Dear Devs,
On a balanced server, every day after release of Molten Front the chance of completing this diminishes as people quit doing dailies after reaching their goals. On an unbalanced server, the chance of ever completing this is vanishingly small on day one.
The simplest fix is to remove both faction-specific NPCs from the achievement. I propose this, because after camping Sethria’s Roost for 20+ hours over the last two days, I still haven’t seen Thassarian, who’s the faction-specific NPC on my alliance heavy server.
I have no way of knowing how many Alliance players have worked on the quest since Tuesday, but if I haven’t seen an Alliance player spawning Thassarian, then the odds here of ever seeing Mankrik are infinitesimal due to so few Horde players multiplied by the low spawn chance of faction-specific NPC’s.
Another fix would be to remove this achievement from the Veteran of the Molten Front meta, akin to how School of Hard Knocks was removed from Children’s Week meta.
Thank you for your consideration.
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It also seems bugged currently. Judging by wowhead comments + what we’ve experienced on our server, it’s only spawning a select subset of the NPCs on each server. For example, some servers never get Hemet, while others never get Chromie.
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i hope that isn’t the case, this is already such a pain in the butt achievement to get since it’s 100% random
In fact it seems as if at least on our server it’s no longer spawning named companions at all. Everyone’s getting 4 protectors.
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I just discovered something else complicating this achievement: layers.
Logged on my alt box today, did the pre-quests, and ran it over to the Roost just after dailies reset. Had this toon, my main, also parked there. We are not grouped, and I discover we’re on separate layers. So Blizz’s solution to high population compounds the already low odds of named NPC’s appearing in whatever layer we’re in.
Further, it seems that named NPC spawn may in fact be broken as you noted. Watching wave after wave of players come to the Roost to do their daily for 30 minutes now and haven’t seen a single named NPC spawn.
While I’m an achievement oriented player, I don’t think I will spend much more time hunting for the last two I need. There are other more fun things to do than hang out in Sethria’s Roost!
If this problem is in fact something Devs are looking into, we would all appreciate a post to acknowledge the issue so we can carry on playing the game. Thank you.
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TBQH The devs have left this achievement in a deplorable state on Retail for a literal 13 years so I have absolutely zero confidence that they will address this one. They are probably completely unaware there’s an issue at all.
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Something is definitely going on in the background.
There continue to be zero named NPCs - except get this - Mankrik just spawned twice within 15 minutes here on Pagle (and again now about an hour later, stuck around feeling lucky waiting for Tharassian). On Tuesday after MF release, it was common to see NPC spam chat all the time. Now, nothing…except for Mankrik three times in two hours. Now I’m ironically waiting for the Alliance NPC to spawn…
Good luck everyone!
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been sitting here for 4 and a half hours on Mankrik server and have only seen a single named companion (ironically was Thassarian being the only one to spawn in a horde dominated server). and i’ve been using both Rare Scanner and Silver Dragon to check for all the named companions for the achievement so it’d be hard to miss them
I spent about 12 hours hovering above the roost yeaterday on Arugal and we saw Thassarian twice, that was it. In 3 days I’ve seen 3 thassarian, 1 chromie and 1 pagle. the day before that there was about 30 chromie and 30 pagle. mankrik was seen on the first day reportedly, and linken/hemet have not been seen at all apparently.
100% broken ach.
if i had to guess purely from spawn behaviour, it seems not all of them have the same chance of appearing, and after each appearance there chance gets exponentially smaller every time.
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It’s almost impossible not to take the appearance of the Alliance NPC on Mankrik and the appearance of Mankrik on Pagle as just a simple coincidence. That two faction dominate servers would each get the opposing faction’s NPC without seeing their own???
The extra observation of a server that has seen both faction NPCs is also quite interesting.
I’m also starting to wonder if their appearance may be related to MF phasing, but now you’ve got me thinking that there’s something else to do with the number of times they are even seen, or if their appearance rate decreases each time they appear. I suppose that could explain why we saw so, so many up front, and now, nothing?
