I’ve noticed over the last two days that the amount of null spheres i’m getting went from 2 an hour to none over two days (about 8 hours) of farming. This is with having plethora of ore and bismuth maxed, +20 skill level from mining fundamentals, +5 from rich bismuth, and then on top of all of that i’m working with blue perception tools. I am literally sitting at 30% perception at haven’t had a single proc in over what is now about 10 hours of farming.
Mistakes happen so i’m not gonna just instantly go to the tinfoil hat of “well they nerfed it”, but something has certainly either been nerfed, or it’s bugged to hell and back.
Edit: Since writing this i have now acquired my first null stone in two days. yay…
In any case, RNG is RNG. Sunday on my dedicated dual gathering alt, I saw two Imperfect Null Stones in an hour. That character only has +12% Perception, +18 skill level from profession equipment. Plethora is maxed with six points in Bismuth, and Fundamentals is maxed so I can gather mounted.
Yesterday on my main/this character? I found six Imperfect Null Stones in 30 minutes. This character has LESS Perception than my gathering alt and sits at 8% on that stat. Plethora maxed with 12 points in Bismuth, currently 26/60 on Fundamentals.
Random is very much living up to its name and definition.
I think they definitely did something to Delve nodes concerning Brann. Now when I stand by fishing pools in Delves, Brann doesn’t even pull a fish, the animation and everything goes through, but I get nothing.
I also had a node disappear in the Delve after Brann mined it, so I couldn’t hit it.
Can’t tell if they’re broken, working as intended, trying to prevent duping, nothing, no transparency from the company.
RNG is RNG i agree, but typically when something statistically improbable continues to happen, that points to an issue.
assuming i’m hitting even just a single bismuth node per minute, that’s 480 bismuth nodes over 8 hours. According to Wowhead, the droprate of null stones is just under 4%, and that isn’t taking into account bonuses from perception.
To put into perspective how unlikely this is to occur, it’s less than 0.00000001% goes on for like, another 20 zeroes.
You literally have a higher likelihood of a primordial black hole crashing into earth and killing us all tomorrow.
Again, i’m not saying bad luck doesn’t exist. But this isn’t a case of “oh my thing with a 4% drop rate didn’t drop in 25 nodes”.
And statistical improbabilities are NOT statistical impossibilities.
If we’re going to play the “Wowhead said this…” game, let’s look at Thunderfury. I finally got it last week. You want to know how long that took me after the first Binding dropped? Nearly four and a half years.
One of the Bindings of the Windseeker has a 3.99% drop rate according to Wowhead, the other has a 3.71% drop rate. Let’s just round it off and call it 4% on the drop rate. By your logic, it should drop four times in 100 attempts. It did not do that. It took well over twice that amount as 52 weeks times 4.5 years is about 232 attempts. That is a 0.43% drop chance in that timeframe, NOT a 4% chance.
Once again, random is random. Logically, one would think you’d see it four out of every 100 nodes, but random odds always seem to have a knack of shoving your expectations into a rather uncomfortable place.
If we’re going to play the “Wowhead said this…” game, let’s look at Thunderfury. I finally got it last week. You want to know how long that took me after the first Binding dropped? Nearly four and a half years.
Over four and a half years do you really expect blizzard to not have released bugs that would mess with said drop chance?
Already your line of reasoning is flawed in that my farming all took place on the same patch within a short time frame of each other. Your farming took place over years, of which you would have seen at the very least 9 major patches since then.
And statistical improbabilities are NOT statistical impossibilities.
We can play the semantics game but yes, that’s basically what it means when the statistical improbability you’re talking about is so insanely low that it would never occur.
Since we’re talking about my current situation and not thunderfury, i’ll stick to the statistics i do know, and i can tell you with 100% certainty that anyone who looked at the probability: (9.1 \times 10^{-15}) would straight up tell you that this situation would NEVER happen.
To save people from taking the time to write it out, it’s approximately
I think I’m getting less than I used to (previously a lot) but I only have 6% perception. Wondering if it was over-rewarding me before. I had 28 after a few days of heavy farming in week 1.
Edit: literally just got one in the next bismuth node after writing this.
This is the way. I remember learning that back in vanilla, typing in general “these crocs are going extinct, the quest item doesnt exist” and boom, next kill is the drop.
To the main point though, i haven’t done much farming but did notice that null stones went up in price a decent bit last night. They had been around 5k and dropping, and last i checked were now over 7.5k. That could just be tuesday reset with everyone doing crafting stuff and goldmaking, but it seemed like a big jump. I certainly hope they didnt nerf it, especially since the ironclaw whetstones inexplicably use them.
It jumped because the Mining weekly asks for 2 Null Stones + some Bismuth.
Not the Imperfect ones, either. Two full-on combined Nullstones to get your weekly points, because we needed yet more evidence that Professions are nothing but a frustrating time-gated gold sink right now for the average player.
And in the time you’ve been complaining about this, I pulled another four Imperfect Null Stones on two different characters. Two on my main in 30 minutes, two more on an alt in about ten minutes.
Once again: random is random. I’m sorry the numbers aren’t working out in your favor, but at this point you’re essentially throwing a temper tantrum on the forums. Yeah, it absolutely sucks statistically for you, but the bottom line is people ARE getting them, and from my own experiences I’m still getting them at the rate I generally expect.
So, what now? I’m mainly asking because at this point I’m half expecting you to say Blizzard is conspiring against you regarding reagent drops.
And yes, I’ve seen enough of these sorts of topics over 19 years to have actually seen that ridiculous claim pop up at least once.
Null Stones are the mining weekly quest for this week, so that has drastically bumped the prices up thanks to folks buying up the cheaper stock and then proceeding to flip them. At last check, US market is holding at about 6.6K for a full blown Null Stone and 1.3K for Imperfect.
Really not any different than in Dragonflight when a particular reagent or crafted item was needed for a weekly turn in. Yusa’s Hearty Stew was particularly notorious for wild price jumps whenever that was part of the weekly turn in last expansion.
Obviously, it still helps increase the odds, but once again: random chance is STILL random.
I could have 90% Perception. Ideally, I should be getting a rare reagent for every nine out of ten nodes, but that doesn’t mean that I WILL get 9/10. I feel like many of you in this topic are still thinking a statistical impossibility is the same as a statistical improbability.
For a different example: D&D. Look at a d20. You have a 5% chance of ANY number on a d20 coming up. I was once at a table where the same d20 was getting passed around between everyone. One player in particular rolled a 1 FIVE TIMES IN A ROW despite the fact that other players were hitting just about every other number on the dice when it came back around to them.
Odd things like that can happen. Dude had a 95% chance to roll ANYTHING other than a 1, yet for five straight rolls on the same dice he got a 1. As annoying and infuriating as something like that can be, sometimes all you can really do is shake your head at the situation and laugh about it
Bottom line: as long as the odds of something happening aren’t 100% or 0%, oddities and anomalies CAN potentially occur.
I think the Tinderbox shadow nerf screwed up Null stones, I was running around with 20-30% perception and finesse and got 7 Null Stones which sounds like a lot but I was farming for several hours with consumable and when my buffs were gone I was getting more at the lower stats. This really shouldn’t be a thing because I am using the camo potion to see the hidden nodes so I am hitting double to triple the nodes I am without it.
I get people are talking about RNG but Finesse gives a pretty good chance of a double roll that affects perception giving perception a chance to roll twice which is how Finesse gives a chance for two Null Stones off of a node.
The change seems to have come about around the time people were exploiting the Tinderbox farm and Blizz shadow patched it.
