My altar is done but for the staff. Getting to 70 is only the start. By grinding I mean upping your gear with +stats that’s what takes the time, leveling up the gems if you have no screams.
It would help if the screams could drop outside of greater rifts. (Then we wouldn’t have to scream for them!).
Found six total this season. Three of them used in unlocking the Altar.
I don’t have a single augment this season. Waiting for a PS to drop so I can get 125 but it may never happen.
Sometimes I could swear I see something brown drop and it disappears. When I count my GR 95 loot I have 11 items. This happened several times this season.
Nevermind! Pet grabbing loot and salvaging it. Brain fart.
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Same here Paragon 792 and not a single Petrified Scream drop. I normally don’t give these a second thought, they usually drop early and often up until this season.
At that low level you haven’t started speed grifting yet I guess. When you do they will drop often enough in my experience. At least enough compared to regular gems.
I’m petrified screaming for screams too 
Run GR as fast as possible. PS drops so much its not worthy to pick up anymore.
Run whatever tier that’s Sub 1 min for urgent PS for altar.
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Doing better than me…
Are you suggesting that the game has AI to determine what you want and therefore doesn’t drop it or makes it a very low drop rate chance?
RNG has been weird this season. I had all items for my build (s6 impale) in under 24 hours. Usually takes me a week of farming (running rifts for DBs, grinding GRs, upgrading rares and gambling). I had 5 primals drop in the space of 2 hours 1 night. Never had that happen before. p800, 4 ramas and 2 petrifieds have dropped. Much lower than normal.
chilltara was weird - worse than normal. ~45 runs, 2/3 were icefalls caverns. Of the 15 odd that were frost caverns, Chilltara only spawned 5 times. I’ve done a lot of chilltara runs over the years and never seen such a low spawn rate for her.
General re-rolling at the mystic has been truly horrendous, the worst I have seen it in 20 seasons (seasons came to console from s10 and I have played every season). 40 odd rolls just to get a impale roll, which rolls like 11% (so near as low as possible) where every other skill has rolled at least twice, most with 15%…even getting a socket is taking 40+ rolls consistently (3 items, all 3 took 40+ rolls to get a socket).
I haven’t gotten to my favourite part of legendary gem upgrades at 60% which for me, has been consistently close to 37% over 20 seasons.
There is something very odd about this game with the RNG.
For those spouting the usual not enough rolls to be statistically relevant i call BS. The average player doesn’t bloody well do 50k rolls to get that statistical relevancy. They may do 50-100 tops. If RNG can’t be consistent over such a small number of rolls, then it has a problem.
they originally did, but the fun police at Blizzard decided that it was too much fun and cut the drop rates…
I’ve done the altar, done 3 conquests, only need to get 1 gem to lvl 70 and then my season is done.
Not going to spend anymore time on this game given the mountain of cheats on the PS4 (save wizard and modded gear) that neither Blizzard or Sony want to do anything about.
This game is dead.
Ah sounds like you play it on console. Good for you for not using those cheats. I play PC and do it straight up. Can’t see making the game even easier
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People have told me before that I’ve just been lucky, and it’s all the RNG, but I don’t entirely believe in the “randomness” of the game and do believe it can be manipulated.
Can I prove it though? No.
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Ok you can’t prove it, but care to elaborate? How do you, in your own opinion think that you can manipulate RNG?
basically you should get 1 scream for every 20 GR runs. sometimes more, sometimes less, but if you run 200 grifts, you should get 8-12. plus, dont forget to lvl up your junk gems and use those too.
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I’m getting close to a hundred GRs, all above 90, and have just seen one single scream in that span. More precisely: since last petrified scream drop I’m getting close to a hundred GR runs.
Not complaining. It usually evens out. But I understand people’s frustrations.
(Have gotten seven this season, three of them used for the Altar).
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If you look at the console version of the game, it can be played offline, and the save is on your console. And there’s always been save scumming going on there. I’m going to make an assumption here that saving overall works similarly enough on the console & PC, just that the server is always online for the PC. The gameplay mechanics are a little different between the platforms, but the items, maps, etc. are all the same, and there’s nothing that would lead me to believe they’d code a completely different save & load mechanism when it’s unnecessary.
