So How Are You Supposed to Find Zaralek Rares?

Can sit in the zone for hours and not a single rare will spawn. It has nothing to do with which subzone is up in the rotation. I am literally talking about 0 rares popping up in the entire zone. Period. So what’s the trick or is this a result of the idiotic “murderball hotfix” that Blizz felt was a good idea to do two years ago and left it in place even though nobody’s in the zone anymore (well, kinda like DF I guess)?

Yes.

They killed that zone and never fixed it.

Oh wait…they did make it worse.

7 Likes

Players getting their hands on an extra piece of 40g vendor trash was too gamebreakingly powerful ig.

4 Likes

Oh god. I forgot they did that. I remembered that insanely stupid quadrant rotation thing they implemented. But then that on top of it LOL! What a complete shemozle that zone is now. RIP to anyone trying to camp rares there. :headstone:

The really sad thing is that it only affects people going after cosmetics the moment the zone ceases to be current content. Kind of a douchebag move to make cosmetic farmers lives even harder.

3 Likes

I never bothered farming those rares back in the day. Anyone can point to some drops that are sought after?

I can’t be bothered to link all the individual items. But there’s a whole bunch of armour sets, weapons, off-hands, pets and at least 1 mount from memory.

This sounds like resharding. No rares spawn in ZC for the first hour of a shard, and it’s possible to be re-sharded at random every few minutes for hours on end. The only way I know to avoid this is to be on an RP server with reduced sharding.

It didn’t think it was that bad anymore, but for a while in DF sharding was going crazy. I’d wait at Karokta and be bumped to brand new shards every few minutes like clockwork so I’d never see a rare.

During current content you could try and join WB groups to get back to a shard older than 60 minutes so you could start seeing rares, but it was still finnicky and there was no guarantee you’d stay there.

The addon NPCTime is helpful for seeing how old a shard is, it’ll put a timer on the tooltip of NPCs (including permanent ones like quest givers that spawn in when the shard is generated) and some other interactable objects (like grappling points in the maw).

Doesn’t stop the sharding but at least makes it easier to tell when it happened, and when you need a 60+ minute shard like ZC to spawn any rares at all it lets you know where you’re at on time.

I never got Karokta and am dreading going back for it.

Edit: Correction ZC rares start spawning after 45 minutes not 60.

1 Like

You can also enable a setting in that addon that will generate a line of text in your text box that will tell you whenever you’ve been connected to a new shard.

1 Like

Dont a lot of the rares have conditions to be met to spawn as well instead of just being on a timer?

Meaning “sitting” there for an hour isnt gonna do you any good?

I’ve heard of an addon that does that but I don’t know which one it is.
I’m not able to find that option with NPCTime in particular.

ZC rares are divided into quadrants on a fixed rotation so some aren’t active on any given day. You can also only loot each rare once during it’s 3-4 day window, after it’s quadrant doesn’t spawn for a day the lockout is reset.

There could be some rares with specific triggers I’m not remembering but the majority are just on timers. I think Karokta was a 40-60 minute respawn but all the sharding during DF made coming up with accurate spawn windows hell.

There were also zone-wide texts for most rares announcing when they spawned.

Edit: Correction ZC rares start spawning after 45 minutes not 60.

I’ve had more success farming ZC rares in War Mode. Zone is usually empty, and as an added bonus War Mode crates still drop so you can get easy Conquest or Honor as well.

It’s /npctime phase iirc.

1 Like

One in particular I wanted but never got because the rares are such a PITA to farm-

Also wanted to do Cavern Clawbbering achievement, now that’s even more unreasonable since it requires a separate camper who isn’t sitting there with a consumable buff running out.

They’ve never done rares in a patch zone worse than Zaralek. For a while, I went back to try to get the mount from one of the rares and only saw it once and gave up. I think I’m done with that zone. The 15 minute despawn is ridiculous.

1 Like

TIL I never added NPCTime to the addon client and my version was hella outdated. XD

Great thing to add to it though, will update after this queue.

1 Like

This gives me hope we might actually see rares in the game again some day not farmable named mobs they call rares.

Bring back multi day respawn timers or at minimum 8 hours with multiple spawn points and meaningful loot.

Is that really what you think people want…to sit at spawn points for multiple days/months, hoping they just happen to be there at the right time for a chance at that collectible?

2 Likes

That’s what I’d like. Instead I logon for 4 hours and collect every collectible the patch had to offer and unsub for three months.

Then in raid next season I pull out my “cool toy” and so does everyone else and suddenly the toy has no value

They can still have named mobs for catch up gear but stop calling them rares. I’m suggesting cool toys and mounts be on the rares with long respawns. Perhaps even some really powerful items.

I don’t much care for farming the same mobs tho so I’d prefer if they just went back to having world quests/dailies award a currency where we can buy catch up off a vendor,

I’m not the biggest fan of the have-no-job-will-camp-all-day og meta tbh. Especially if you have to take a bio and come back to a corpse.

Prefer low drop chances over low spawn chances if rarity is necessary.

3 Likes

Hint: The toy never had any value. Nobody is impressed by anything you have in WoW.

So you’d rather keep paying so you can sit AFK for hours on end…to each their own I guess, lol.

2 Likes