Which goes right in line with “respecting the player’s time”.
If Blizzard notes anything I say in this topic down, I hope it’s this: my Emerald Dream patch experience so far is to spend 1.5-3 hours each day in a raid of druids camping rares that will otherwise not get callled out before killed, or will get killed too fast to justify flying around hoping. This includes Talthoneil, who seems to have a random cooldown between spawns that makes killing NPCs to trigger her spawn actively wasted time instead of passively wasted time.
There are many other fun parts of the Dream patch I’d love to focus on, but I can’t focus on those until I get my daily kills in because a combination of the low drop rate, the incredibly long spawn timers, and the fact I have to be on my Druid to loot the customisation marks means every day matters significantly. If I skip a day I can’t just go “oh well, I’ll find it at some point” like with older rares in other expansions. They simply won’t be up while I’m in the right place, on the right character, most of the time. And if I take too long these raids will dry up, and there will be fewer eyes to call out spawns, which means if I need to farm multiple of the rares I can’t even fly to another one that spawns while waiting at one’s spawn point. I’ll have to restart the clock each time.
This is how long spawn timers, in real terms, negatively impact the player experience. Whether the rares are soloable or not (and they should be soloable), it just doesn’t respect the player’s time. I know there’s an old philosphy of making rares a ‘jackpot’ moment, but that’s not how real players approach it these days. We want to collect the goodies, so rares are ‘mandatory’, so the spawn timers affect our gameplay.
If all rares dropped were a special currency you could use to buy rewards, like in Time Rifts, the current system would be fine. It’d make every rare equally valuable, which would make normal play and killing rares as they pop up a lot more feasible. But as long as we can only loot this specific drop from this specific rare at this specific spot on this specific lock-out for a chance at getting its loot on a 1-3 hour timer, we don’t truly have the freedom to play the game how we want.
Really, “rares” as a concept should be retired and replaced with something like “daily encounters”, a special but soloable challenge that has a chance of dropping rare loot, that respawns regularly, and a less common type of “special encounters” that function as group-incentivised but not necessarily group-requiring versions that drop the rarer stuff like mounts, which are spawned through player activity like killing mobs or puzzle solving.