Which of them is rarer?
- Reins of the Blue Proto-Drake
- Time-Lost Proto-Drake
Timelost.
Not even close.
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Blue Proto is always there in a wrath era heroic dungeon, always there for you to brutalize it on any number of alts.
No brute force will get the Timelost to spawn, though I guess you could abuse phases/war mode of any number of dead servers.
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For me, it’s debatable because this week, two acquaintances of mine, out of two who wanted to get the Time-Lost, obtained it in just one day. One acquaintance was flying around the location, and the other, on a low-population server, leveled an alt and simply found the dragon. Meanwhile, the Blue Proto-Drake is only owned by me, and people make hundreds of attempts to get it. I might be mistaken, but in my opinion, the rarity of the Time-Lost Proto-Drake is mainly due to player competition.
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I had two Blue Protodrakes in Wrath on characters that couldn’t even use them. I’ve never even seen the TL Drake in game to even kill it.
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Even abusing phases or dead servers, the Timelost shares its spawn with one or two other rares.
I think its the rarer of the two.
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If we’re going off personal anecdotes, I’ve seen probably a dozen blue proto drakes drop, but I’ve never even seen the corpse of the TLPD.
But if we’re looking at data, TLPD has a collection rate of 11% on WoWhead (meaning 11% of all registered WoWhead accounts have TLPD), Blue Proto has 25%.
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So, are you guys trying to tell me that if I log into the least populated server, enable PvP mode, use the necessary addons for notifying about the proximity of the rare spawn, displaying spawn points, I won’t be able to find it within a couple of days?
Time-Lost may be rarer in general, but for me, the Blue one is rarer, because I don’t have it! 
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Maybe. But it’s also entirely possible that you run Heroic UP and then get the Blue Proto first go as well.
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I already obtained the Blue one. I truly believe that without competition, it’s possible to calculate the respawn cooldown of rare spawns and simply patrol the necessary routes. I will try to do that. I’m not diminishing the rarity of the Time-Lost one; I just think that it’s mainly due to competition. In the current circumstances, when you can log into an empty server and kill it, obtaining it might be easier than the Blue one.
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The TLPD shares a 2-8 hour spawn timer with another rare, which spawns more often. It’s entirely possible that if you find an empty shard and stay logged in to that shard for 48 hours straight that the TLPD won’t even spawn in that time period.
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They’re both ‘rare’ for different reasons. For the blue proto, it’s easy to attempt but hard to drop. For time-lost, it’s hard to attempt but guaranteed to drop.
I personally prefer the latter option, but I think I’m in the minority on that because when collectors complain, it’s usually about frequency of attempts (which usually means spawn timers when it’s something outside of an instance) rather than drop rates.
People used to camp for TLPD for literal days on end, with groups of people/friends spread out across the zone, and never even saw it spawn before giving up. It has the lowest chance to spawn of any rare in the zone, and it shares a spawn timer with 2 of the others. The blue one also had a chance to drop from the boss as a rare spawn in the outside Northrend world during the Shadowlands pre-patch, and I saw plenty of people get it then. In short, it’s not impossible for you to camp for 48 hours straight and have it spawn, it’s just not very likely.
Per WoWhead, 25% of profiles have the blue protodrake, where as only 11% have TLPD.
Actually way higher than I expected on the TLPD.
Brutosaur is 4%. Just thought I’d throw that in there since I’m a 4%er
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Blue proto is definitely rarer. I don’t care what Wowhead data says. None of their stats are accurate due to the way it collects player data. Anyone who’s played wow for longer than 6 months knows about the mounts discord. Every week I’d say there’s about 10-20 new TLPD owners minimum. Whereas the blue proto is locked behind a far more brutal RNG drop rate.
No. They are saying it’s very unlikely. You could be lucky enough to find it on your first attempt, if the RNG gods smile upon you.
For myself, it was unadulterated luck that I ran into it by pure chance, while was questing in Storm Peaks during Wrath on my BE priestess. She was holy spec, and it very nearly killed me. I was also supremely lucky that I finished it off and looted it moments before a paladin showed up…and he was royally p-oed, heh.
TLPD only shares its spawn with Vyragosa, since it was designed to be a ‘rare spawn of a rare spawn’ in Vyragosa’s place.
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Yeah, people used to say it was 2 rares before they made changes in 9.0 (without actually knowing, I’m sure)…old habits.
This isn’t exactly possible, lemme explain why quick.
When regions of the world don’t have players in them for a given period of time they get set to inactive, this has the same effect as a server restart. Rares (TLPD in particular) are notable for only spawning a certain number of hours after a restart that I can’t remember off the top of my head. The way you track this is by using an addon like npctime to see how long npcs have been alive for, if it’s only a couple of minutes the region of that server group was inactive and TLPD will not be in the shard. The same is true for nearly all rares that drop mounts, with some being worse than others (voidtalon portals only start to spawn 24 hours after a restart for example)