Thanks for the replies and info from other servers.
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i have seen both on mankrik, but yeah it’s odd that ive seen Thassarian more often than Mankrik.
also it would really suck if they have a lower chance to spawn the longer the days go on, maybe we can hope that the spawn chances reset on the weekly teusday reset but at this point i doubt it.
after 11 hours yesterday i saw 2 Thassarian’s, 2 of the non-needed Doc’s, and a non-needed dwarf whose name i didn’t catch
im on faerlina and havent seen thassarian, also havent seen any named npcs in like 3 days
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Dear OP.
On a dead server like mine, I’ll never complete as the only other person I see in Sethia is my friend.
Thanks for letting me know this achievement exists. I hadn’t looked.
dropped the quest and hearthed to capitol city and going to check after a couple hours logged if the same NPC shows up. ie: ‘soft reset’. No one on wowhead comments said they did that test.
side note: I healed up the bedridden Hamuul about 16M hp for grins and he’s stayed 100% all week, but expect him to lapse back to 10% on tueday reset. There is no easter egg result for healing him to 100%. Anyone caring to help replenish my embersilk bandage stock are welcome to do that.
Has anyone here competed the achievement? could be time-gated in some way if not
edit: waited a couple of hours and picked the quest back up after logged. same NPC. also swapping to the other quest in sethia’s roost got me the same NPC
the achievement shouldn’t be time locked as ive seen people on my server with both chromie and linken progress (the two i am missing), it is just purely an RNG issue but i suspect the spawn rates are bugged since ive been camping the roost for several hours each day with two different scanner addons looking for all of them and have barely seen any of them.
if it is some weird issue where the spawn rate decreases as they spawn then i hope that tomorrow it resets with the weekly reset
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I wonder if they tried to apply some internal weighted RNG to make the ones that haven’t been seen in a while to have a higher chance of spawning but accidentally reversed it and made them less likely.
It sounds absurd but they made this exact mistake with Legion legendaries in 2016. But I doubt they went out of their way to change how this random achievement works, especially with presumably no change to it on retail.
One interesting observation is that apparently people are still seeing the faction-specific ones (Mankrik and Thassarian) show up. On Arugal I was seeing Thassarian a few times after the others stopped showing up even though our server is mostly Horde so there might be something happening there.
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Again, very interesting observations from the field. No doubt this achieve isn’t high on Dev priority list, and wasn’t in OG Cata either, but it does feel like something is currently happening in the background, whether it’s dev tinkering or simply a bug.
I no longer think there is any time gating, number of spawns, or phase-based rationale for the spawns given that some people - here on Pagle and on other Classic servers - have completed the achievement. I guess we’ll see shortly whether the weekly reset changes the named NPC spawn rate, or if there are other patches or hot fixes applied.
But what continues to intrigue me, almost to the point of obsession, is why the non-dominant faction NPC seems to show up with much higher frequency than the dominant faction NPC, e.g. Thassarian shows up more often on Horde servers while Mankrik shows up more often on on Alliance. Further, looking back to 2011, Wowhead comments don’t make mention of this sudden, sharp decline in named NPC spawns, which appears to be unique to Cata Classic.
I only have Thassarian left, so here’s to hoping I see him soon. Good luck, all!
Edit after weekly maintenance: named are spawning again after reset.
Maybe it is linked to the number of times seen, or another change was made. Either way, if you need named NPC’s, hop on and give it a go!
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I’m also seeing named NPCs spawning again. Arugal just got Linken and a couple other non-achievement named NPCs, hopefully Hemet is not far behind.
yep i’m seeing a lot more named companions not required for the quest, and even got chromie, so either it is tied to how often they spawn per week or they fixed something
edit: and i just got linken too so i’m finally done with it
I also found Thassarian and have completed it as well.
At one point just after dailies reset a few minutes ago, ALL of them were up at once!
Very interesting. Again, thanks for all the responses. Good luck, and have fun all!
this seems to be broken … again. no named npcs spawning
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