Until the launch of 10.1, I was doing it on my main as many times a week as I could, because wowhead posts confirmed that it would drop on the second siege of the week.
After reading posts on wowhead, in 10.1 I started doing weekly sieges on each alt, mostly because I figured it couldn’t hurt to do them on other chars on the off chance that the first siege WAS a higher chance.
On one of my alts this week, at the 4am siege on Wednesday morning, I was alone on a 385 primalist geared alt. It took me 35 minutes to clear up until the only thing left was Scalepiercer > Grand Flame > Inferna. I begged in general chat until someone took pity and helped me kill the last three elites that I couldn’t solo. The siege finished at 2:42
Forty. Two. Minutes.
And this is already just one patch into Dragonflight. I realize it was 4am. But I was alone. I’m just so demoralized.
It is pretty strange. My main is on Area52, where the event tends to complete at a fairly good pace on a fairly consistent basis, around 90% of the time. Afterwards I log over to an alt on Deathwing, which is on a connected realm with a few other servers. The Deathwing side is a little slower about half the time than Area 52, about 20% of the time it’s got a lot of people and goes even faster, and about 30% of the time it seems to never get off the ground at all because no one shows up.
At first I thought maybe the inconsistency was because sometimes people might be forming groups for it on that server, but the group finder won’t have anything on the same shard when it’s going fast on Deathwing when I check.
I assume that the medium and low population servers just get knocked around and sharded every which way, so it’s just really inconsistent, while the high and full pop servers don’t switch their sharding. Or, who knows, maybe it varies from player to player regardless of realm. I don’t really know how things work anymore honestly, just that my Area52 characters get more reliability.
That said, i’ve seen the Area52 events get abandoned too for lack of participation. Though that was very late at night.
I’m late to this thread! I saw the notice one of my other threads had been linked just now.
Now on topic: I agree that a lot of the original content that was introduced at the start of the expac has now seen a drastic reduction in participants. I myself still struggle to obtain some things from The Grand Hunts and of course that blasted toy that this topic is about.
Something needs to be done to breathe life back into this content or offer alternative sources for these toys/items. I know they TRIED to give life back to Grand Hunt and the Siege by offering Shadowflame Residue Sacks but that is not enough, as we’ve seen, to tempt players back into doing this content.
There is also the topic of smaller servers not being able to do this content at all. If this content is going to be left to rot then it needs to be made soloable in a good amount of time and not take over 30 minutes for a sub 70 to complete all the tasks.
As a note, for the mount, if you bring a pocket healer they can keep you alive while you loot even if you don’t have any self-shielding or self-healing. I was able to dual-box this with my level 60 Priest and my level 70 Rogue, you just have to be careful with the positioning to not go out of range.
I was also super disappointed to see that the toy only makes you immune to lava in outdoor Dragon Isles zones - and the Zaralek Caverns apparently don’t count as this.
Reduction in participation is a problem, but even when it slows things down a lot and an expansion moves on, you can typically find people to still get things done. It just kills the ability to do things like server hop and leverage your alts to get a good number of attempts in. I’ve been down that road before in obtaining things from prior expansions, that normally it doesn’t really bother me that much.
Eventually everything gets to a point where you’ll be able to go back and 1-shot everything that’s combat oriented, and the annoying thing will be the non-combat tasks (like running around to pick up items around an area of the map). The siege, being mostly combat driven, won’t be that horrible to get done when we out-level the content, but the number of attempts we can get in per event will drop a lot.
Of course, I do think Blizzard should try to adjust these events for when they get fewer people participating, but the core problem here, and what makes this thing worth raising as a complaint to me, is just the pure, extreme low-RNG tuning. Items from events like should not be tuned around something like 0.2% drop rates, which is where this thing looks to be. It should’ve been a 2 or 3% drop rate. They fixed it for the mount that drops in Zaralek, they ought to fix it for this.
I 100% agree here. Like the thread that had linked me here; I am also frustrated with the obscene drop rate on things. I had made another thread here: Making Rare Farming More Accesible touches up on the length of respawn for certain rare spawns ontop of their already low drop rates of items such as toys, scripts, and mounts.
While that initial post mainly talks about respawn rates of rares dotted around the islands, it does touch up on drop rates in later posts. I really do not care for how they’re treating rares/the things they drop this expansion. I would have probably pulled all my hair out and quit from camping rares for drakewatch scripts if it wasn’t thanks to one of my good friends who has a large number of 60+ characters spanning across several servers. I’m thankfully down to a single drakewatch script remaining from rare drops (aside from Suffusion Camps) and it happens to drop off the Corrupted Proto-Drake which has a very nice respawn of 3-5 minutes. This is how rares should work. 3-5 minute respawn with their daily loot lock out.
I do not mind low rates on rare items that I have to continue farming well into an expac.
I take issue when the sources of those rare items are events that take me 45 minutes to solo on my alt and only occur every 2 hours. It’s just horrific. I think we’re all on the same page on that, lol.
The issue with the Horn in particular is several fold. One being the extremely low drop rate itself, another being that you need a group to finish the event in a reasonable amount of time, and that one can acquire it simply by AFKing in the area instead of participating. It’s just a huge design fail all around in that regard. A quick fix would be making it a 2-3% drop off Inferna and/or Grand Flame which would put it in line with every other rare drop in history.
Thanks for taking the time to post about it on the CC forum. Hopefully they see it.
I got it close to the beginning of the expac too. Like most toys I paid little attention to it. I don’t recall what brought my attention to it, but now I find it one of the most useful toys around. It ends up on my bar when leveling toons. Want to do the initial quest line in the islands? Pop the the toy when rescuing the explorer hanging over lava. Who cares if you stand in that lava. Fishing caviar WQ have something you can use? Pop the horn. If the fish pull you in, who cares? You won’t be harmed. Etc
But I have a friend who is in the boat of those who RNG hasn’t favored. It does suck. And yes, why it’s annoying it doesn’t work in the cavern. That seems outdoors to me,
There’s “low” then there’s absurdly low. Any drop from a piece of content becomes unreasonable if you lower the drop rate enough, and here I think they crossed that threshold by quite a distance.
By this point Blizzard ought to have an internal safeguard against this for future content. It shouldn’t require player feedback to recognize that drop rates at less than 1% constitute terrible tuning.
It’s also a bit trollish that rather than put it on or in something where the drop rate could be easily tracked by third party sites like wowhead and the manner in which it drops better understood, they put it on push loot and gave no details so no one fully understood how it worked for months (and people still don’t know whether maybe the first kill of the week has a higher chance, or whether there might be some daily lockout at play - probably not, but the uncertainty remains).
I just found this toy going through All The Things. I had no idea it even existed and I’d run the Seige and Dragonbane Keep content until I had just about everything else done. The only other thing I’m currently missing is the Cloak of Many Faces toy.
So, looks like I’ll be doing this event into the forseeable future. Fortunately I can pretty much solo it. Perks of being a BM hunter. So hopefully that’ll ease some of the pain for people who perhaps can’t.
I honestly would recommend that you don’t. Some of us are clearly “too deep” into having started after this thing and can’t quite get over the whole sunk-cost psychological effect.
But I didn’t really understand how insane this thing was when I started, since it wasn’t clear how the drop was handled due to Blizzard making it push loot. If I had, I wouldn’t have ever started in on this thing.