OK, I get it, everything is gated by horrible RNG. But when three players all between P400 and P800 have seen a grand total of 2 Puzzle Rings drop something may have changed. And it’s not just Puzzle Rings. Some other items which used to be fairly easy to get are also suddenly as rare as hen’s teeth… like Bovine Bardiche and Broken Crown. For the three of us the totals were 1 Bardiche and 2 Crowns. By this point in the season I usually have 8 or 9 Puzzle Rings and half a dozen Bardiches in my chest. It feels like the loot tables have been changed. Of course junk nobody wants like Blackthorne’s keep dropping (and dropping and dropping). Is anyone else seeing something similar?
Until yesterday, I had half a stash tab of cow staffs (until I salvaged all but 7 of them). I’ve gotten around 15 Puzzle rings so far. I can’t speak to Broken Crowns except that I got what I needed fairly early on and haven’t paid attention to them since.
And the two multistate lotteries in my area are sometimes won every few weeks, and sometimes won in six months.
Unfortunately, RNG has no memory, so what you’re seeing can’t be extrapolated to a change in loot tables.
5 Likes
Which is part of the broken design in the game. Almost everything you need to progress from the Ring of Royal Grandeur to specific set enhancement pieces, is locked behind RNG. It’s lazy design used as a replacement for content. Something like once every 100 Paragons you can go to Kanai’s Cube and click on a power you don’t have and Zoltan says something like, “Ah, you seek power you lack… I’ve heard rumors of it… Go to the (random dungeon crawl) and kill (random boss) and you shall find what you seek. If you survive, that is… Mwuhahaha!”
1 Like
Broken?
If so, whats the alternative in an ARPG like D3? Give everything to everyone up front?
I ran about 10 low level bounties before I got a RoRG. Some will get it sooner, some later. That doesn’t seem broken for an ARPG to me.
6 Likes
It’s just variance. Seasons 22 & 23, the T13 vault was the last thing I needed to do to complete the Season Journey. Both times, I went the entire season without seeing a vault via a goblin, or getting a puzzle ring, until I farmed for them as the very last thing.
So basically you presented a “question”, but it was just to have the opportunity to rant and whine? Maybe this season you have found more nemesis (for me somehow that took a while this season) or leorics crown or whatever, and maybe previous season you were just lucky, because i have never had that many puzzle rings that early with that low amount of para.
Besides you can craft bovine’s pretty easy, for example crus only has 3 polearms to craft. puzzle ring can be gambled on a lvl 31 WD or DH. Furthermore you can share some in communities.
1 Like
Humm… No…
#MissingCharacters
The RNG can have huge variances and having a streak of bad luck might seem like the RNG is broken when it’s actually not. The RNG gravitates towards specific average value but still allows massive variances.
Many seasons ago I also had very bad luck acquiring Puzzle Ring. I don’t remember which season it was but that time I felt like all Puzzle Rings had disappeared from the game. Eventually I got one but it took a while. Doesn’t mean anything was broken back then either.
If anything, for me, the ancient drop chance has been set to almost 0 as that is practically what I have. Or rather, I suppose, of items I would actually consider using. Alas, I don’t really need them this season and am now going through a level-up process for a barbarian so I can complete the set dungeon (I am not doing Inna and do not like any other monk dungeon, not that I have the gear for them anyway.) And then, other than Cubing 20 some odd miscellaneous items for no purpose than wasting materials, I am pretty much done. I figure the barbarian can do a rift in under 2 minutes so I don’t need to care so much and I’ll get Avarice once I feel like it.
The odd thing, for me, is I don’t get a puzzle ring to drop until after I have had the first one and used it. And the only way I get a first one is through Kadala or being lucky enough for a goblin to pop a vault portal. Then, like primals, it seems to think "OK, flag set - drop rings now) and I start to get them but only after using them… like I used a ring to get to T16 vault and got another one in the Greed drop. Used it and got another one.
I have seen 3. But I don’t really try to get them. Keeping one for my lady to run through when she gets some time to play.
Lazy is being paragon 400 to 800 and complaining about not getting puzzle rings and bovine bardiches!
Have found plenty of Puzzle Rings, but can’t seem to find a Flavor of Time to save my life. On all three regions. Have yet to see a Leoric’s Crown on the Asia server (had to slog out the leveling to 70 w/o it) - ugggh 
It feels like that when we play and don’t get an item we desire. That doesn’t mean anything have changed.
Usually as soon as the first one drops and we get over that obstacle then all the rest feels like the expression “when it rains it pours”.
In order to draw any conclusions you will have record thousands of drops, maybe in the range of hundreds of thousands in order to draw any conclusions. That a hell of a lot of gaming.
