Throughout the course of Season of Discovery, I have never seen a farm as brainless, time-consuming, and rage-inducing as the farm for Zila Gular. This post will explain what the problem is, what I find wrong with it, and potential ideas to fix it.
Background and the Nature of the Problem
For those who are out of the loop on exactly what the fuss is about, warlocks received a new “pet” called the Explorer Imp in phase 3. When you find a Fel Portal in the open world, you may send your Imp into that portal, and after 20-30 minutes he comes back with a bag of goodies, scaling off of the type of portal and zone you found it in. The 20-30 minute timer can be reduced every 10 seconds by killing a mob, which will reduce that timer by 30 seconds per mob killed. Thus, you can get this timer down to 5 minutes if you kill a mob (cough or sacrifice a demon cough) every 10 seconds, but still a minimum of 5 minutes in between portal visits. Also of note is that once someone uses a Fel Portal, it will despawn in ~15 seconds, meaning everyone else in the zone who wants to use that portal will have to rush there in this ~15-second timeframe or miss out and hunt through the zone again.
In order to actually get Zila Gular, the best-in-slot trinket for affliction warlocks, you have to perform the following sequence of steps. This can work in any Zone with Fel Rifts or Fel Scars (called portals from here on), and for every step below, if it says you have to send your imp through a portal, it is implied that you have first scouted the zone for a portal and found one. Also, when I say “send your imp through a portal,” I mean that you keep sending it into portals until it comes back with the desired item. Without further ado, the steps you must follow:
- Send your Explorer Imp through a portal until it comes back with a Legion Portal Tuner. This tuner has 5 charges, and if it runs out you must find another one.
- Tune portals and send your imp through tuned portals until it comes back with a Portal Tuner Tuner. You must then use this Tuner Tuner on a Tuner to create an Overcharged Portal Tuner, which has 2 charges.
2.5: If you don’t want to do steps 1 and 2 above you can also buy an Overcharged Tuner from the AH for ~60g (current going price). - Overcharge a portal, which will send it to one of two destinations. If the destination is “Zzal’rukh,” it will have red flames swirling around it (we call this a red portal). This happens ~80% of the time. If the destination is “Evasilier,” it will have a green beam emanating from it (we call this a green portal, happens the other 20% of the time).
- Send your imp through Green Portals until it comes back with the trinket (~7% chance).
My issue with the whole process
Hopefully the above steps have demonstrated how tedious the process is. You have to get lucky and find a green portal with your tuners (which have only 2 charges each, so if they run out you have to buy/make a new one), then you have to send your imp in and either wait out the 20 minutes or do mind-numbing mob grinding to shorten the return time, and on the 90% chance you don’t get Zila, you have to do this all over again. For some it may take an afternoon, for others it might take a whole, consecutive 2 weeks or even longer.
Now, by itself this can be a cute little farm that warlocks can do. Finding a portal every now and then, and then overcharging it for rare valuable materials can make a decent amount of gold passively. My main issue is that this grind is required for a BEST-IN-SLOT TRINKET. That’s right: player power is tied behind a lengthy, RNG-based grind, and not doing this grind means you will feel like you are forever behind those who went through the ordeal (or just got lucky). One of the tank warlocks in our guild got Zila back in the day, never planned on using it, and now it’s sitting collecting dust in his bank.
Some of you might think, “well I don’t see the big issue behind a grind. PvP gear has always been a grind, the Wintersabers have always been a grind, etc. This is nothing new.” This is new, however, because it adds an element of randomness to the whole process. Going through battlegrounds, you know exactly what you have left to do, because once you hit that required reputation or honor threshold you know that you are done, and that your reward awaits you imminently. But because overcharging portals is randomized, and the contents you get from the portals are randomized, whenever you find a green portal your first thought is not “This is finally it!” but rather “please get me out.” This isn’t fun; it’s Stockholm syndrome.
Proposed Fixes
Now, I am not one who complains for the sake of complaining: if I see a problem with something, I will also try and come up with a solution to make my feedback constructive. To that end, I have some ideas on how to make this grind “more bearable,” for lack of better phrasing. The main problem I see with the grind is that it was meant to be a way to farm gold, with a chance of getting gear as a bonus; instead, it got turned into a way to get your best-in-slot gear, with a chance of getting gold as a bonus. To that end, here are my proposed solutions:
- Increase the drop rate for Zila: Let Zila come from red portals as well as green portals, or increase its drop rate substantially if it comes from only green portals. The current droprate is abysmal and needs to be fixed.
- Nerf Zila: This is imo the easiest fix, but also the worst fix of them all. While it does disincentivize grinding out these portals for a best-in-slot trinket, it also effectively negates all the hard work put in by those who went through the process will inevitably generate a lot of negative feedback, counterproductive to healthy discussion.
- Alternative ways to acquire Zila: For those who don’t want to do the portal runs, let there be an alternative way to acquire the trinket. Maybe put it on the Real Vendor for 100 reals? Something more deterministic, even if it’s more tedious, will at least give measurable progress as an alternative to an RNG-based farm.
All-in-all, this situation needs to be fixed, and the sooner the better. Just because the metrics say all the warlocks are farming rifts, does not mean that we enjoy farming rifts. For our sanity’s sake, please help us.