Thank you Blizzard for effectively ruining the obtaining of this Legendary item! With Timewalking Firelands unfortunately forced upon us, you have not only removed the 25-Man (Normal & Heroic) version of Firelands, but also removed the drop rates and drop amounts needed for the quests involving this item.
Before this unnecessary gutting of the raid was done, quests had VERY different droprates and amounts of the quest items needed across the Size/Difficulty you chose. Below are some of those.
Eternal Embers
[10-man] 0-1
[25-man] 1-3
Seething Cinders
[10-man] 15-25
[10-Man Heroic] 20-30
[25-Man] 45-55
[25-Man Heroic] 55-65
Smouldering Essences
[10-Man] 4-6
[10-Man Heroic] 7-8
[25-Man] 7-8
[25-Man Heroic] 9-11
And those are just the quests that require multiple lockouts to GATHER items, let alone the quests in-between and the Focus Fragments for the “Delegation” quest.
Before this Timewalking fiasco, the average time it took to complete everything was roughly 9-14 weeks on 25-Man Heroic. Now with all the horrible changes, it now will take an average of 18-28 weeks to do, with obviously more if RNG on droprates are even worse for you. And if you don’t know, that means getting this staff from fresh can take up to over HALF A YEAR to do.
I’m sorry, but this is absolutely horrible to have to grind for half a calendar year, if not more just to get an item. A Legendary item that was just a short while ago and years before it a relatively casual process to obtain. Please for the love of all that is good and decent in this world do something to update the drops in the now only available formats of this place to reflect the 25-Man and 25-Man Heroic versions. I’ve already gotten this wonderful item twice (once when current and the other in the wonderful Warlords Of Freetime expansion), and WAS planning on doing it 2 more times, but with this current state of it, it would not be an overstatement to say it is a complete and utter waste of time.
I’m working on the staff right now, and the trick is you do it on NORMAL and HEROIC. Those are 2 different lockouts with 2 different drop tables. I started doing the Cinders and Essences after the TW changes and yeah it takes longer because you have to do the 2 different difficulties each week but I should have my finished staff next week.
Each part took about 2-4 resets which I don’t think is too terrible especially cause there’s mounts in there. Which seem to be on par with the pre-TW change.
I just started the grind for the staff maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago and I’m almost done the Seething Cinders step with only around 1 more lockout to go for it. Even if you have “bad RNG”, it will NOT take you half a year unless you’re only killing a single boss on normal a week. You can quite easily get 250 - 350 Cinders a week from Normal and Heroic combined, and the Embers step literally took me a week. The drop rates aren’t nearly as low as you’re making them out to be, because even were you to get a lower end of the spectrum, you’d be done in no more than 3 months. Not 6 months+.