I have only managed to get 2 shards since early access. They just don’t seem to drop. Even went and joined some farming groups well after getting my farming out of the way early on…No drops.
Skys shard 2.0 complete with the drop rate low enough for me to lose interest after 15-20 minutes.
I did this farm at launch (because I knew they were meant to be expansion-long grinds and wanted them out of the way early) while grinding out Siesbarg and the bee mount and rarity says my per-shard kills is north of 2k.
Wowhead displays the average drop rate experienced by players. Of course, we never see the standard deviation, only the average. so, yes, player experience can vary quite a bit.
but if blizz actively programmed a lower drop rate, then the average player will experience fewer drops per kill.
it seems - anecdotally - that the drop rate has been nerfed (i.e. reduced). if that actually occurred, it costs blizz nothing to put it back.
even if it wasn’t nerfed, it costs them nothing to increase the drop rate.
I got 5 shards rather quickly at the start of the expansion, and haven’t seen a single Crackling shard since.
Honestly I thought I was doing something wrong, but I guess not? I even have been farming the nerubian chitin Dorngal, and cleared out a ton of bees to farm the pollen… but nope… still 5.
It wasn’t that the drop rates for nerfed. It was that there were hyperspawns you could farm without moving. That’s how a lot of EA players got the farm completed fast. Then blizz came in and nerfed the hyperspawns.
I mostly get these on my DH while doing the bee/wolf skinning farm to cap out on knowledge points for the week. I’ve gotten 3 so far…I hope I can get all 10 before I completely max out skinning.
The person I know in my guild who got this, does nothing but casual content, they don’t do keys, raid or dungeons or any group content, they just farm mounts and pets literally all day.
That’s basically how you’d hafta to play to get this. I tried to farm it and never got a single shard, threw in the towel as it was preventing my character from gearing up. I was literally doing nothing but gathering and killing for shards for like a week and a half.
People got that thing in 7 hours in Early Access lmao. They nerfed all the spots for it right after EA ended.
I had been getting them regularly skinning but I usually pull 5 or more each time if I can find the mobs.
I am still very mystified why this came so easy to me since my RNG is normally just terrible. Although I guess easy to me when I wasn’t really all that anxious to get it still meant it took me two months
You should go test the Kobold spot. I swear they made it 0.00001 drop from those since it’s the last “dense” area left that you can almost 1 pull if you’re a tank.
They nerfed every single spot that had any sign of mob density.
I’ve had this character at 80 for 35 days and some change of played time, reached level 80 day 2 of EA, and I got the mount around a month ago.
In that time, I’ve been able to hit gold cap from around 50k gold, almost all of it via dual-gathering. I’ve gotten the Siesbarg mount. This character has hit 619 ilvl without any heroic raiding, and very little Mythic+. In other words, aside from the Siesbarg grind (which got me 2 shards, and this was LONG after EA had ended), the other 8 came from the various mob kills while dual gathering on Isle of Dorn. None of them came during leveling, and none of them dropped during EA.
People are just unlucky or are expecting this to be an easy farm. I remember playing MOP heavily and only received one Sky Shard the entire time to get Alani. It happens. Considering all of the other things you’re able to accomplish (and given how much of those things can be done on Isle of Dorn), I’d just do other stuff.
If Blizz didn’t want the mount to be a grind, they would’ve designed it to be easy-to-get. They would’ve had a high drop rate on the shards, or allowed people to group up with a person who had 10 shards and all be able to loot the mount. Just like Siesbarg and Machine Defense Unit 1-11, these are grind-based mounts. Annoying though they might be, you know what they are going into it.
Killing crap for over 7 days straight to the point where I wasn’t progressing my gear isn’t “expecting it to be an easy farm” what planet are you existing on? The one where you play 14 hours a day?
You said it, you don’t raid or do dungeons, so you obviously just kill crap all day in Dorn? You put so much information into your post but you forgot to include how many hours you’re averaging, I will hedge my bet that it’s an abnormal amount.
Look it’s great there’s a giga mount farm, but you cannot simply delete the fact that people got it in 7 hours in Early Access, I’m sorry.