happen and instead try and enjoy the game for what it is (if that makes any sense). It can also be a good idea to not play the same hero over and over or do the same things over and over if you feel that something isn’t going the way it should.
I have even seen some claiming that having frequent breaks (leaving and reentering or even quitting and restarting) can affect the drop rate of primals. If you “feel” that your drop rate is fine, having breaks should have a negative effect of course, because then you’ll play less actively.
For me, I farm some bounties (not for the caches but to get fissures)… ideally those that offer density on the map or spawn cursed chests and the. Cursed Shrines is also very useful because that map spawns a ton of small critters to wipe out (=high chance to get a portal)… I also do some GR 100, like five or so. That also leads to gambling and I also try my hand at mass crafting Aughild, Crimson or Guardian set pieces… plus a normal rift or a cow level (if I have a bardiche) every now and then. If after all that I still got no primal drop, then I restart the whole game. At some point a primal drops. Then I make haste to go back to town and try reforging, if I have a specific item I want as a primal. Might be superstition, but for me ir always feels like that - if a primal dropped in a game, I have a better chance to produce a primal or at least an ancient when reforging…
Playing like that got me some primals, but I’m especially out of luck with crafting or reforging this season. Burned 30k souls without a single primal to show for. I’m fed up with that at the moment, maybe I will just collect 100k souls first and wait for a primal to drop.
The drought is rather strong this season, though. If not for the primalizing recipe, I wouldn’t even have a decent weapon. Only good thing is, I found a select few useful primals… like my TR helm and a Nilfur on SC, I will keep the helm, but the boots will meet the anvil once the season is over. Have way better primal Nilfurs NS… and in HC there’s this TR amulet, but sadly it rolled with Fire%… oh well, I’ll still keep it. Who knows if or when that might be useful in the future. But I won’t reroll a stat on it for now. Don’t care if that means no CHC.
I have got 6 primals in about 6 hrs play. Plus not pushing very hard either. It doesn’t mean you getting more in that area. That is on this account. On one of my other accounts I went over 1200 drops and didn’t get 1.
People stop worry about the drop rate. The primals drop when they drop. Be lucky your getting them. Plus most of the primals are crap. I have got maybe 15 so far this season. Out of those I got to use three the rest I salvage.
Well, I played my HC wiz bit just now, since my last post.
• found Serpent’s Sparker doing a bounty (good one, with 10% DMG/7% AS)
• crafted a Guardians set belt (has thorns damage, but rest was okay)
• found Custerian’s bracer in a Vision (became ashes)
So three in under two hours. Called it a day, then - not a bad day…
That is about right. The faster you kill something the better chance you have to get a drop. That is how the game works. A few yrs ago people work as a team. Today all it is a big free for all.
At least people are actually being civil this time around. Thank you for that, everyone.
I mean the following with all due respect: Please refrain from explaining how probability works. I’m aware. I put it in the original topic for a reason. I get it. RNG is RNG, it’s 2.5% out of 10%, yada yada. I know. It’s not helping. I know you’re trying to help and I earnestly thank you for that. You’ve been heard.
So, I guess, here’s some extra details about my end.
Playing GoD DH. I main Wizard for pushing purposes. Wizard is my go-to for GRs, but considering this season’s GRs are only for leaderboards, not exp farming, I haven’t bothered caring about exp past P800. Wiz hits harder, DH grinds faster. So I’m pretty much exclusively playing DH this season to make the most use out of the Enmities. Literally just farming for non-seasonal at this point. Amassing mats, trying to get true primals since last season gave me PLENTY of Ashes and I don’t need fake primals I can’t equip anyway, the works.
I do not reforge, almost ever. I mean, I am farming for legendary mats so that reforging can be done, but I try to avoid it at all costs. I’d rather farm for an ancient of a specific item than try to reforge one. The ancient rate is ALLEGEDLY 10% but in the history of reforging being a thing, I have literally never seen a single item reforge as ancient in fewer than 20 tries. If I’m lucky. Dumping 1000 Soul mats into ONE ancient is just impossible to justify. This season has the fastest Soul mat farm the game has ever seen, letting me reach 1000 Soul mats within an hour or two, and even still I won’t reforge any item more than 5 times because I know it will be a waste. I have gotten one primal from reforging, ever, and yet that is not my biggest reforging accomplishment. My biggest reforging accomplishment was getting a ring to reforge ancient…after - and no, I am not making this up - 200 attempts. TWO-HUNDRED attempts at a 10% chance. That’s a 0.00000000078389768% chance, for those wondering. Chance of non-ancient (“failures”) to the power of number of failures, or 0.9^199. It was definitely a bit more than that, too, because I didn’t start counting until it failed a weird number of times already, and obviously this was over a very long period of time considering I had to keep grinding more Soul mats to continue. Before anyone asks, YES it was a level 70 ring. When someone responds to a cosmically-unheard-of statistical anomaly like that with “lol rng is rng”, it’s…a bit upsetting. I have never seen the 1-in-10 claim hold water when reforging for myself.
Kadala has given me two primals, ever. Both of them last season, under the full buffs from the Altar, and they were back-to-back. I don’t even want to try guessing how many blood shards I’ve thrown at her over all the years. I have no reason to not keep unloading blood shards on her, but it just doesn’t seem like a viable primal source.
I can speed through a GR100 within like…a minute and a half with the GoD DH. But it’s not like GRs have a higher primal rate than anywhere else. Best place to get primals is wherever legendaries drop the most densely. Getting roughly, what, 8 leggos in 1-2 minutes is significantly fewer than running Enmities. Halls of Agony 1/2/3, then Temple of the Firstborn, reset world. Average maybe 2 Enmities per room, chance of finding Rainbow Gob (found one so far), overall a much better leggo rate than GRs. Plus, don’t gotta waste time leveling up gems to close the GR. And like I said above, GRs also give blood shards, but those don’t close the massive leggo acquisition rate gap.
Final note: Despite my whining, I do appreciate people trying to help. I’m really just venting my frustration with (suspiciously) bad luck and was opening up a channel to encourage others to vent their own frustrations with the same (alleged) luck.
Just kidding of course 