Basically, at one point in the game, whenever you reloaded the game on the console, you’d always get the same outcome, be it Kadala, upgrading items in the cube, enchanting, etc. Thus, the game always started with the same seed.
Some people found out though, that if you changed some gear that you were wearing, the seed would change, i.e. the items you gambled, upgraded, enchanted, etc. would change. But it wasn’t just changing one or two pieces of gear. That would keep the seed the same. If you swapped sets though, or had the full set with heavy critical chance, and swapped to the same set with heavy cooldown reduction, that would also change the seed.
This part was provable. What’s not provable here though is what was the effect on the seed. That is, is the RNG weighted, and is the game working against you?
By weighted, this means that just because you have 5 items, doesn’t mean each item has a 20% chance of dropping.
It could be something like:
- Item 1: 5%
- Item 2: 10%
- Item 3: 15%
- Item 4: 25%
- Item 5: 45%
So, that if you upgraded an item, roughly half the time you would get item 5, and you’d have to upgrade a lot to get item 1.
So, that would lead to a question of, if you wanted to enchant certain stats, perhaps it might be useful to wear gear of certain stats. And, if you thought the game works against you and wanted Critical Chance, you’d wear a full set of gear with everything but Critical Chance, to make the game think you absolutely do not want Critical Chance, thus the game would give you nothing but Critical Chance when you go to enchant.
That part there is not provable. The question that this brings up for me though, why does the seed stay the same if you swap a set piece where Critical Chance is higher than another stat, regardless if you have 40% or 50% Critical Chance and 20% Cooldown Reduction, but when Cooldown Reduction overtakes Critical Chance, the seed changes? If it’s purely random, why not just have the seed change when you swap any gear?
When it comes down to screams, and this is all anecdotal, I’ve tended to notice they have a higher drop rate the lower the Greater Rift That’s my hypothesis, but I can’t prove it. I have kept track of my Petrified Screams though, and on average, I have roughly a 3x drop rate in Hardcore vs Softcore. And in Hardcore, I tend to build up in Greater Rifts, whereas by hour 5 in Softcore, I’m in Greater Rift 80 or above.
And that’s how I also approached the Conquest “On a Good Day” last season, where I had 4 Petrified Screams roughly 3 hours into the season, compared to the second player to get 3 gems to 65 roughly 5.5 hours into the season. And that was also running SSF and saving my Challenge Cache, so it took one and a half hours just to level to 70.
Now, this could all be coincidence, and I just got lucky. Perhaps that’s the case.
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it’s very frustrating. Skilled and experienced players such as myself are getting our butts kicked by the cheaters and there’s nothing we can do about it. All it has done is drive me from the game - I do enough to get the seasonal journey and altar completed and that’s about it. Takes me a week solo and I’m not playing hardcore either - just a few hours every night. Hell, I’m no longer even bothering with the seasonal challenges LB, since you can’t see what the challenges are (and haven’t been able to since ~s17 or s18 when Blizzard changed something and never fixed it). I used to be top 10 global for that regularly. Considering many in the top 10 had a group/team helping them…that’s no mean feat.
The game is broken on console PS4 (and switch). Sony is corrupt and Blizzard is lazy and inept.
Yes, this is my suspicion too. I have long suspected that the game has some code that recognises what you’re after and makes it harder to get. I was trying to get ms on my UE boots and took around 50 rolls to get 14% (I had 2 ms rolls over 50 goes - 11% and 14%). In that same time, I had 3x 15% impale rolls and 2 or 3 other impale rolls. I’d never g et that many with my s6 impale character. I CBF playing with RNG seeds like that to try and get better gear for my main s6 impale character even though it would probably work based on my game experiences over the years.
PS I still need to reply to your PM on the PS4 - I keep forgetting to (doesn’t help that I haven’t really been super active LOL).
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But why are you still playing seasons if…
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purely for the xmog/pet/wing(s). Nothing more.
GR 110 complete. Altar done (just need 1 Primal). Season 31 completed. 12 Ramadamas and 5 Screams ← this should be reversed. 6 LV 100 gems so I have done a couple GR’s.
IMHO OP has a legit complaint.
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I couldn’t agree more. Blizz is really missing the boat on this one. If they actually want us to play their game this would make a big difference.
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