Instead of trying to do anything “nutty” like that just take a step back and accept that you are experiencing some bad luck and move on.
I do understand your feeling because it can be annoying like hell sometimes, last season I wanted a RoRG badly and did some 30 ish bounty runs in group before one dropped. I had bite marks on my knuckles… 
I was unlucky in that but damn lucky in other finds.
Happy hunting
2 Likes
There’s always something you find easily and something that keeps evading you.
I finished Guardian on US by asking in chat for a vault invite because I had no puzzle ring.
I Have said it before you try to get something the first time. It might take for ever it seams. but when one drops then after that they rain down like cats and dogs. LOL
I run between 3 accounts and it was along time before I got a dawn on any of them. Plus on one of the accounts I still haven’t got one to drop and it is at like 800 paragon. Plus all 3 accounts have done the season journey too.
Like said before you have to live with the Good and the Bad in this game.
Just RNG, while some don’t find what they look for there is the other side with people that find your item all the time. As an example, one of my clanmates wrote in chat the other day that he only got 3 of the Ramaladni’s… while I had 15+ of them, our para was similar.
Gonna disagree. P800 is the whole freakin’ season.
I also haven’t seen a bardiche this season, and only two puzzle rings. But it’s within the realm of normal RNG, I suppose.
Buyout options. They could have consumables like puzzles, cow sticks, gifts purchasable with mats. Just make the price equivalent to what the average would have to farm to get one. This would take the sting out of those who are RNG cursed, but make it expensive enough, so that everyone doesn’t have stash pages full.
I have long wanted a system where you could reforge an ancient and keep its ancient value, but pay 10x the mats per roll. Same with the mystic, if I want 20% fire damage on my bracers, let me pay the statistical price in mats for it. You can just give 2 options to get the results, gamble or straight payout.
Some people love slot machines, some hate them. An ARPG doesn’t mean the game needs to have layers and layers of nested RNG. Some people want to gamble and try their luck, let them. Some people want to save up for something, let them. More options would not hurt the game.
1 Like
I think that’s the issue with the genre in general. Who exactly is the core audience? Because in the end, you need to cater toward them. This isn’t to say that a person who plays 500+ hours in a season shouldn’t be rewarded, but you need to have a minimum. And I’d agree that it shouldn’t be the super casual audience who doesn’t even reach GR70 (or even level 70) by the end of the season.
And I know this may sound stupid to a lot of people, but I’d say that 10 hours per season is fair. And 10 hours can easily be Paragon 800, but it can also be the full Season Journey.
That’s one solution. Broadly speaking, the alternative to randomness is guarantees. The game presents you with a challenge. You do the work, you get the reward. No one’s trying to get out of doing the work for an item. That’s in bold because it’s critical to understand. When people complain about RNG, they’re complaining because they feel like they’ve done the work, but didn’t get anything for it. What they want is a reasonable assurance that some sort of reward is coming and they’re not just grinding and wasting their time.
Some ways to do it:
- Kill a boss, get a fixed reward (ex Ubers mats for the Hellfire ammy)
- Kill x players in PVP, get a fixed reward
- Complete x quests, get a fixed reward (ex bounties)
- Do x quests y days in a row, get a reward (ex WoW dailies or weeklies)
- Do x quests for y faction, get access to rewards (ex faction/reputation grinding)
There are lots of ways to do it. The reward doesn’t have to be an item either. It can be a currency which serves as a fraction of an item. It can be crafting mats, as long as the crafting system is robust enough to fill the gaps. And you can mix and match with the itemization too. If you want to have intro and mid-level gear available via guarantees but BIS items as drop only, you can do that. You could also do all drops on RNG, but second-chance mechanics are on guarantees. Lots of ways to hybridize to get a feeling of “fairness.”
It doesn’t have to be everything on a roll of the digital dice.
Disagree here. More options becoming necessary often (but not always) means a core game system is malfunctioning. Tetris doesn’t need more block shape options. Chess doesn’t need more options for pieces or starting configurations.
D3 needs options because its item system has broken OP sets and legendary items that invalidate the rest of the loot table, making them mandatory for any end-game viable build, and resulting in cookie cutter builds. In order to play at the highest level, you have to have the exact group of select items, and they have to have the right affixes and be rolled well. Fix the core issue with proper, balanced itemization, and randomness becomes viable again because there’s less range between “good luck” and “bad luck.”
1 Like
As I said it before I say it a gain, RNG is a sentient entity! It knows what you crave for, and it will refuse to give, unless you make a sacrifice to it. I usualy give goat blood, but sometimes chicken is accepted also. ALL HEIL THE RNG GODS!!! LoL. 
1 Like