i have done that aswell. like when i killed Soulless for the first time back in BFA. it just randomly spawned close to me and i got the silent glider, even tho its a 1% drop AND Soulless spawns in random spots all over the zone. i didnt even know it was a annoying rare to farm, let alone get the mount until a guild member told me
on the flip side, i have been farming other mounts every week on most of my characters for years and havent got them yet. rng really can be a “female dog” at times, knowing what you want and what you dont, lol
Haha! Nah, I’m a firm believer that complaining about something fixes it. It’s like the universe hears your plea of frustration and is like, “Ok fine, you’ve suffered enough.”
Ashes took me from BC when current to about almost 3 years ago to get.
Headless Horseman’s 2 years ago since starting on that one back when it first became a thing.
Invisible…still working on that one.
I got VERY lucky with my Ashes mount. I don’t remember exactly how many runs but it was less then 10. Still working on Invincible though. Rng is a helluva thing.
What most people would say, is it can technically take an infinite number of attempts. But that answer isn’t very helpful. You’re asking what’s likely, not what’s possible.
If blizz showed the data for how many attempts players take to farm ashes of al’ar, for example, you would see that ~99% of players who have the mount got it at or before 268 attempts.
That number comes from the geometric probability distribution which is used to model repeated experiments where each experiment has two outcomes, success or failure and both outcomes have a fixed probability. That is applicable for mount farming because the drop rate never changes.
Using the geometric distribution you can find percentiles to answer “at what number of attempts will X% of players see a drop”. So my above example,268 attempts, was the 99th percentile of a 1.7% drop.
You can find any percentile with this equation.
Num of attempts = log(1-percentile))/log(1-droprate)
where percentile and drop rate should be converted to a decimal.
The drop rate is fixed but as the number of clears increases the amount of players who havent already seen a drop decreases. If there was a group of 10,000 mount farmers who all decided to farm ashes, at 268 clears only 100 out of those inital 10,000 would need to keep going. By 536 we would only expect 1 person to remain.
I finally got this mount a few years ago on my birthday when I decided to run it on a whim. That was super cool! Having said that, I’ve played since Vanilla and ran that raid off and on since then to try and get it.
RNG will be RNG. I do think there needs to be some sort of protection against it though. Run it X amount of times and you’ll 100% get it…something like that.
There isn’t a good answer, you’re just as likely to get it on your first shot as you are your 1000th, Just because something has a .01% chance doesn’t mean the chance goes up each run it means you’re rolling the board and the numbers are stacked against you every step of the way.
The drop rate is fixed but it becomes more unlikely for a drop to not have already happened as the number of attempts increases.
For ashes, at 268 attempts 99% of players
farming the mount would have seen a drop.
You don’t know how many attempts you’ll need beforehand, but you are much more likely to be a part of the 99% of players who get a drop before 268 attempts instead of the 1% who take more.
Well I got the Raven mount in 5 runs, and the Blue Drake in 50. Those are the only RNG mounts I’ve actively farmed.
My friend got Huolon on his first kill, I’ve never seen it drop after that. Oh, and I’ve never see the Timereaver mount drop, much less for me, ever, except the TW before this one, where I saw it drop twice.
